http://music.guardian.co.uk/news/story/0,,2279339,00.html
Hidden gay life of macho hip hop stars

A former MTV executive reveals a homosexual subculture in an aggressively male business

Paul Harris in New York
Sunday May 11, 2008
The Observer

American rap music is an industry ruled by machismo. It is a place where reputations are made by shady pasts, the aura of violence and ultra-masculinity. But now an explosive new book is lifting the lid on one of hip hop's most unexpected secrets: that many people in the business are gay.
Terrance Dean, a former executive at music channel MTV, has penned a memoir of his life and times in the hip hop industry as a gay man. It is an explosive exposé of a thriving gay subculture in an aggressively male business, where anti-gay lyrics and public homophobia are common.

Perhaps not surprisingly, many in the industry are nervous about the book's publication this week, fearing that it will expose some of the top black names in music and Hollywood as secretly gay. But Dean said that his memoir was not intended as a way of outing famous people. 'I was never tempted to name any names. The book is not about outing people. I wrote it so that people realise the industry has a gay subculture and we are part of this music,' he said.
That gay hip hop subculture certainly seems to be thriving. Dean's book describes a world where many industry executives and some artists are leading secret gay lives, which are often obvious to everyone but rarely talked about. And, despite using some false names, the book contains enough information so that it will undoubtedly spark off a frenzy of speculation as to who some of the characters are in real life.

For example, Dean describes 'Lola', a singer who is a lesbian and had to keep her sexuality secret. And 'Gus', a male rap artist who appeared on television in typical 'gangsta' style yet hid a secret gay life. Then there are the other hints of big-name celebrities close to the hip hop business who are also gay. They include 'Lucas', a married A-list movie star, and 'Kareem', a leading sitcom actor.

Dean hopes that by bringing out his book he will allow a leading hip hop figure to come out as gay and thus pave the way for the notoriously homophobic industry to come to terms with its secret side. 'Within the next year I believe a major artist will come out. They are going to have to be brave but I think they can do it,' he said.

That is no understatement. Leading hip hop artists such as Eminem, DMX and Ice Cube have all been targeted by gay activists for using homophobic lyrics. One of Eminem's songs famously included the line: 'Hate fags? The answer's yes.' In his book Dean describes a world in which hip hop stars and executives often berate and denigrate homosexuals, and the use of the word 'faggot' is common place. He says that too often he let such abuse pass by, and writing a memoir was a way of making up for that. 'I am a part of this culture. I was getting by, saying it's OK when those things are said. But then I realised they are actually talking about me too,' Dean said.

There are signs that things are changing. Several leading rap artists, including top seller Kanye West, have admitted that homophobia is rampant in the industry and they have spoken out against it. West had previously spoken out against gay lyrics. There are also a handful of openly gay rappers such as Deadlee, who has held national US tours of his music and appeared on television to talk about his sexuality.

Dean, however, hopes that hip hop will soon put its homophobia behind it. He says the music changed dramatically from hip hop's roots in nightclubs and parties to a celebration of urban violence and gang life as 'gangsta rap' became the norm. Homophobia grew up alongside that musical shift as most successful artists used songs that idolised guns, drugs and crime. 'We need to get hip hop back to those party roots and away from the gangsta rap culture,' he said.

However, Dean's book shows that heterosexual rappers clearly have no monopoly on tough upbringings. Dean's book is a searing description of a tough childhood on the streets of Detroit, ironically also the home town of Eminem. His mother was a prostitute addicted to drugs who later contracted HIV.

Dean eventually suffered a childhood sexual assault from a male babysitter and ended up serving jail time in Nashville for stealing a car.

If homophobic rappers are looking for a dubious sense of 'authenticity', then they can just as easily find it in Dean's background as in the most masculine of gangsta rappers. But for Dean his purpose in writing the book was simply to shine a rare light on the most shadowed corner of some of the most popular music in the world.

'Everyone knows. It is not a secret in that sense. It is just that people do not talk about what goes on in private and who is sleeping with who. Now I hope a mainstream artist will have the courage to soon come out,' he said.

Rappers' Rants

· In his single 'Criminal' in 2000, Eminem sang: 'Whether you're a fag or a lez, Or the homosex, hermaph or a trans-vest, Pants or dress - hate fags? The answer's yes.'

