The hip hop blogger and radio host Jay Smooth dismissed concerns that it wasn’t safe for a mainstream commercial rapper to come out as gay.

“Safe for whom, in terms of whether us old fogey heterosexual hip hop listeners are ready,” said Smooth, who hosts the long-running Underground Railroad on WBAI. “I don’t think people should wait until we’re ready; you should make us ready.”

ADVERTISEMENT

Smooth told Totally Biased With W. Kemau Bell that younger hip-hop fans would be more accepting of openly gay rappers than older fans.

“There’s a sort of old-fogey, anti-gay tea party contingent among hip-hoppers my age,” Smooth said. “There’s a similar thing. They see the tide of history turning against them, so they’re becoming this really loud, freaked-out minority who thinks that our culture’s going to lose its moral center if people are openly gay or wear skinny jeans and things like that.”

Smooth said there was no one more “badass” than gay people, citing the genesis of the gay rights movement during the 1969 Stonewall riots in New York City.

“The history of the gay rights movement started from a fight,” he said. “They had a bar fight against the police. There’s nobody more gangster than the LGBT. If they knew their history, like, Rick Ross would be pretending to be gay instead of pretending to be a drug lord.”

Watch video of the FX program Totally Biased with W. Kemau Bell: