Outspoken rapper Angel Haze has has spoken out about homosexuality and homophobia in hip-hop, saying that she doesn’t have a “coming out story” because she doesn’t think people should have to come out.
“Being gay in hip-hop is still really stigmatised,” wrote the rapper in her discussion about sexuality and gay rights in her latest column for Vice‘s music blog Noisey, succinctly titled Some Rappers Are Gay. Get over It.
“I don’t have a coming out story because I don’t think anyone needs to come out,” writes Haze. “I don’t get the fascination with being gay, lesbian, bisexual. There’s no separation between gay rights and human rights, it’s just fucking stupid.”
“I guess I’m ‘out’ but people ask me what my sexuality is all the time and I always tell them that it doesn’t matter, we’re not in a sexual situation so you don’t need to know,” she continues. “Sexuality is not the most interesting detail about a person. It’s like me saying my favourite colour is red all the time. After a while you’d kindly tell to me to shut the fuck up about it.”
Although Haze says she eschews the idea of ‘coming out’, she also details the struggles and criticism she faced with her own family and friends. “My mother’s never been married, she’s never been in a successful relationship, my friends have had boyfriends who abuse them and think that shit’s OK. Yet they think that I’m an abomination,” she writes.
Haze appeals to her fans to be happy with who they are and opens up about the inner debate she had before covering Macklemore & Ryan Lewis‘s Same Love in 2013. “I was so reluctant to do Same Love, because I get so caught up on people thinking of me as a queer rapper, I don’t discuss my sexuality in my music,” says Haze.
“But I’ve always said to myself that an artist is a person who has something to say and isn’t just a part of the noise,” she continues. “Same Love was for the fans who I get messages from saying ‘I hate myself for being gay, I wish like fucking hell every day that I could be straight.’ Why? Why would you wish to be anything other than who the fuck you are,” she writes.
“Never deny yourself anything that makes you feel happy.”
Listen: Angel Haze – Same Love
http://youtu.be/V4BYB9nlx0I
