Photo by Michael Renaud*. Click play on the top right corner of the page to listen to artists mentioned in this piece.*

Rapper Mykki Blanco-- born Michael Quattlebaum-- prances out onto the stage at Manhattan's Highline Ballroom in a Jetson-esque orange metallic crop-top and matching skort. The place is packed. "I taste my own flows on this beat, hum-delicious," he hisses during a rapid-fire, three-song set. "I pull my dick out/ Skeet skeet, so nutritious."

It's early March, and Blanco is part of a showcase featuring fringe artists from a broad array of genres, but they've got plenty in common: They're wildly flamboyant, mostly dressed in drag, and hellbent on keeping the energy meter pinging on high all night. At about 2 a.m., Brooklyn dance-rap crew and performance collective House of LaDosha take the stage to screams of "La-Dooooooooo-sha!" Antonio Blair, who also goes by Dosha Devastation, is decked out in a caramel-blonde wig and shiny red, skin-tight waist-high pants squeezed over a leopard-print turtleneck. He's so tiny and impeccably primped that he could easily pass for a female rapper if it weren't for the miniature patch of hair sprouting from his chin.

Mykki Blanco and House of LaDosha's performances at the Highline accentuate the juxtaposition of ultra-feminine and flamboyantly gay aesthetics with the in-your-face braggadocio of rap-- palpable proof that the two are not as mutually exclusive as any traditional, hyper-masculine hip-hop narrative might suggest. This comes into brilliant focus when LaDosha perform their take on Rick Ross' boisterously gruff 2010 anthem "B.M.F.", in which drug dons are replaced with supermodels: "I think I'm Kate Moss/ Naomi Campbell/ Up in French Vogue/ You know the pose." The delivery is so dauntless that you sense these guys could challenge Ross to a blunt-off and win handily, all without breaking a nail.

Mykki Blanco. Photo by Will Deitz.

If there's ever been a time for an artist to rip hip-hop identity conventions to shreds, it's now. The genre is the furthest left-of-center it's been in a long time-- or at the very least, the line between mainstream stardom and underground oddballism is blurring beyond recognition. Take Danny Brown's G-Unit-offending asymmetrical haircut and tiger-striped gear, rappers like A$AP Rocky or Soulja Boy harkening back to hip-hop's dandydish earlier days and labeling themselves "pretty," Nicki Minaj's decision to stage a high-budget theatrical exorcism on stage at the 2012 Grammys, or XXL's first-ever inclusion of a woman (a white one, at that) in the 2012 edition of their annual list of hip-hop freshmen. And meme-hop genius Lil B has probably never racked up so many of his coveted YouTube hits-- and critical praise-- as he did when he named an album I'm Gay. From the top down, there's a lot happening that doesn't quite jibe with textbook definitions.

But acceptance for queer figures in rap outside of a New York underground bubble are still flimsy at best. When it comes to a culture that caters almost exclusively to heteronormative sensibilities, it's easy to applaud topical gestures of gay acceptance without demanding to see them applied on a tangible, more mainstream level, be it in the form of live bills shared between gay and straight rappers, co-signs, radio play, or label deals. When a hip-hop figure takes even a "don't ask, don't tell"-type stance, we applaud.

I myself am guilty of this-- when I interviewed Harlem's self-labeled pretty boy rapper A$AP Rocky last fall, we talked about homophobia in rap music. He confessed that he used to be homophobic, but that he reformed his ways when he realized all of his beloved fashion designers are gay, writing off hip-hop homophobia as "immature." When I assembled the piece, I included these comments, but I left out something he said later when I asked about his friendship with Venus X, who hosts New York's rave-rap club night Ghe20 Goth1k and appears in his "Peso" video: "That shit gets too freaky for me. One time, [Ghe20 Goth1k DJs] were spinning at [Manhattan venue] Santos. I went downstairs and a bitch was dancing on the floor and these gay guys were around her doing some cult-chant shit... I was scared. I guess that's what happens when square motherfuckers hear my music and shit."

House of LaDosha's Dosha Devastation. Photo by Will Deitz.

