Writing in Slate, Jonah Weiner strains a bit to make his case but it's worth considering:
As society becomes increasingly gay-tolerant, hip-hop is reassessing
its relationship to homosexuality and, albeit in a hedged and
roundabout way, it's possible that no homo is helping to make hip-hop a gayer place.
("No homo" is added after statements to indicate the speaker didn't mean what he just said in a gay way.) Weiner elaborates:
In the very act of trying to "purify" an utterance of any gayness, after all, the no homo tag must contaminate it first—it's both a denial and a flashing neon arrow. This isn't to suggest that saying no homo is a radical act, but there's an appealing sense in which the phrase
refuses to function as tidily as some of its boosters might like. This
is especially striking in those cases when rappers add no homo
to statements of sexual pleasure we'd otherwise have no reason to think
of as gay. "No homo, I go hard," Chamillionaire rapped on a recent mix tape,
implying that an erection is inherently homosexual. Even more absurdly,
when Cam'ron [above] named a song "Silky (No Homo)," it was hard to decide what
he was disavowing. The emotions of sadness and longing expressed in the
lyrics? Or the tactile sensation of silkiness itself?
His final paragraph is too long to quote but here's his beginning and end:
Beyond this, there's a sense in which no homo, rather than
limiting self-expression in hip-hop, actually helps to expand it.... This is
still a concession to homophobia, but one that enables a less rigid
definition of the hip-hop self than we've seen before. It's far from a
coup, but, in a way, it's progress.
Read it all.
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