Gay bars ban rap musix

B iggy C has been a DJ for 20 years. The day I meet him, he has just returned from a ragga event in Birmingham, complete with a dancing competition. He says there was a good turnout, and that the biggest tune of the night was a track by Vybz Kartel - gay of the artists whose recent Mobo nomination so horrified Peter Tatchell's Outrage!

The track musix called Tek Buddy Gal. None of this would be surprising were it not for the fact that Biggy C is gay, and so were the predominantly black crowd dancing to Vybz Kartel. He thinks that Peter Tatchell "means well", but should concentrate on getting the gay age of consent lowered rather than "going on about Jamaica or trying to arrest Robert Mugabe.

I don't know if he's on a mission for other rap or for himself, you know what I mean? Biggy C does not seem terribly interested in Outrage! But if I'm bar at a gay house party, I kill it with the homophobic records. In recent weeks, more column inches have been expended in newspapers on homophobia in music and ragga in particular than ever before.

It has also provoked debate - one broadsheet's letters page featured seven letters on the topic on just one day last week - in which the language is becoming increasingly emotive and accusations of racism are being thrown around. You can see why. In the current climate, the very notion of a gay ragga fan appears to be a contradiction in terms.

Perhaps no one has noticed them because no one outside the scene can really believe they exist. According to club promoter Ban Lilley, that's a major oversight. His club nights Fruit Machine and Queer Nation have been playing "urban" music for the best part of a decade.

These are not minor underground nights. This summer, Queer Nation ran a series of events sponsored by mobile phone company O2, which also sponsors Party in the Park.

Banning anti-gay music will achieve nothing

Increasingly, that audience is black. The generation that wanted to go to clubs and listen to banging techno has started to stay home and the generation that listen to Missy Elliott has started going out. That banging techno sound is dead. Lilley says he would never tell a DJ not to play a certain record in his clubs - "by banning the record, you're not going to solve the problem" - but admits that the shift towards urban music in gay clubs is not without its critics.

The perception of bourgeois gay white males of a certain age who may well have experienced homophobic treatment at school or in the past from black people Well, racism's a peculiar word - you couldn't get 10 people to agree on what exactly racism is - but, for me, I think there's certainly racism in the gay community.

Young black promoters find it more difficult to get venues than I do, I know that for a fact. Even today, you get managers and security questioning the sexuality of the kids who turn up simply because they're black and they don't dress in a gay way, thank God. However, Brandy, a lesbian MC and the promoter behind the Flava nights, isn't surprised.

She says she's come to expect the unexpected ever since she went to her first black gay night, Off the Hook, and discovered it to be "full of Jamaican yardies dancing.