Few who saw it will forget it. There was Shabba Ranks, Jamaica's rude, lewd, skirt-chasing dance floor superstar, explaining to the audience of Channel 4's The Word that he was at one with the Bible in believing all the "batty boys" should be put to death. And there was stand-in presenter Mark Lamarr, with his retro-rockabilly sideburns and crest of gleaming hair, getting more and more annoyed until he finally exploded: "That's crap, and you know it!"
The optimistic view that Planet Pop is a place where barriers of race, sex and sexuality dissolve into a universal live-and-let-live rhythm took a nasty jolt that night in 1994. Two cultures clashed with clamorous incomprehension: a black heterosexual braggart invoking the good book to justify his view that every gay man should be slain; a white media figure representing a young, western postmodernity for which homophobia is every bit as wicked as racism. After two decades in which the Big Beat had been associated, implicitly or directly, with progressive social movements of some or other kind, here was a spectacle that seemed to reflect rather more than a spat between two well-known people on a gross-out TV show.
Here was a divide that seemed to run disturbingly along racial lines. Yes, white rockers Guns 'n' Roses sang songs of queer-bashing too, just as Eminem does now. But Shabba Ranks was only one among many high profile black musicians loudly and proudly giving grief to gays. Nor was the sentiment restricted to raggas and rappers. Black preachers, black activists and black politicians were at it too, not only from the Caribbean and North America, but also from Africa and all points between, including Britain.
Of course, homophobia was running deep in plenty of white communities too. But suddenly, it was as if no force on this earth united its people of colour quite like their loathing of the Queer Nation. There were, though, pockets of dissent. Among those watching The Word that night was Delroy Constantine-Simms, born and raised in a council estate in Wolverhampton but very much a citizen of the world. Growing up in the 70s, his black identity was influenced by his revolt against the pentecostal churches he was forced to attend both by his family at home and his relatives in the Bronx, and by his interest in the funkier pan-African take on black existence offered by Jah Rastafari.
Homosexuality, though, was a far more distant country. At least, it was until the day he spotted a black friend walking through Wolverhampton holding another fellow's hand. "When I followed them around a corner, I saw the two of them kissing. I thought, 'Oh my God.' I was in a state of shock." Also, he was angry. That was partly because he was disgusted, and partly because he felt betrayed: "He was always going on about 'those gays, they're this and that'. I thought it was hypocrisy." It was a bit sickening too, because his friend was extremely popular with the ladies, including one or two whom Constantine-Simms would have liked to be more popular with himself.
Two important things came out of the experience. One was that his friend, having been spotted in the closet, felt an obligation to stop hogging the womenfolk's affections: "It was a bonanza for me on the girl front," recalls Constantine-Simms, warmed by the memory. The other important thing was that when, a few years later, Shabba Ranks came on the box preaching extermination in the name of the Lord, it spurred Constantine-Simms, by then a freelance writer and researcher, to stir up a more constructive rumpus around the touchy subject of blackness, gayness and the links between the two.
The result is a book called The Greatest Taboo: Homosexuality in Black Communities, a collection of academic essays by mostly American writers that contend, among other things, that same-sex exploitation and desire are the parts of slavery that black historians won't face up to, that the Bible offers no sort of guidance for anyone's sexual morality, and that those ever-swaggering, fag-baiting, women-hating, cock-clutching crews of hip-hop boys have got more of the Greek about them than they would wish to admit.
Not surprisingly, it's this final assertion, elaborated in the book by the Rolling Stone critic Touré, that has brought Constantine-Simms to the attention of the black public in this country. He made the front page of the Voice under the headline "Hip-Hop Has Gay Roots", accompanied by a piece predicting that his views were "set to cause outrage in the black community."
Constantine-Simms told the Voice that much hip-hop sartorial style goes back to dress codes in prisons where black inmates became gay "husbands" or "wives", and that the street fashion for low-slung, baggy trousers is a throwback to black male prostitutes of the 40s who wore them to assist easy access for their clients.
And then there's the sheer, relentless, exclusive boys-togetherness of rap performers themselves, perhaps protesting their super-masculinity just a bit too much: "As in so many homosexual political fantasies," Touré writes, "homophobia is a mask for gayness." He also observes: "Gangsta rappers en masse have much in common with drag queens."
How does the big bad Puff Daddy respond? His thoughts are yet to be recorded. But the Voice has had calls from indignant chaps in saggy slacks, and Constantine-Simms has received some unpleasant emails at the Blacknet website where he is news editor. Despite warm comments from black women, he detects much stony disapproval, especially from the churches.
"There's a lot of confusion there," he believes. "On the one hand the Europeans gave them the Bible, on the other they see the same white culture taking liberal attitudes to homosexuality." There is also, he argues, a deep defensiveness within black Britain that, while understandable, makes it resist debates that present a challenge to conservative beliefs. "We're small and closely knit, and I have gone against the grain. People see what I have done as earning a dirty living."
The book covers a wide territory, from the concealed potentials of the outwardly heterosexist Million Man March to sometimes dense deconstructive studies of entertainment icons, including the soul singer Luther Vandross and basketball stars Dennis Rodman - a sensational cross-dresser - and Magic Johnson.
One of the most fascinating sections is Charles Clifton's re-reading of slave narratives, so central to the efforts of civil rights-minded historians to reveal the untold stories of a collective black past. Clifton detects in some slave texts the subtle airbrushing of any form of erotic experience that would have offended the Victorian values of the times.
He also challenges what he sees as a failure to address these elisions by those who have promoted slave narratives in the name of black consciousness and self-esteem. Bluntly, the notion of black male slaves either being the humiliated victims of homosexual rape or engaging in consenting gay sexual relations with each other or their white masters, whether for money or for love, does not fit comfortably with the preferred liberationist picture of a proud African people who were beaten but never broken. The former is too shaming, the latter smacks of unmanly collusion.
Constantine-Simms detects that such preoccupations with orthodox masculine mastery drive homophobia, misogyny and the self-destructiveness of men as they strive to achieve impossible manly ideals. And this all impacts destructively on black communities.
His mission, he says, is "to get those communities to talk about it," though it may be a while before they do so with his glee and gusto. "I used go to New York every summer," he recalls, "and one day I was in this park, which I didn't know was popular with black gay guys. There I was with my tight ass in my Lycra cycling shorts, and there were all these guys whistling at me! I thought, 'hey, interesting!' " And how courageous today that he is thinking it out loud.
• The Greatest Taboo: Homosexuality in Black Communities, edited by Delroy Constantine-Simms, is published by Alyson Books and distributed in the UK by Turnaround, priced £12.99.