Rocky has since been championed as a hip-hop progressive, appearing on the cover of Complex with music-industry-darling fashion designer Jeremy Scott and receiving praise for comments like the one he recently made to Spinner: "Man, if you're gay we can be friends... as long as you're a great person and, y'know, you don't bother me and make me uncomfortable, then let's be friends, dude." For most heterosexual rappers, treatment of gays seems to go something like this: Cherry-pick gay culture for things you can use to enhance your own brand, fly your fashionable freak flag high, grandstand your anti-homophobic statements, if the spirit moves you, and wait for the applause (it will come). But make sure to keep the gay men at a fearful arm's length at all times.

"You're not gonna be 'no-homo' and then call yourself pretty and say, 'Swag swag swag, swag swag, swag swag.' That is a gay attitude-- a gay black attitude, specifically," Quattlebaum says. "You cannot tell me it isn't. Gay men invented swag."

When I go to meet with Quattlebaum in a Williamsburg cafe in February, I initially breeze by his table. I've never seen him out of drag and makeup, and I don't recognize him in a relatively conservative denim button-up with hair cropped close to his head. It seems counter-intuitive that he would have moved away from this look and toward drag to become a rapper, but it begins to make sense once he explains it as an extension of his performance-art roots. "I would rather be famous like Insane Clown Posse than like A$AP Rocky," he tells me.

Originally a child of punk and industrial, Quattlebaum began dressing in women's clothes in late 2010 with the intent of inventing a rap character. "The Mykki character came naturally. I had been performing in this kind of screamo style that, if you're fast enough, sounds like rap," he says. "One day, I had the idea to buy a wig. I was like, 'This character is going to be a teenage female rapper.' I started rapping and realized I was good at it."

Now he dresses as Mykki three to four days a week. In the last year, he's parlayed the whim-spawned rap persona to the center of his work as a performer and recording artist, and has plans to release a four-track mix in the coming weeks. If it sounds anything like "Betty Rubble", a one-off SoundCloud cut posted last year, it'll be an uneasy mix of dark, minimalist production and conventionally reference-loaded diss-raps. "Mykki, we got some issues/ Nah bitch, you got some problems/ You suck a dick like Dilbert/ I Calvin and Hobbes 'em," he rhymes on the song, his vocals looped through a crunchy digital filter that sounds like a far more sinister iteration of Auto-Tune. "Mykki has two sides: Cute and criminally insane," explains Quattlebaum. "Whether I want to admit it or not, Eminem is embedded in my subconscious, because I loved Eminem as a kid."

Quattlebaum filmed a video diary recently wherein he freestyles in full drag in various spots in New York City. At one point he's in Harlem, surrounded by a group of skeptical and wide-eyed schoolkids. "I go into the belly of the beast-- a group of young African-American school children. Children are the most homophobic because they don't know any better," he says. With Mykki Blanco, Quattlebaum uses what he refers to as "shock-rock" tactics, intentionally grabbing at any aggressively heteronormative hip-hop convention or stereotype and flipping it on its head.

That same sort of subversion can be found in the new video for Zebra Katz' breakout single "Ima Read", which is out on perennial fringe-miner Diplo's Jeffree imprint. The clip is a standalone piece of art unto itself, a dystopic greywashed take on a private school where masked, gender-neutral figures sporting school-girl outfits and waist-length braids haunt abandoned hallways. Meanwhile, Zebra Katz plays a steely-eyed school teacher, marking big red Fs on papers and delivering commands in measured, hard-assed chants: "I'ma reach that bitch/ I'ma teach that bitch/ I'ma take that bitch to college/ I'ma give that bitch some knowledge/ I'ma read, I'ma read, I'ma read."

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The song and video have earned praise from a long line of cultural higher-ups including big-name, Goth-inspired designer Rick Owens, who used it during a runway show in Paris, along with the Roots' ?uestlove and Saul Williams, among others. When Azealia Banks performed at Karl Lagerfeld's house in Paris, she played his guests "Ima Read" before doing her own set. Not bad exposure for a rapper who worked at a catering company until a few weeks ago.

Like Mykki Blanco, Zebra Katz is a rap character who blossomed from a performance-art background. "Zebra Katz's story is that he was a Chippendale dancer who quit working at Chippendale's and moved to New York and then started working in sanitation," says the man born Ojay Morgan, sitting in his Brooklyn apartment. "It just came to me one day. I really liked the play on the Jewish last name."

