Bash'd: A Gay Rap Opera

By Chris Craddock & Nathan Cuckow

When naïve small-town boy Dillon meets the sophisticated urban Jack in a gay bar, it's love at first sight, and not just for a one-night stand either! While these star-crossed lovers manage to bring their initially dubious if not downright disowning families together in celebration of their marriage, their unblemished love certainly hasn't changed the world-quite the contrary.

When Jack becomes the victim of a gay-bashing, Dillon sets out on an indiscriminate rampage of revenge. Unfortunately, the straight men he takes on are neither particularly homophobic, nor are they exactly itching for a fight and the scene quickly turns ugly, teetering on the verge of a slaughter of the innocent until the police intervene.

Realizing too late that two wrongs don't make a right, the lovers, wrapped in each other's arms, die in a hail of bullets.

Arriving in heaven, much to their contrite surprise, the Creator fits the souls of these two Romeos with a set of wings and sends them on a mission of redemption. Condemned to wander the earth and tell their cautionary tale forever to whomever will listen, their angelic personae TBAG and FEMINEM have had no trouble enthralling wildly enthusiast audiences all over North America with the rap opera rhymes of this tragic tale ever since.

While the goal of BASH'd is first and foremost to tell an engaging gay love story, it also flips the music industry's gangsta stereotype of rap music on its head and returns it to its political roots-in this case to explore the dangers of the kind of attitudes that continue to condone and even encourage sexual discrimination of all kinds in our society.

Not since Coleridge's "Rime of the Ancient Mariner" has a narrative poem inspired such empathy in the hearts and minds of its audience.