Standing in the stark white stage lights in a darkened theater on the third floor of the Center on Halsted, stripped of a beat and sharing a spoken-word bill with a group of teenagers he’s coached on both poetry and survival, Tim’m West is doing something rare, even among musicians who’ve pioneered a sound: he’s turning his art into something bigger.
The Center on Halsted offers a safe environment for troubled and homeless LGBTQ youth, and as the Center’s associate youth director, West brings to that mission a personal history that ties queer masculinity to genre-bending hip-hop. A founder of the influential Bay Area gay rap group Deep Dickollective, West played an important role in challenging and expanding the definition of hip-hop (not to mention the definition of the Gay Black Man) and helping to create a new kind of landscape now occupied by artists as varied as Mykki Blanco and Frank Ocean.
It was in Little Rock, of all places, that West first became exposed to hip-hop.
West came out while in DEN, and found a supportive, if perhaps a bit surprised, support system. “I don’t think they quite expected it, because I’m a hip-hop jock type. When I came out, a lot of them didn’t have a reference to what a masculine, basketball-playing, hip-hop [guy] would be doing being gay. I think people could fathom someone being really closeted, being on the down-low, but I was a very early pioneer in openly masculine, gay hip-hop.”
West met one of those revolutionary-minded people at an event celebrating the ten-year anniversary of Tongues Untied, where he performed “Quickie.” The poem resonated with Chicago native Juba Kalamka—in much the same way it resonated with the youth at the Center on Halsted more than a decade later. West and Kalamka’s frustrations with the homophobic attitudes they encountered in the supposedly “open” spoken-word scene—and with racist leanings in the LGBTQ community (something that many black youth find out when they arrive in Boystown)—inspired them, along with fellow Stanford student Phillip Atiba Goff, to form a group founded on the unlikely intersection of race and queer culture. As West explained Deep Dickollective’s mission to the San Francisco Bay Guardian in 2002, “D/DC occupies this space that isn’t exactly comfortable for everybody. We’re not comfortable for black gay people; we’re not a comfortable act for white gay people, white straight people, black straight people. … You don’t get to be this cool gay white guy and not called out in some regards.”
Deep Dickollective made no bones about reappropriating disses. As far as the group members were concerned, Common‘s infamous “In a circle of faggots, your name is mentioned” was proof of their own skill and relevance. West recalls silencing battle rappers whose main shut-down line was the quick-strike attack on a rapper’s masculinity: the accusation of homosexuality. “They go ‘Yo, go suck a dick.’ I say, ‘Which one and how quick?’” West laughs. “It disarms them.”