But while Zebra Katz and "Ima Read" are conceptual and performative in some of the same ways as the work of Quattlebaum of House of Ladosha, Morgan's explorations of sexuality in his raps are intentionally understated. "Ima Read" is lyrically abstract-- the lines could be rapped by someone of any gender or sexual preference, and Morgan doesn't cross-dress.

"It's a fine line that I'm playing here. I'm trying to see how cleverly I can walk a tightrope," he explains, detailing how a more nuanced approach might appeal to broader swaths of listeners. "You have [fans from] the ball culture," he says. "And then you have hip-hop heads who are gonna say this is hard because it's very minimal and to-the-point. And we're talking about bitches and bitches and bitches and bitches."

____Zebra Katz. Photo by Federico Cabrera.

The "ball culture" Morgan refers to is New York's legendary vogue-ball scene, a vital source of inspiration that this current crop of rappers draw from heavily. Most people are probably familiar with the culture as it's depicted in Jennie Livingston's 1990 documentary Paris Is Burning, which chronicles the experiences of the gay black and Latino drag queens or transgendered people who lived it. The roots of these scenes extend back decades, but exploded in the late-1980s, when they migrated to downtown Manhattan from Harlem.

Central to the balls are extravagant pageantry and voguing-- a form of angular, improvisational and competitive dancing that can be compared to breaking-- which reached mainstream visibility as filtered through Madonna's 1990 hit "Vogue". Today, the debate lingers as to whether people like Madonna and Livingston were important ambassadors for gay Latino and black men within the ballroom scene, or merely opportunists who pilfered the culture for their own benefit and moved on.

To the average listener, "Ima Read" comes off as a twisted pro-education anthem-- in some ways it is, according to Morgan-- but ultimately it's a bow to this ballroom culture, a reference to the vogue slang "reading," i.e., verbally insulting an opponent on the dance floor. Sometimes the ballroom references made by this wave of rappers are as blatant and simple as naming a song "Ima Read" or tagging SoundCloud uploads with "vogue" and "cunty." But there are deeper and more understated roots that connect to a lineage of communal cultural experiences shared by gay black and Latinos in New York City.

"When I first found out about voguing as a teenager, it was an eye-opening experience because it felt like an innate way of moving. And a lot of my music is made with the intentions of movement and dance," says Le1f, aka Khalif Diouf, the wunderkind rapper and producer who crafted the beat for Das Racist's breakout hit "Combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell" and contributed to Spank Rock's newest album while still an undergraduate at Wesleyan. "But it's the cultural side-- the experience of being at a ball-- that's affected what I rap about. The fact that there's a scene that's existed for so long with such a rich history, and is ceremonial, is really nice."

"It's also just a community of people who are so liberal and devoted to making good art, often collaboratively," he adds. "There are straight white guys who are just as awesome as the gay black women."

*Le1F. Photo by Jake Moore.

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The intro to Chantal Regnault's gorgeous new photo book Voguing and the Ballroom Scene of New York 1989-1992 includes a quote from black cultural critic Frank Leon Roberts, and his characterization of the voguing community does not sound so different from the web of subcultures thriving in New York right now. "A rich taxonomy of gender personas and identities flooded in: thugged-out hustlers who were 'new' to gay culture, butch lesbians with erotic attachments to gay men, bootleg black designers and fashionistas eager to put their garments 'to test' in a new urban scene."

Still, it's difficult to imagine a thriving queer-friendly subculture translating to acceptance on a bigger scale. Even as the rap industry and audiences open their arms to a wider array of artists, we're consistently left wondering when a gay male rapper will find mainstream success (or when successful mainstream rappers will stop feeling the need to stay in the closet). Byron Hurt's 2006 documentary Hip Hop: Beyond Beats and Rhymes attempts to answer some of the questions: What are the roots of misogyny and homophobia in hip-hop, and how can we advance past them?