· In the April 2004 issue of Playboy the American rapper made the point clearly: 'I don't like gay people around me, because I'm not comfortable with what their thoughts are.'

· Jamaican rapper Beenie Man's song 'Damn' includes lines such as 'come to execute all the gays' which led to the cancellation of several concerts in July 2006.

· American hip hop artist Kanye West spoke out against gay lyrics on MTV in 2004. He told a US magazine he 'wouldn't feel comfortable at a gay bar. I wouldn't go to a gay parade'.

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http://women.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/women/beauty/article3883269.ece

'These are the top casting agents and designers who decide whom to send on photoshoots and the catwalks, and many of them are gay white men. I’m told they really don’t like black women. Again, the question is, why? Or, rather, why not? As ever, if it’s not something to do with money, it is probably something to do with sex.'

May 11, 2008

Jourdan Dunn is the colour of money
She’s British, she’s beautiful and she’s black. Hooray! At last, the industry might be waking up to its dark secret

Minette Marrin
There’s an open secret in the beauty industry and it’s a guilty one: the industry is racist. And it seems a storm is set to break about this, exactly as it did over the size-zero campaign. You might imagine that, among fashionistas, beauty would be welcome in any form, and the more diverse, the better. But you would be wrong. These days, ethnic beauty is pretty much invisible.

Last month, I took a quick snapshot of what you currently see in fashion magazines. I bought 25kg of glossies in random armfuls from a top newsagent; mainly British and American, but also several from Europe, as well as Japanese and Indian Vogue. All those kilograms added up to literally thousands of pages, and the result was conclusive.

Compared to the vast numbers of white girls in them, there were hardly any ethnic models, and few of those were black.

In all the editorial photoshoots and advertisements combined, there were only 163 ethnic women, and of these only 14 were black.

Admittedly, this sample is far from professional market research, but it is striking enough to be worth considering. The fashion world, on this evidence, has been screening out ethnic beauty.

The issue is reaching an anxious tipping point this month with the emergence of a new black supermodel, Jourdan Dunn, the 17-year-old British girl you see pictured on these pages. She was discovered last year while shopping in Primark, and photographers, stylists and editors believe she could go all the way.

She is remarkable, and particularly so because she is black. Sarah Doukas, head of the Storm modelling agency, to which Jourdan is signed, (and who famously discovered Kate Moss), says: “I’m very excited for her. I feel, if she does have great success, she will have a big effect on the way people look at different kinds of beauty.”

Such is the heat around Dunn and the ethnic issue right now that, in an attempt to stave off accusations of inequality, both Italian and American Vogue have been fighting over her for their covers. Italian Vogue’s entire July issue has been shot with black models (the last time it featured one on its cover was 2002); American Vogue has also shot Dunn for its July edition. Incidentally, the last time British Vogue had a black woman (Naomi Campbell) on the cover was also in 2002. Doukas, who this year celebrates 21 years of Storm, says that when she first started out, there was plenty of diversity — not so now. “It’s ridiculous that we have so little diversity in our idea of beauty,” she says.

In the 1960s and 1970s, ethnic women were much more visible in fashion. That was a time of exuberance and change; the time of the Black Power movement, the mantra “black is beautiful”, Roberta Flack singing Be Real Black for Me. This mood continued into the 1980s, with models such as Iman, Pat Cleveland and the young Campbell splashed everywhere.

Fashionistas will admit that it is now extremely rare to see a black girl on a magazine cover, and that there were almost no ethnic girls at the catwalk shows in Paris, Milan and New York in February. One or two Chinese models made it, but otherwise, the Aryan look dominated.

The question is: why? The standard answer is that it all comes down to money. Beauty is what sells — the magazine, the label, the skincare and the bag. Editors and managers say that, however much they want to use ethnic girls, putting one on the cover of a glossy magazine will depress sales. If ethnic women brought in big profits, nobody in the industry would be in the slightest bit interested in their skin tones or their racial type. Rightly or wrongly, though women from ethnic minorities are considered a bad commercial bet.

As one insider said to me regretfully: “Fashion is aspirational, magazines are aspirational and, to aspire, you need to be able to identify with someone – at least a little. And readers don’t identify with ethnic women. They don’t see them as aspirational.”

