Enter Blaxican Homo Thug

Gaycitynews.com
By Alysha Grevious
April 12, 2007
http://www.gaycitynews.com/site/news.cfm?newsid=18201173&BRD=2729&PAG=461&dept_id=586298&rfi=6

Los Angeles-based Deadlee, an openly gay gangster rapper, is innovating queer advocacy and expression with his aggressive but heartfelt lyrics one show at a time. Deadlee is a multi-racial hip-hop artist who has asserted, "A lot of people didn't even know there were openly gay rappers, but there have been gay rappers since at least 2000." The notion of a gay gangster rapper is a long unspoken truth within gay identity and communities of color.

A man of many layers, Deadlee has made it his mission to get his voice and voices like his heard. "There are a lot of kinds of gay," stated the rapper, "There is more to being gay than just 'Will & Grace.'"

His most recent accomplishment in this vein was the first ever LGBT hip-hop regional tour titled the Homo Revolution Tour. With the support and participation of over 18 other LGBT hip-hop artists, the Homo Revolution Tour covered 10 cities in the Southwest starting in San Diego and ending in Dallas. Deadlee would like to do two more tours covering the Northwest and East Coast possibly in the summer and fall of 2007.

The Homo Revolution tour was derived from the annual Peace Out Festival, where the queer hip-hop community had been meeting annually in the San Francisco Bay area for the past seven or eight years. Deadlee said, "It just seemed like the next step was to take it to the road."

Since the tour, which ended April 8, Deadlee continues to do solo performances, including one this Saturday evening at the New Jersey Performing Arts Center as part of the Sacred Circle Cafe series, titled "Hip Hop: Out, Loud and Proud," which is NJPAC's first officially queer event ever.

In Deadlee's push to expose queer hip-hop to mainstream culture he said is ultimate goal is that, "Hopefully we will cross over to just being rap artists not gay rap artists. Really we are just people living our lives and telling our stories."

Deadlee has his producer to thank, at least in part, for his success. "When I started I was trying to play the game, trying to be hard and gangster. My producer was listening to my material and told me that I sounded fake and should talk about things that are really happening in my life. Naturally since I like guys, being gay became part of my material. Then I was just being real."

Since then Deadlee, who has always worked with community, found inspiration in working with LGBT youth, and being a fan and creator of hip-hop music. He said, "Becoming a spokesperson goes hand in hand with working with youth. Being a spokesperson for the queer community is almost automatic just because no one is really doing it."

He works to counter many of the homophobic sentiments found in hip-hop music calling out many mainstream artist such as Eminem, DMX, and 50 Cent. His tactics, however, are by no means conventional grassroots strategies for getting out a message. The self identified "gayngster rapper" reclaims terms like faggot and cock using them as ways to assert and reclaim identity.

In one of his songs, "Gay Tupac," Deadlee's lyrics come across in a violent manner asserting, "Flip flopping hip-hop, faggot on top, my Glock is cock." While other songs such as "Straight" speak about his own personal struggles of being a teen and coming to terms with his sexual orientation.

Other motivating factors in Deadlee's plight stem simply from the state of the world we live in. In reference to recent articles in the news concerning the military's condemnation of gay soldiers, Deadlee said, "It's time to wake up. It disgusts me that people still call us immoral."

Deadlee also remains critical of the gay community, particularly the gay media. He said before the CNN interview he did not receive nearly as much attention from the gay media outlets as he did after.

"Sometimes our own communities perpetuate stereotypes," he said. I expected the gay media to be more of a spring board."

Deadlee himself has received both negative and positive reception from audiences as he pushes to get his message out, particularly after the February CNN interview. He said, "There was so much hate mail, like fags shouldn't rhyme. I even got, like, 10 death threats."

Regardless of the negative backlash, the role model was thankful for the publicity, stating that he saw a significant increase in fan mail and a lot of positive reception on Myspace and his Web site from people who were appreciative of his work.

You can come out and check him out for yourself, when he performs on a program that includes Tim'm T. West from D.C., t'ai freedom ford from Brooklyn, River Huston from Pennsylvania, and ShadoKat and Pandora Scooter from New Jersey.