When Tyler, The Creator’s fourth album Flower Boy leaked last month, the primary initial takeaway was that some of the lyrics seemed to hint that Tyler is gay or bisexual. The most telling lyric, from “I Ain’t Got Time!”: “Next line will have ’em like ‘Whoa’ / I been kissing white boys since 2004.”
Of course, Tyler has always been quick to joke about a variety of topics, so it’s sometimes hard to take what he says at face value, especially when he says it in a song lyric. That said, he was a guest on Know Wave‘s Koopz Tunes radio show this week, playing a bunch of songs that he enjoys and talking with the host between tracks, and one of the first things he said was that as a young teenager, he had a boyfriend:
“I had a boyfriend when I was fifteen in f***ing Hawthorne [California], n***a. If that’s not open-minded, I don’t know what the f**k that is.”
Born in 1991, Tyler would have been 13 or so when he was “kissing white boys” in 2004, as he raps in “I Ain’t Got Time!,” so him being in a relationship with another boy at 15 sounds pretty accurate based on the timeline he’s established. Also, it seems like the year 2004 was probably chosen for the sake of the rhyme.
The lyrics of Flower Boy don’t seem to be the first time that Tyler has hinted at non-heterosexual tendencies, though, since he tweeted back in 2015, “I TRIED TO COME OUT THE DAMN CLOSET LIKE FOUR DAYS AGO AND NO ONE CARED HAHAHHAHAHA.”
I TRIED TO COME OUT THE DAMN CLOSET LIKE FOUR DAYS AGO AND NO ONE CARED HAHAHHAHAHA
— T (@tylerthecreator) April 13, 2015
Listen to the entire show below, during which he also calls 2 Chainz his “favorite right now” and rattles off a freestyle rap, at about 1:05:00 into the episode.
https://soundcloud.com/know_wave/koopz-tunes-with-tyler-the-creator-august-14-2017
