Music

Azealia Banks doesn't think she should get in trouble for homophobic slurs

by Tyler Munro

Azealia Banks has seen her fair share of controversy over the years, at first with the massive delays of her much anticipated and eventually critically acclaimed debut but perhaps more notably for her propensity to speak what’s on her mind.

Unfortunately, what’s on her mind is usually some form of homophobic. Last year, she was calling blogger Perez Hilton a “messy faggot” and urging him to kill himself. Her apology, if you can call it that, is that the term isn’t slanderous to gay men, but to “any male acting like a female,” and her rationale was that she can say it as a bisexual person.

Uh, sure. But her homophobia has found itself back into the news this month thanks to her bizarre feud with Vice’s Mitchell Sunderland, who she says is part of the “gay white media” conspiracy.

Fed up with Banks tweeting and mocking “twinks,” Sunderland confronted her.

It got weirder from there. In a one-sided conversation, Banks tweeted at Sunderland about drag queens—they get their wigs from WOMEN, emphasis hers—and how much money she makes.

But never one to let sleeping dogs lie, Banks took to her Instagram account yesterday to voice her frustration. Again making a non-apology, she wrote that she’s fed up that she can’t use homophobic slurs. She says it’s unfair that gay men can colloquially use the word “bitch” but she can’t say “faggot.”

“Do gay men get a special pass to say misogynist things simply because they like dick?” reads her message, which you can see in full below.

Not to comment on the false equivalency in her argument—nobody is saying it’s fine for men, gay or otherwise, to refer to women as “bitches,” this is an odd tirade from an increasingly troubled musician. From someone who, while talented, has spent months re-inserting her name into an important dialogue amongst black Americans when she called out rival Iggy Azalea for what she deems is racial appropriation.