Tag Archives: Azealia Banks

6 Famous Bisexual African-American Women

When asked to come up with the names of famous bisexual women, most people will name Megan Fox, Drew Barrymore and Anna Paquin. African-American women are a lot less likely to show up on the list for whatever reason.

So, to celebrate the identities of those who are both of African-American descent and identify as ‘B’, here’s a list of six famous bisexual African-American women who are often overlooked.

1. Amandla Stenberg

Amandla Stenberg

Best known for her role as Rue in The Hunger Games, actress Amandla Stenberg is also an outspoken intersectional feminist. Aged just 17, Stenberg has made headlines for her writing and opinions on cultural appropriation and race, but most recently she made headlines for coming out as bisexual. On the Teen Vogue Snapchat, the actress explained:

I cannot stress enough how important representation is, so the concept that I can provide for other black girls is mind-blowing. It’s a really really hard thing to be silenced, and it’s deeply bruising to fight against your identity and just mold yourself into shapes that you just shouldn’t be in.

As someone who identifies as a black bisexual woman, I’ve been through it, and it hurts and it’s awkward and it’s uncomfortable. But then I realized: because of Solange and Ava Duvernay and Willow and all the black girls watching this right now, there’s absolutely nothing but change.

We cannot be suppressed. We are meant to express our joy and our love and our tears, to be big and bold and definitely not easy to swallow.”

2. Azealia Banks

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While Azealia Banks may be a controversial figure – and is perhaps best-known for her Twitter rants than her music – the rapper and singer has spoken about her bisexuality many times. Asked whether she has a “special affection” for her gay fans, Banks told Rolling Stone:

Definitely. I mean, I’m bisexual, so it makes sense. But I don’t want to be that girl who says all gays necessarily hang out together, of course! I have people say to me, “Oh wow, my friend is gay, too,” and I’m like, “Yeah, so?”

3. Frenchie Davis

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Frenchie Davis is a Broadway performer, but most know her from her time on reality television shows American Idol and The Voice. Speaking to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch in 2012, Davis told the publication that she had been dating a woman for the past year and that “I wasn’t out before the relationship, but I wasn’t in. I dated men and women, though lesbians weren’t feeling the bisexual thing. Now I’m in love with a woman I think I can be with forever.”

4. Sapphire

Push is the book that Oscar-winning movie Precious was based on and it tells the story of an illiterate, HIV-positive African-American girl who had also been abused. While both the movie and the book have been massively praised and studied, few people know that the author behind the novel “describes herself as bisexual”, according to an interview with the Evening Standard.

5. Bessie Smith

Bessie Smith, "The Empress of the Blues," gave voice the listeners' tribulations and yearnings of the 1920s and '30s.

Bessie Smith, “The Empress of the Blues,” gave voice the listeners’ tribulations and yearnings of the 1920s and ’30s.

Blues singer Bessie Smith was one of the most famous singers within the genre during the 1920s and the 1930s. Also a major influence on other jazz singers of the time, it’s difficult to quantify just how much of an impact Smith had on the music industry.

Much of Smith’s life is depicted in HBO biopic Bessie (which starred Queen Latifah as the titular performer), including the singer’s bisexuality. While Bessie Smith was not ‘traditionally’ out, due to the times, her relationships with men and women are well-known to those who have studied her life and her career.

6. Tinashe

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Tinashe is best-known for her incredibly catch track 2 On, and she has also won fans with recent track Player as well as her feature on Snakehips’ song All My Friends. The singer and performer is also openly bisexual, having posted this gifset on her Tumblr that explains that bisexuality is not a set, 50/50 (50% attraction to men, 50% attraction to women) thing for some people and that she has “an attraction to everyone” and she loves “everybody”.

Daily Juice: Azealia Banks Beef With Beyonce ‘Lemonade’, And Tegan & Sara Release New Video

Bisexual singer Azealia Banks has beef with Beyonce’s ‘Lemonade’ – tweeting it’s bad for feminism and black women.

https://twitter.com/AZEALIABANKS/status/724771276636704768

https://twitter.com/AZEALIABANKS/status/724773769596833792

Tegan and Sara have released their new video for “Boyfriend,” directed by Clea DuVall.

The Abs Fab trailer has finally dropped, seeing the duo kill off Kate Moss

Ellen DeGeneres celebrates first transgender man to compete on an NCAA Division 1 Men’s Team

Leandra Joubert has become the first openly gay woman to make the top 100 selection in the annual Mrs South Africa pageant.

Isle of Man finally passes same-sex marriage – meaning Northern Ireland is the last place in the United Kingdom without marriage equality.

Angel Haze Helps Homophobic Mother Accept Her Bisexual Daughter

Angel Haze is no stranger to controversy. The openly pansexual rapper has gotten into Twitter spats with fellow MC Azealia Banks (which Haze has since apologised for), they’ve hit back at the media for referring to them and their girlfriend Ireland Baldwin as “gal pals” (when they are anything but platonic) and Haze has even took their own record label on after they delayed their album release by several months. Now, Haze is using their outspoken nature to help inspire and uplift in a new MTV show called Truce.

In Truce, Haze partners up with Nev Schulman who some may know as one half of the team behind Catfish (the show which looks to expose whether online relationships are real or fake). The duo take on tough situations and act as mediators to help sort people’s problems out. The idea of course, is that not only will these people be able to see a opposing viewpoint to their own, but that viewers at home will learn something new too.

