Akademik

n.

Hip-hop music as performed, played, or promoted by gay and lesbian artists, DJs, or MCs. Also: homohop, HomoHop.

For decades, gay hip-hop-heads have toed the line, rapping about everything except their sexuality and stifling their anger at homophobic lyrics by mainstream rappers. Like good street soldiers, they kept it "real" while the music they once embraced as a creative outlet became another closet.

Now that's changed. Thanks to the emergence of homohop, a growing genre that's equal parts music and community, gay MCs and DJs are staking their claim in uncompromisingly loud, rhyming terms.

— Neva Chonin, "They're here, they're queer and they homohop," The San Francisco Chronicle, September 10, 2003

It's time to get your booty over to the Oakland Metro in Jack London Square for the Third Annual PeaceOUT World HomoHop Festival , a celebration of positive, creative, and provoking spins on the lifestyle and art of hip-hop, featuring MCs, DJs, and visual artists from around the globe.

— Amrah Johnson, Kelly Vance, "Homo Style," East Bay Express, September 10, 2003

D/DC members — who consider themselves part of the "homo-hop" movement — travel around the country. Through poetry and hip hop, they spread a gay-positive message for African Americans: There's nothing wrong with brothers loving each other.

— Christopher Heredia, Sabin Russell, "AIDS at 20," The San Francisco Chronicle, June 4, 2001

An older version of this term combines homo and sock hop to refer to a gay and lesbian dance:

Six thousand copies of a University of Toronto newspaper have been recalled and will be reprinted because an advertisement for a gay dance was mysteriously taken out. ... The paper was to have displayed the ad which gives the time, date and place for a popular dance called the Homo Hop.

— "Gay-Ads," The Canadian Press, April 14, 1990

Thanks to subscriber Erin McKean for passing along the hip-hop sense of this term.