So, neither the editors nor the advertisers will take any risks on them. This is particularly true in new markets – marketing aimed at the new mega-rich consumers in China and Russia cannot afford to ignore the fact that those countries are more racist than the west.

I’m sceptical about this view. If the assumption that ethnic beauty is unprofitable is right, you would expect advertisers to be even more reluctant to use ethnic models than magazine editors. Editors can afford to take a few risks, perhaps, as fashion leaders, whereas advertisers are much more reactionary, driven by the pursuit of profit. Yet in my snapshot of April magazines, it was the advertisers who were using more ethnic girls.

In all those kilograms of pages, there were only four black women in editorial fashion shoots, and 10 Asian women, whereas there were 71 black women and 48 Asian in advertisements. Four black women in editorials against 71 in advertisements is a striking contrast. It suggests that, in reality, ethnic beauty has greater commercial value than the fashion mavens assume, and that the market has latched onto it first. As Hilary Riva, chief executive of the British Fashion Council, points out: “It is important that we see aspirational images of all types of women in the media. One of the biggest UK ad campaigns, for M&S, has done just that.” Perhaps the punters are a bit less racist than the pundits.

This is only speculation, but it is hard to find much else about this extremely awkward question. British Vogue refuses point blank to comment, and most people I contacted preferred to talk off the record. One suggestion is that the absence, particularly of black girls with African features, has to do with the tiny minority of people who make the fashion weather: the arbiters of fashion. These are the top casting agents and designers who decide whom to send on photoshoots and the catwalks, and many of them are gay white men. I’m told they really don’t like black women. Again, the question is, why? Or, rather, why not? As ever, if it’s not something to do with money, it is probably something to do with sex.

The ideal of female beauty in the fashion industry today is childlike, almost bordering on paedophilia. With few exceptions, the most sought-after faces have small, childish features, with little noses, little chins, small mouths and big, little-girl foreheads and eyes. They are childishly asexual. The same goes for fashionable bodies. The hottest bodies are almost always immature, lacking in secondary sexual characteristics – no curves, no breasts, no body hair.

Those ethnic girls who fit into this stereotype are almost always the ones who succeed. Whatever their skin colour – and paler is more successful than darker – they actually look like white child-women. Asian girls, with their uncurvy, boyish figures and neat features often fit easily into this mould, but models with pronounced African features – large, full lips, wide noses and different facial proportions, as well as more curves, bigger bottoms and fuller breasts – do not. Their look is far from childishly androgynous, however dewily young the girls may be. It is more maturely sexual, more assertively female. Several people have suggested to me that the gay arbiters of fashion find full-on female sexuality distasteful, which is why they don’t favour this kind of womanly beauty among white girls, either.

This, however, can only be part of the explanation. There is also evidence that ethnic women have been ambivalent about their own kind of look for many years. For decades, women with dark skin the world over have tried to make their skin paler or their hair straighter, sometimes with dangerous chemicals. The model Alek Wek recently told Vogue India that, in her native Sudan, her dark skin is looked down on by lighter-skinned Sudanese. “What is this obsession with pigment?” she asked. Marriage adverts in Indian newspapers unselfconsciously express a preference for fair or wheat-coloured skin in women. Japanese and Chinese women regularly have cosmetic operations to remove the fold of skin above their eyes, so they look more like a “round-eyed” European, and dye their hair blonde. As Doukas said of a photoshoot in Japan recently: “The girls just didn’t look Japanese. It was very sad.” Indeed, in my copy of Japanese Vogue, there was a total absence of Japanese models. “I am black but comely,” says the beautiful woman in the Old Testament’s Song of Songs. Why the “but”?

There are, of course, issues of status and power tied up in all this. Most dark-skinned people have been colonised or overrun by pale-skinned people. Pale, in folk memory, means power and wealth, and this has been deeply internalised. Perhaps this is partly why there is some resistance among black and other ethnic women themselves to dark-skinned beauty, even now; perhaps they themselves find something else more aspirational.

Things may, though be beginning to change. The fuss over Jourdan Dunn and her distinctive black beauty may be a sign of the times, a renewed interest in diverse kinds of beauty. “Globally, I think a huge change is about to happen,” Doukas concludes. “I’m optimistic. I think people will come to feel again that diversity is much more interesting than the rather bland, generic look we’ve seen so much of for so long.”

Additional reporting by Araminta Markes