Frank Ocean, R&B singer, comes out

**NoNoRehab** · July 5th, 2012, 06:20 PM

This was in the Bossip blind item thread, but I felt it deserved more attention because this story has really rattled me.

A lot of people are talking about Anderson Cooper, and I would never begrudge anyone's bravery in coming out. Having been there myself, I know it takes a lot to do it at all, even if you're not famous and even if the people around you are generally supportive. But we all know that people like Cooper, or Jim Parsons, etc. come out at very little risk to their careers. Yet there are people for whom coming out is still a huge risk, and Frank Ocean is one of them. There are almost no out black entertainers, period, and in the R&B/hip hop community? Forget it. The backlash there for even making a mild statement in support of LGBT equality can be huge. Even older, more established stars are too terrified to come out for that reason. So for someone like Frank, who is at the beginning of his career and is considered a Next Big Thing, to come out in that environment is huge.

He also broke the mold in releasing a statement that is not full of generalities, but gets really honest and personal and painful:

Whoever you are, wherever you are, I’m beginning to think we’re a lot alike. Human beings spinning on blackness. All wanting to be seen, touched, heard, paid attention to. My loved ones are everything to me here. In the last year or three I’ve screamed at my creator. Screamed at clouds in the sky. For some explanation. Mercy maybe. For peace of mind to rain like manna somehow. Four summers ago, I met somebody. I was 19 years old. He was too. We spent that summer, and the summer after, together. Everyday almost. And on the days we were together, time would glide. Most of the day I’d see him, and his smile. I’d hear his conversation and his silence … until it was time to sleep. Sleep I would often share with him. By the time I realized I was in love, it was malignant. It was hopeless. There was no escaping, no negotiating with the feeling. No choice. It was my first love, it changed my life. Back then, my mind would wander to the women I had been with, the ones I cared for and thought I was in love with. I reminisced about the sentimental songs I enjoyed when I was a teenager … the ones I played when I experienced a girlfriend for the first time. I realized they were written in a language I did not yet speak. I realized too much, too quickly.

Imagine being thrown from a plane. I wasn’t in a plane though. I was in a Nissan Maxima, the same car I packed up with bags and drove to Los Angeles in. I sat there and told my friend how I felt. I wept as the words left my mouth. I grieved for them, knowing I could never take them back for myself. He patted my back. He said kind things. He did his best, but he wouldn’t admit the same. He had to go back inside soon. It was late and his girlfriend was waiting for him upstairs. He wouldn’t tell me the truth about his feelings for me for another 3 years. I felt like I’d only imagined reciprocity for years.

Now imagine being thrown from a cliff. No, I wasn’t on a cliff, I was still in my car telling myself it was gonna be fine and to take deep breaths. I took the breaths and carried on. I kept up a peculiar friendship with him because I couldn’t imagine keeping up my life without him. I struggled to master myself and my emotions. I wasn’t always successful.

The dance went on … I kept the rhythm for several summers after. It’s winter now. I’m typing this on a plane back to Los Angeles from New Orleans. I flew home for another marred Christmas. I have a windowseat. It’s December 27, 2011. By now I’ve written two albums, this being the second. I wrote to keep myself busy and sane. I wanted to create worlds that were rosier than mine. I tried to channel overwhelming emotions. I’m surprised at how far all of it has taken me. Before writing this I’d told some people my story. I’m sure these people kept me alive, kept me sane … sincerely, these are the folks I wanna thank from the floor of my heart. Everyone of you knows who you are … great humans, probably angels.

I don’t know what happens now, and that’s alrite. I don’t have any secrets I need kept anymore. There’s probably some small shit still, but you know what I mean. I was never alone, as much as I felt like it … as much as I still do sometimes. I never was. I don’t think I ever could be. Thanks. To my first love. I’m grateful for you. Grateful that even though it wasn’t what I hoped for and even though it was never enough, it was. Some things never are … and we were. I won’t forget you. I won’t forget the summer. I’ll remember who I was when I met you. I’ll remember who you were and how we’ve both changed and stayed the same. I’ve never had more respect for life and living than I have right now. Maybe it takes a near death experience to feel alive. Thanks. To my mother, you raised me strong. I know I’m only braved because you were first … so thank you. All of you. For everything good. I feel like a free man. If I listen closely … I can hear the sky falling too.

-Frank

IDK, sorry for being a total sap about this, but I actually cried seeing the hate thrown at Frank at Twitter today. He's Tweeted some in response but has subsequently deleted his comments (I got them from another site where someone collected them):

Do you feel my pain now?

They say keep your head up but the clouds are as dark

Still got one bullet left

It's hard to see the good in people when the darkness is so overpowering

Imagine smiling after a slap in the face. Then think of doing it twenty-four hours a day

Everyone should buy his album when it comes out later this month, not because of the brave thing he did, but because his music is amazing. But it breaks my heart to think of such an amazingly talented artist and brave young person struggling.

IDK, I'm just a mess of feels today over this, but I feel like more people deserve to know what Frank Ocean did and is going through, and that it shouldn't get drowned out by Anderson Cooper's story.

