Angel Haze recently addressed the perception of people who are gay within Hip Hop.
“Being gay in Hip Hop is still really stigmatized,” Haze says in an interview with XXL. “There are so many people in this world that are closet homosexuals. I guess I’m ‘out,’ but people ask me what my sexuality is all the time and I always tell them that it doesn’t matter. You don’t deserve to go through that and you don’t have to let that define who you are.”
Haze says she was “reluctant to do ‘Same Love,’” a cut about her sexuality that was released in 2013.
“I was so reluctant to do ‘Same Love,’ because I get so caught up on people thinking of me as a queer rapper, I don’t discuss my sexuality in my music,” Haze says. “But I’ve always said to myself that an artist is a person who has something to say and isn’t just a part of the noise. Adele is one of those artists for me. So are Frank Ocean and J. Cole, people who have something genuine to say and won’t just add to the room full of chatter.”
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Haze’s “Same Love,” patterned after Macklemore & Ryan Lewis’ song of the same name, features lyrics about the rapper’s upbringing and sexual preference. “At age thirteen, my mom knew I wasn’t straight,” she raps on the track. “She didn’t understand, but she had so much to say / She sat me on the couch, looked me straight in my face / And said you’ll burn in hell or probably die of AIDS.”