One clip from the film shows him asking three men in drag how they feel about homophobia in rap; shortly after, Hurt is inside of a studio with Busta Rhymes questioning him on homophobic lyrics. Rhymes seems both bemused and shocked. "I can't partake in that conversation, homes," he says. "That homo shit? That's what you're talking about? With all due respect... What I represent culturally doesn't condone it." A moment later, when asked whether or not he believes a gay rapper could ever achieve mainstream acclaim, Rhymes begins singing evasively and stands up, breezing out of the room past a grinning Mos Def.

Beyond Beats and Rhymes asks important questions, but like many people who've tried to analyze or push back on the endlessly complicated relationship between rap and homophobia, he comes up pretty empty-handed. Cohesive analysis of the origins and commodification of black masculinity, images of sex and violence in hip-hop-- not to mention the significant threads of homoeroticism woven through rap's entire aesthetic-- can't be dealt with in decades, let alone 56 minutes.

Rappers like Morgan acknowledge the challenge inherent to creating music within a genre that's historically been hostile to their sexuality. But there's little interest in engaging the hand-wringing debates-- it seems more effective to answer exhausting, outdated questions like, "Are we ready to embrace a gay rapper?" by sidestepping them altogether and just going about one's business.

"I'm not trying to push any buttons. I've always been the type of guy who never even felt that he had to come out of the closet," Morgan says. "I grew up in a Caribbean household with Jamaican parents, and everyone says Jamaican parents are the most homophobic people ever. But I never felt homophobia growing up in my household. I was never made to feel like I was different because I always knew I was different."

In writing the lyrics to his forthcoming debut mixtape, Le1f worked hard to toe the line, juggling identity politics with accessibility and party-readiness. "I really wanted to rap about being both black and gay simultaneously and what that means," he said. "But I'm very aware that people don't want to hear preachy music. Conscious rap is not my favorite type of rap."

And just as there's the worry that hip-hop will shut out rappers because they're gay, there's perhaps an equally legitimate concern that audiences will fetishize them and pit them against one another for the same reasons. "Let's not make gay NYC rap a 'thing,'" Le1f wrote me in an email after our interview. "I'm not trying to be competing with my friends based on their race and sexuality. The whole 'room for one' mentality is homophobic... if the world is ready for a gay rapper, then they're ready for multiple gay rappers. If we were straight, no one would be comparing us."

Cakes Da Killa. Photo by Alana Yolande.

Rashard Bradshaw, a 21-year-old college kid who raps with an impossibly fast tongue over Dipset-glitzy beats using the name Cakes Da Killa, thinks hard about this, too. He lives in New Jersey and makes it into the city to perform at small bars when he can, and cites rappers like Antonio Blair and Le1f as "my foremothers," but he's also fearful of quotas and pigeonholing: "We're all cunty, we're all gay, and we're all really out," he explains, sitting in a Brooklyn bar. "I really don't want to come out and have it be like, 'Oh, he's trying to be like Dosha or like Le1f."

At the same time, he's sincerely reverent and grateful for their influence. "All of those people are paving the way for people like me who want to break out." He tells me he's dying to see Mykki Blanco and House of LaDosha perform at the Highline, though he's not sure if he'll be able to get into the city. He's still a junior in college. At the show a few weeks later, I spot a tall figure with tell-tale bleached tips poking out from under his safari hat. He's in the front, cheering as Mykki Blanco takes the stage.

Check out tracks and videos from artists covered in this feature below:

Mykki Blanco: Cosmic Angel video diary

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Cakes Da Killa: "The Sermon" (via SoundCloud)

From the 2011 Easy Bake Oven EP.

LE1F: "Mind Body" (via SoundCloud)

Single from the forthcoming Dark York mixtape, out April 15 via Greedhead.

House of LaDosha: "This Is Ur Brain" (via SoundCloud)

2001 track tagged as "Drug Ballad Cunt" on SoundCloud.

__Cakes Da Killa: "Rapid Fire" and "The Birdcage"

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Mykki Blanco: "Join My Militia (Nas Gave Me a Perm)" (via SoundCloud)

A recently released track from Blanco, who has a four-song mix coming soon.

MikeQ: FACT Mix (via SoundCloud)

Ballroom DJ extraordinaire MikeQ's new hour-long mix for FACT, which includes a drumline-stutter remix of "Ima Read".