Last week, there was a minor controversy over whether D.C.-based rapper Wale was refusing to perform at the D.C. Black Pride festival, an LGBT event. He said that the whole thing was a misunderstanding, and that he had no intention of not performing. At the festival, blogger CarlosinDC asked Wale a couple of questions about why Wale chose to perform (via WPGC and Amanda Hess):
It's one of those situations where like, it was hard to understand like ten years ago, but it's 2010, there's gay people who are heads of companies, just functional human beings...How could I be scared of a gay person when most of the designers that I wear are gay? To say that you hate a specific orientation for whatever reason is to be unfair.
[...]
At the end of the day, whether you agree with it or not, it's not going anywhere. So it's something that you gotta accept. They're people just like you are...The one thing I can say, is that if you're shocked, a lot of people they're associating with might be of that orientation and might not be able to say it.
I don't want to lionize Wale too much for basically doing the right thing. What's important here isn't so much that Wale is a big hero for not being a homophobe; it's the fact that it represents a remarkable cultural shift in hip-hop for an emcee not to want to be seen as homophobic. Even if your tastes are strictly backpacker, your favorite emcees toss around homophobic slurs like loose change.
Aside from feeling obligated to remind people that the black community is not a monolith on the issue of LGBT rights, a big part of me wants to attribute this to DC's particular cultural context as a mostly black city with a large, politically active and open black LGBT population. So what you end up with is D.C.'s most prominent emcee performing at a black pride festival in a mostly black city that recently extended marriage rights to its LGBT population. And if you're from here, if you know this city, there's nothing really surprising about any of this.
Like Wale said, "At the end of the day, it's all about D.C. man."
-- A. Serwer