Also: Rapper Angel Haze Records Coming Out Freestyle to ‘Same Love’ Beat.

That was the case in a recent episode where Haze met a woman named Chiquina who was having difficulty accepting her bisexual daughter Briyonza’s sexuality. Chiquina told Haze that:

“You wanna know my thinking of guys dating guys and becoming gay? I think they got molested when they were younger…Girls, I think they just try stuff and I’m not gonna sit there and say if I let a girl lick on me that I wouldn’t like it. I mean, I know how I like to be licked. You know what I mean? So, this is how people get hooked on drugs: they try things.”

While Chiquina is certainly not alone in her opinion (unfortunately), her homophobic views meant that her relationship with her daughter was suffering. So, after a meeting with Chiquina, Briyonza and Briyonza’s girlfriend Advani turned sour, the rapper took Chiquina aside and explained that they haven’t spoken to their mother in 5 years due to similar views.

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While Chiquina initially told Haze that they should be ashamed of themselves for not talking to their mother, Haze responded with “No, she ought to be ashamed of herself for choosing that over her own child” and it was then that Chiquina saw the error in her ways. Later in the episode Chiquina tells Briyonza that “You should always be happy. Even if you think it’s not going to make me happy…well, you should care, but your happiness is more important.”

With Angel’s help, Chiquina (and Briyonza’s grandmother) said that they accepted Briyonza and that their “hearts were touched”. Hopefully viewers at home felt the same way too.

Azealia Banks Defends Use of F-Slur, Says Gay Men Are ‘More Misogynistic’

The use of slurs in popular culture is a subject that often draws heavy debate. On the one hand, many people say that if we keep using the words and ‘reclaim’ them then people would have nothing to get upset about, whereas other people feel that once something is established as a pejorative term it will always be a pejorative term and we should stop using them.

One thing is certain though and that’s that slurs can cause offense. This is something that Harlem-based rapper Azealia Banks learnt the hard way after calling notorious blogger Perez Hilton a “f****t” during a Twitter spat.

In an interview with The Guardian, Banks told the publication that although she doesn’t regret using the term, she’ll “never do it again, because [she doesn’t] care enough about the person to have the battle again and defend my use of the word faggot.”

She then added:

“A lot of gay men are way more misogynistic than straight men. The s**t they say about women behind their backs, it’s like, ‘Wow, oh my God!’ You can be a straight faggot, you can be a gay faggot. A faggot is anybody that hates women.”

It’s like, y’all sing along to my words when I’m saying n***a and ****, but as soon as I call this one white man a faggot the whole world exploded.

Listen, I didn’t say all gay men are faggots; I said Perez Hilton is a faggot, so don’t try and bring the rest of the gays down with your faggotry.”

Azealia Banks

While it’s hard to argue with her feeling that gay men are more misogynistic than straight men – gay men’s misogyny has long been an issue in the female LGBT community – it’s not hard to see why someone would be staunchly against her defence of the word “f****t”.

As someone who is an out and proud bisexual woman, Banks has stated on several occasions that she couldn’t possibly be a homophobe yet even so, should she really be using such a potent slur? It’s been used for many years to insult and disgrace gay men and so at the bare minimum only other gay men should be able to say it.

Banks herself notes that listeners of her music sing along and say the n-word, taking some issue at it, so she clearly understands that there’s a right and a wrong for who can say which words. It is unfortunate that such a vocal LGBT ally doesn’t understand why this is a contentious issue but as she’s booted it from her dictionary (at least in public anyway) let’s hope we don’t hear the f-slur from her again.

Comeback Queen – The Rise and Fall of Azealia Banks

The world of hip-hop is notorious for being a haven of misogyny and laced with homophobia. However, in 2012 Azealia Banks took a stand and publicly admitted she was bisexual.

However, cut to one year later and the LGBT friendly artists caused mass controversy by using a number of homophobic slurs on twitter. First, she battled with then rising rapper Angel Haze, in a spat where her insults were strongly transphobic. She then picked a fight with gossip blogger Perez Hilton and resorted to homophobic insults. Her behaviour caused a massive media backlash and her Twitter account was cancelled.

Move forward in time and she was released from her contract with Interscope/Polydor. She was signed to the label for two years, but they didn’t release her debut album, Broke With Expensive Taste.

Now in 2014 and Azealia hopes to release those songs on her own label, and move on with her life.

She has a new single out – ‘Heavy Metal and Reflective’, which comes with a new video. A video where Azealiais driven out into the desert and left to die alone of thirst, which shows some awareness of the state of her career given the roll she was on two summers ago.

“I’ve literally just been sitting here waiting to get off the label. For awhile it was like, ‘What is she doing? She’s here, she’s there, she’s doing this, she’s saying this. When is the album coming out?’ So I’m really happy to get this project off. Cause I’ve already started working on a bunch of new stuff.

I’m still connected to the [Broke With Expensive Taste] music, but I’m still somewhere else, with these other projects, because I know how quickly I like to move and my fan base likes to move. So I’m halfway, like one foot in Broke With Expensive Taste and one foot in the next project, and having all these other ideas. But I’m just happy that I can do whatever I want now.”

Azealia Banks

Watch Azealia Banks’ ‘Heavy Metal and Reflective’ video: