Excerpt:
Before it seemed like Hall was everywhere, he felt like he belonged nowhere. He grew up in the relatively small city of Plainview, Texas, where he was often the only person of color in his dance classes or musical theater productions, and he struggled to find himself in pop culture during his formative years in the 1990s and early 2000s. "I didn't grow up around a lot of black people other than my church and my family, and so the things that I saw that were representing my race on television, I would always be like, 'I love this, but I don't identify with this because that's not me,' " says Hall. "I'm not Ne-Yo. I'm not Usher."
He describes his 2007 stint in the original Broadway production of The Color Purple as a kind of a crash course in being black: "I'm sure I had been proud to be black before, but being in The Color Purple was the first time I remember being like, 'I am so proud to be an African American performer because only African American performers could have told a story like this.' " Yet his relationship with black culture and other black creatives has occasionally been strained. Early on in his career, a black artistic director he was working with approached him and said, " 'The worst thing you could ever be in this world is a black gay man,' " recalls Hall — an unhelpful warning about the uphill battles he might face in entertainment. "He was projecting a lot of things from his own experience onto me, but words are so powerful. It made me question if I had made the right decision by coming out and being so open."
In recent years, critics and fellow content creators also have accused Hall of "not being black enough," alleging that his early YouTube videos featured negative caricatures of black people and suggesting that Hall prefers to surround himself with white celebrities, due to his close ties with stars like Swift. Multiple black YouTube personalities have publicly called Hall racial slurs and accused him of "tap dancing," a reference that suggests he is putting on an act and toning down his blackness in order to appeal to white audiences.
"I feel like oftentimes if we don't sound like what a black person 'should' sound like by other people's standards, we do start to feel like we're not black enough," admits Hall. "I'm on a roller coaster where sometimes I try to overcompensate and prove my blackness, and then sometimes I'm like, 'But I don't feel supported by my black community, so I don't need to try to sell to them.' I'll just sell to whoever wants to buy my music."
Even though he co-executive-produced the "You Need To Calm Down" video, which included rounding up celebrity cameos from the likes of Laverne Cox and the cast of Queer Eye, there was no shortage of social media posts dismissing Hall for being "thirsty" for the A-list and allowing himself to be the "token gay black friend" for other celebrities. Those comments didn't surprise him — "I feel like there's a group of people who wake up every day, they yawn, and then they say, 'What can I be upset about?' " — but the remarks bothered Hall for a number of reasons. He thinks more pop stars should take the kind of concrete steps that Swift has to spotlight and support members of the queer community. "We have taught them how to walk in heels, we have helped them with the slang they end up using in their songs, but when they go onstage, what do they do?" asks Hall. "The people who taught them how to do it and who can really kill it on a different level are in the wings watching them, giving them a towel to dry their face off when they get offstage. That, to me, is a travesty."
Yet those comments also stung because, even when it seems like he's winning on his own terms — when "You Need To Calm Down" won Best Video for Good at the 2019 VMAs, Swift handed the award to Hall and let him give the acceptance speech — he often feels like he's still doing it wrong. "It's really hard for me sometimes because I feel that the hate I receive on the internet comes mostly from people of color and people who are part of the LGBTQ+ community," says Hall. "It's almost like we like complaining about the fact that there isn't enough representation, but then when the representation is there and it doesn't come in the exact package or the exact size that we wished it had been in, we bash that as well."
