It's exactly a week after I returned to Humboldt County where I'm teaching at Humboldt State University after The Hard Gay tour. I returned exhausted, fulfilled, but mostly moved by the feeling that I'd made two new friends-- men I've known through their own celebrity, if only through their music or the OHH gossip mill. In a Hip Hop culture stubbornly denying the existence of gay rappers, we traveled thousands of miles, did shows in four Cali cities (among them a pretty small town: Arcata), captivated the attention of audiences big and small, and we did it...the hard way ...together.

The concept for The Hard Gay tour started via a conversation with Twizza and given my desire to make the most of my temporary stay in California-- a state I long claimed as home, during those integral years with Deep Dickollective. Understanding that there was no label sponsorship, no corporate backers, just determination on a chicken wing and a player, I needed to rethink my plans to tour with Twizza and Last Offence. I believe strongly, however "budget" gay tours can sometimes be, that artists should never lose money trying to promote their art. It's a matter of principal and good business; and at 36, I'm about my business. I figured that focusing on California rappers would enable a more cost effective tour. I am also aware that while there'd been a Pretty Thugs tour and HomoRevolution, there'd been nothing centering, if playfully and ironically, on gay masculinities. After conferring with Twizza, who I know I’ll be touring with at some future point, asking Deadlee and Last Offence to join me was about challenging the perceptions about manhood and masculinity that are used to disenfranchise gay men seeking recognition in Hip Hop. Deadlee, Last Offence, and I are comfortable as masculine men, yet feel no need to put down genderqueer, trans, or effeminate emcees. It's a powerful position to be able to deconstruct, through rap, the social dictates that make little distinction between effeminate faggots and masculine faggots. Our faggotry is the basis of the industry's diss. In fact, masculine gay men face particular challenges because we're often not considered "gay enough" to be gay and more "straight acting" than many of the straight boys. I wanted to explore our masculinity without apology.

I also knew that teaching at Humboldt State University would offer a great launch for the tour if planned it just after the election and just before Vets Day, since I already had a poetry event planned for In The Meantime's Black Gay Men's group in Los Angeles on 11/11. I teach a class at Humboldt State University called "Black Male(d): Deconstructing the African-American Male experience through the poetry of Langston Hughes and TuPac Shakur". The class enabled me to tap into resources at the University to fly Last Offence and Deadlee up to Humboldt County and provide lodging, with a little spare change left over after expenses. We agreed to split proceed at other shows were available and ultimately offered earnings at Tori Fixx's release, and the tour's closing, to the man of honor. Such selflessness is a rare gem in even an increasingly competitive and vicious indie industry. It was great to tour with brothers who had high expectations of the tour, and yet understood the sacrifices necessary to make it happen. Helpful also was the support and enthusiasm of OutHipHop.com.

The opening performance was a part of the Campus Dialogue on Race Program. In addition to performing songs themed around the acronym TUPAC (Truth, Underdog, Pain, Affirmation, and Choices), we decided to

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Many or most know that, in addition to my work as a queer Hip Hop artist, I am one of a growing number of scholars in the burgeoning field of Hip Hop Studies (e.g., Byron Hurt's Beyond Beats and Rhymes, U Michigan's Black Cultural Traffic, Jeff Chang's Total Chaos). This semester, while I'm teaching Ethnic Studies at Humboldt State University (CA), I get to teach a course I created called "Hip Hop Nation: Who is Really Real?".  Indeed the question of "realness" is at the core of identification and disidentification with the Hip Hop Nation.  As queer Hip Hop artists (and queer simply being non-heterosexual) we identify (to varying degrees) with the challenge of a "breakthrough" into the mainstream, understanding that the Hip Hop industry (not necessarily its fans) have been largely dismissive of even our most talented and tested artists. I have an opportunity as a Professor, to define Hip Hop, not through its central personalities (those with mega-million record deals and an industry to support them) but by those on the margins of Hip Hop. And who better to look at than artists in the queer hip hop scene-- diverse in cultural, racial, gender, and sexual representation-- embodying as broad a range of styles as evident in the overarching Hip Hop scene? As part of the course, I always screen Pick Up the Mic, Alex Hinton's critical touchstone in the visibility of the GHH/OHH movement, and among the reasons the scene has grown from the handful of artists represented in the film to countless numbers since. I always go through a range of emotions watching it, some good, some not so good.

Truth is, you can't even define Hip Hop without talking about what it isn't... and for a long time, many in the mainstream have held the belief that Hip Hop is not gay. Despite breakthroughs by women, whites, other ethnic groups, other nationalities, keeping it real holds "gayness" as its antithesis. Lesbians better be so hard they get dap from "true thugs" OR so pretty they can operate, even lyrically, as seductress. Gay men are....well....

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By Tim’m T. West

This is officially a rant, not a manifesto! And for all I've already written, rapped, and freestyled about Hip Hop, my investment in deconstructing this idea that there is a "real" real to keep, is about the only real thing I know. The shit has hit the fans. Its stench is slamming them in the face with the excesses of fantasy-driven, capitalistic, agonistic, hypermasculine bullshit that is clogging radio waves and iPods alike. To be clear, far from romanticizing a "Golden Era" of Hip Hop that was ever really real, I'm interested in complicating even those who'd suggest some pure notion of Hip Hop harkening back to the days of Beat Street, Breakin', and Krush Groove. I was a kid in Little Rock, AR when those flicks dropped. The movement of Hip Hop from our boomboxes to the big screen was an authenticating touchstone. Up to that point, Hip Hop was late-disco and 80s soul. Hip Hop was the roller skating rink and all kinds of eccentric characters trying to mark themselves as the most eccentric playboys, gangstas, and pimps. Listening to Grandmaster Flash and The Furious Five's The Message, one hears a litany of struggles defining inner city life. But this is no uncomplicated and romantic inner city-- there are pimps, pushers, working class folk, fag hags, addicts, and undercover fags. They all have in common capitalism's grip pushing each of them closer to "the edge". Fag in this context was descriptive, not pejorative, so I still felt like I could be a part of it. Hip Hop was the music of the people-- and for all the ways my attraction to boys distinguished me from other b-boys or emcees, I still felt welcomed to participate, if silent about my difference. Poor people where I grew up had other shit to worry about besides who you were hookin’ up with.

As product of inner city streets of that era one must understand Reaganomics and urban neglect to truly understand the alliances of the era-

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