BTW, just to add, that aside from supportive statements from Russell Simmons and Tyler the Creator (Frank's bandmate in Odd Future), the silence from the hip-hop/R&B world has been "deafening," in one writer's words. Frank is going to need all the fans he can get, because mark my words, he is being shut out of the community and being blackballed from urban radio as we speak.

**Tati** · July 5th, 2012, 07:08 PM

His statement is beautiful. He's really brave to do this so early in his career; I hope he finds happiness.

**NoNoRehab** · July 5th, 2012, 07:23 PM

Jay-Z posted this open letter from Dream Hampton on his website:

Thank you, Frank Ocean.

It’s true, we are a lot alike… “spinning on blackness. All wanting to be seen, touched, heard, paid attention to.” In your opening few lines, you simultaneously established your humanity, a burden far too often asked of same sex lovers, and acknowledged that in this age of hyper self- awareness, amplified in no small part by the social media medium in which you made your announcement, we are desperate to share. You shared one of the most intimate things that ever happened to you – falling in love with someone who wasn’t brave enough to love you back. Your relieving yourself of your “secret” is as much about wanting to honestly connect as it is about exhibition. We are all made better by your decision to share publicly.

You and Anderson Cooper have the same coming out calendar week in common, but in many obvious ways, you couldn’t be more different. Anderson Cooper is an heir to one of America’s great Industrial Age fortunes and a network professional whose maleness and whiteness backed by his considerable accomplishments guarantee him work. You are a young Black man from New Orleans who fled your still struggling city. You didn’t arrive in Los Angeles with generational wealth and privilege, only the beautiful lyrics and melodies that danced through you and your dream of making it in a music industry whose sand castles were crumbling.

You are in fact, connected to one of hip-hop’s great cadres, in the tradition of Oakland’s Heiroglyphics, The Native Tongues and The Juice Crew. Your music family, like all the rest, will likely grow apart, but in this moment Odd Future bends hip-hop’s imagination with utter abandon. You fulfill hip-hop’s early promise to not give a fuck about what others think of you. The 200 times Tyler says “faggot” and the wonderful way he held you up and down on Twitter today, Syd the Kid’s sexy stud profile and her confusing, misogynistic videos speak to the many contradictions and posturing your generation inherited from the hip-hop generation before you. I’m sure you know a rumor about Big Daddy Kane having AIDS and with it, the suggestion that he was bisexual, effectively ended his career. You must have seen the pictures of pioneer Afrika “Baby Bam” from the Jungle Brothers in drag and read the blogs ridiculing him, despite the fact that he’s been leading a civilian life for nearly two decades. I know as a singer you love Rahsaan Patterson and bemoan the fact that homophobia prevented him from being the huge star his talent deserves. Only last month Queen Latifah unnecessarily released a statement denying that her performing at a Gay Pride event meant she was finally affirming her identity for thousands of Black girls. Imagine if Luther had been able to write, as you closed your letter, “I don’t have any secrets I need kept anymore…I feel like a free man.”

But you’re not an activist. You’re a Black man in America whose star is on the rise, working in hip-hop and soul, where gender constructs are cartoonishly fixed. Your colleague Drake is often attacked with homophobic slurs when he simply displays vulnerability in his music. He seems to respond by following those moments of real emotion with bars that put “hoes” in their proverbial place. But you’re a beautiful songwriter (your question to Jay and Kanye, “What’s a King to a God?” on their own song on an album about their kingdom, was brilliantly sly). Your letter is revolutionary not least of all because it is about love. It is about falling in love and feeling rejected and carrying both that love and rejection with you through life. The male pronoun of the object of your desire is practically incidental. We have all been in a love that felt “malignant…hopeless” from which “there was no escaping, no negotiating.” Your promise to your first love, that you won’t forget him, that you’ll remember how you changed each other, is so full of love and grace.

You were born in the ’80s, when gay rights activists were seizing the streets of New York and other major world cities, fighting for visibility and against a disease that threatened to disappear them. The cultural shifts created from those struggles in some ways make your revelation about your fluid sexuality less shocking than it would have been decades before. Still, there are real risks with coming out as a man who loved a man. I hope you hear and are reading the hundreds of thousands of people who have your back.

We admire the great courage and beauty and fearlessness in your coming out, not only as a bisexual Black man, but as a broken hearted one. The tender irony that your letter is to a boy who was unable to return your love until years later because he was living a lie is the only truly tragic detail about your letter. A million twirls on this spinning ocean blue globe in this vast endless blackness for you my love.

**CornFlakegrl** · July 5th, 2012, 07:24 PM

His words really are lovely. I hope he gets more support than he imagined and it drowns out the hate.

**venue_26** · July 9th, 2012, 11:28 AM

I was so struck by this (the letters and the backlash) that I sat my two children down (5 and 9) to discuss this.
I've already talked to them about religous persecution and racial persecution, so the premise wasn't foreign to them. These things just hurt my heart....to be so tormented and belittled based on something you have no choice over. Ugh. I couldn't describe the anguish I would feel if my son or daughter was harassed because of their sexual orientation......or if I ever discovered my children were ever behind hateful words directed at someone who was gay.
I have only 2 rules for my children: Be Safe and Be Respectful. That's it. They aren't rules for my house, they are rules for life. I wish more people felt the same. *Sigh*