Remember that adorable 90-year-old grandma who couldn’t, for the life of her, understand her granddaughter’s lesbian relationship, or even how lesbian sex worked? She should hang out with Ebro and Peter Rosenberg, the hosts of the radio show Hot 97 in the Morning, who seemed just as perplexed by the mechanics of same-sex love in an interview with NYC-based rapper Cakes da Killa last week.
The 20-minute segment with the rapper, who released his latest mixtape Hunger Pangs back in June, starts innocently enough. But things start to get a little bizarre around the two-minute mark, when Ebro says “evidence suggests” that Cakes da Killa is a gay rapper (It’s unclear what “evidence” Ebro is referring to, unless he saw Cakes da Killa having sex with a man in the green room before airtime):
EBRO: When I heard your music, I didn’t know based on—I was listening to it, I was like, Whoa, he was talking about a dude.
CAKES DA KILLA: Yes, it’s very pauseworthy.
EBRO: Well, not if you’re into that sort of thing, which I’m not. But I did appreciate that the music was good. The tone of voice and the rap style was good. The content I can’t relate to. It’s not for me.
From there, the interview proceeds in a similarly bumbling, if not outright homophobic, fashion. But it takes another detour to Weirdville around the 16-minute mark, when cohost Peter Rosenberg asks if Cakes da Killa would have sex with his female, lesbian assistant:
ROSENBERG: She’s a girl and she’s gay. You’re a guy and you’re gay. However—this sounds so stupid—
CAKES DA KILLA: What are y’all about to say?
EBRO: He’s about to go, “Why don’t y’all like each other?” (Laughter)
Rosenberg says, “But in some part of my brain, I’m like, ‘Y’all should really fuck with each other.’” Da Killa has to ask him to specify: “Like go out and get Chipotle, or make a baby?”
They then proceed to ask Cakes da Killa why he, a gay man, would not be interested in having sex with a gay woman, a line of questioning that culminates in the mind-boggling query “Is it directly penis that interests you the most?”
To his credit, Cakes da Killa, while making no effort to conceal his incredulity, mostly takes the interrogation in stride: “Oh, this cannot be a serious question. Yes, it’s directly the penis that excites me.”
To be fair, Ebro and Rosenberg seem genuinely impressed by Cakes da Killa’s skills, and they ask him some solid questions about what it’s like to navigate the staunchly heterosexual rap world as a gay black man. Their attitude is not so much marked by outright homophobia as bumbling hetero curiosity about a sexual preference that happens to be different than their own.
But ignorance is not a great defense for their tone-deaf questions, especially considering that Cakes da Killa is far from the first male rapper to identify as gay or bisexual. In addition to Frank Ocean, who famously wrote a Tumblr post that many interpreted as him coming out as bisexual (he later denied that was the case), there’s the openly gay New York rapper Le1f, as well as genderqueer performer Mykki Blanco.
While the hip-hop world has always had issues with homosexuality, it seems that attitude is (very) slowly evolving. It would be awesome if reporters’ questions to LGBTQ rappers would evolve along with it. And you know what would be even more awesome? If we stopped calling artists like Cakes da Killa “gay rappers,” and started referring to them as “rappers” instead.
H/T Queerty | Screengrab via Hot 97/YouTube
