The article that spoke to me the most from this section was the Kalamka & West piece. Their effort to upend the common narrative that queerness in Hip-Hop is illuminating to me. I had, embarrassingly, never heard of the “homo-hop” movement and had assumed that open queerness in Hip-Hop, specifically rap music, was relatively new. Their point about queer artists like Basquiat and Keith Harring shaping much of the aesthetic made me think about the lack of appreciation for the Ball scene of the 80’s and 90’s. The men and women in the ball scene created so much of what we would think of as queer culture today. The very concepts of “serving”, “realness”, and “shade” all stem from the drag scene. These words eventually worked their way up through Hip-Hop culture and into the mainstream collective consciousness without any mind paid to the people who coined them. The history of black and brown LGBT people in Hip-Hop is so often tossed aside in order to focus on the cis men of the scene that we almost never mention them when discussing the origins of the culture. Even a person like James Baldwin manages to be largely absent from the canon, despite being fundamental to the revolutionary streak present throughout Hip-Hop. To continue saying that Hip-Hop is “waiting for a gay rapper” is to deliberately ignore the long and storied history of queerness in Hip-Hop. In my opinion, the desire to erase queerness from Hip-Hop comes from the same place as the desire to continue to relegate women in Hip-Hop to the realm of the “Female MC”; the qualifier so often used as to avoid giving women too much credit for their abilities on the mic. It is a desire for the straight, cis, black men to hold on to whatever amount of power has been afforded to them by Hip-Hop, in a culture that denies them power at every turn.