The running joke about Brockhampton was best articulated in a tweet from the comedian Jaboukie Young-White last year:

“i’ve been gay in los angeles for 8 months and i’m still not in brockhampton idk what i’m doing wrong.”

The thing about Brockhampton is, there’s a lot of them. As founder and de facto leader of the 13-person rap group, Kevin Abstract, GQ’s digital cover star for Pride month, explains to playwright Jeremy O. Harris and me that the collective is inspired by the Factory, Andy Warhol’s famed New York studio. To me this designation reads as both unmistakably queer and multi-disciplinary. Essentially, the more interesting people are around, the better. The crew formulation is not without precedent; Wu-Tang and A$AP Mob jump to mind. But Brockhampton are the youthful inheritors of these legacies, a ragtag group of rappers, producers, and graphic artists who work and sometimes live together. Abstract and the rest of the group are down for the mixing of mediums, down to mix the personal and the professional—and when it comes to art-making, down for collaboration without limits. Abstract’s most recent album, Arizona Baby, which came out in April, marks the ninth year he has been making music in an official capacity. He’s just 22 and poised to be everywhere. There’s a new Brockhampton album on the way, too.

Born Clifford Ian Simpson, Abstract introduces himself as Ian when we meet at Condé Nast Studios. He’s wearing head-to-toe Marni as he rises in stocking feet to shake my hand. My arrival had interrupted the conversation he was having with Jeremy O. Harris, a brilliant young playwright fresh from the Yale School of Drama. Harris’s Off-Broadway debut, Slave Play, which closed in January, received glowing reviews. The New York Times described Harris’s arrival—which happened while he was still a student in New Haven—as if the playwright were “commuting into Manhattan on a comet.”

Jeremy is all long limbs (he’s six feet five) and wearing Gucci, his Afro resplendent as he lounges across from me on a gray sofa. He’s conducting an interview, but the conversation feels much more intimate than that. We touch on everything from Dottie Peoples (gospel music doesn’t dissemble; it’s all right there on the surface) to Boogie Nights (a perfect movie). Harris’s radiance does not betray the fact that he is working, the mark of a great interviewer.

Over the course of the conversation, it becomes clear that Kevin Abstract is preoccupied, artistically, with the idea of home. His group is literally named after the street he grew up on in Corpus Christi. He is not shy about the fact that his sexuality, his ambition, and his inability or unwillingness to conform to the culture of Texas have left him feeling alienated from the idea of home and, by extension, family. Pride month can be painful for many of us because it figures a sort of emotional homecoming: We are asked to confront the ways we are accepted or rejected by our families, and our communities, for who we are. Corny as it sounds, the guys in Brockhampton have clearly found home in one another.

As the leader of Brockhampton—born from a post made in 2010 on the Kanye West fan site KanyeToThe.com—Abstract possesses that rarest of combinations: talent, drive, grace, and an unerring sense of perspective. A respect for the slow rise and the benefits of challenging one’s self creatively. A month before this interview, he took to Twitter to make a strange announcement. Abstract tweeted a message that read: “I’m going to be running on a treadmill for the next 10 hours in front of my childhood home on Brockhampton Street in Corpus Christi, TX.” And then, in what could only be described as performance art, he proceeded to do just that. Why return to the place he left as a teen? Perhaps to confront and exorcise his demons directly, to take stock of how far he has come, to pay homage to his beginnings. It stands to reason that you can’t know where you’re going if you don’t know where you came from.