The Double Life of Hot 97 DJ Mister Cee
Last year an article on a very hot dj Mister Cee brought to light an individual in a very dark place. Like most people that have trouble or questions about their sexuality they become damage goods. I hate to use that expression on a human being and is not fair but is truthful and it describes how some of us become when a part that is supposed to be private becomes public or it makes us be someone in public something we are not. The main reason for this is because our sexuality like our color pf skin and height are parts that compose our personality. Our sex is not who we are but is an intricate part of it. If its something that keep us up at night and it make us lie and be someone else because we might not like who we think we are, then is a big problem and it needs to be dealt with. Not publicly but if you are a public person yelling up on the air what a Lion you are with the opposite sex then you better do at least a good growl when you are not in public. These things tend to drip into the public eye like the plumping on an old building. Mr. DJ CEE is been talking to GQ and I will like to bring you a posting of it. I think is a very human drama story that is far from over.
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After the first Daily News article came out, he went on the air and said nothing, just played Biggie's “Dead Wrong” and Nas's “Hate Me Now,” songs that in their truculence and incredulity proclaimed his innocence for him. He got caught again, in May of last year, ended up back in the Daily News—hot 97 dj “mister cee” charged with trying to pick up male prostitute, blared the headline—and then two days later, he was back on air, sitting across from his program director, Ebro. “Because I was like, ‘Cee, what the fuck. What are we doing?’ ” Ebro remembers. “We got on the air and had the conversation.”
Or, more accurately, didn't, as Cee stammered out equivocations (“Even if I wanted to lie, that's my choice”) and told the same lies he'd been telling his therapist and everyone else. All while a city of profoundly confused people listened in their cars and office buildings and headphones, wondering how the Hot 97 morning show had become a live broadcast of some unfathomable form of public therapy or performance art. “I don't have any more questions,” Ebro said in disgust, ending the conversation.
Ebro says now that he had a good idea he was being lied to: “I had my suspicions.” But at the same time, he adds, “I've met people and have known people in my life that did not categorize themselves as gay, right?” So “in the back of my mind I'm thinking, ‘He just doesn't categorize himself that way.’ ”
Cee had grown up in a conservative West Indian family, didn't know how they'd react. And he'd come up in a rap era that grew less tolerant, from its first steps in downtown clubs in the late '70s and early '80s—where hip-hop fans and gay men and women used to stand side by side—to the '90s, when Eazy-E died of AIDS, then thought by many to be a “gay” disease, and so got written out of the vanguard of rap history. Even fundamentally tolerant guys like Biggie, back then, might rhyme something like: Money and blood don't mix, like two dicks and no bitch.
It didn't matter that when Cee started getting caught, friends and other artists got in touch or sent their support. 50 Cent. Wyclef. Busta Rhymes. In 2011, Cee says, “I reached out to Jay Z for a favor, and he came through in less than a day.” Even then, he was afraid of what might happen if people learned the truth. Both his parents are dead. So is his grandfather. Now Cee takes care of his grandmother, his aunt, whoever needs help. “I hold my family down, man,” he says.
So he continued to lie. “It wasn't even about losing the job. I was just afraid of what the perception was going to be about me and that people was still going to want to stand behind the Mister Cee brand,” he says. Promoters. People he worked with. And if they didn't, “how was I going to be able to continue to support and take care of the people that I care about?”
Finally, in September—after three arrests that Cee will admit to, two Daily News articles, and one excruciating on-air interview—a blogger named Bimbo Winehouse, posing as a sex worker, made a video filmed inside Cee's car as they negotiated a price for sex. Within a few days, the video was on the Internet. That day, September 11, Cee went on air and resigned, admitting nothing but that he believed it was untenable for the station to continue employing him.
Hot 97 released a statement accepting his resignation. But by the next morning—after a series of agonized late-night phone calls between Cee, Flex, and Ebro—Mister Cee was back on air, opposite Ebro once more while millions listened, telling the truth this time, to the extent that he understood it. Two days later their extraordinary conversation landed Mister Cee on the front page of The New York Times under the headline hip-hop, tolerance and a d.j.'s bared soul: he's tired of denial.
“I am tired of trying to do something or be something that I'm not,” Cee told Ebro that morning, in between bouts of tears. “I'm tired.”
By noon, he was back in his old spot, resignation rescinded, boisterously calling attention to a Sly and the Family Stone chorus: Thank you! For letting me! Be myself!
“The truth will set you free,” he said to everyone listening.
The first thing he did was make amends. “Once I told the truth last month, I made a list of everybody who I needed to apologize to,” he says. His court-ordered therapist was on that list. So was his younger sister. He still hasn't talked to his grandmother or his aunt about it, but they know: The day he resigned, he received a text message from his aunt, who is a minister and doesn't listen to secular music, let alone Hot 97. But somehow she heard. The text message said, “I love you.”
He went into the station and apologized to his co-workers. “I think I said to him, ‘Yo, that videotape was nuts!’” Flex remembers. “And he's laughing. Like, now we can act like we're on the corner; we're making fun. That's a good thing.” And then, one by one, he apologized to the other women in his life—friends and those who were maybe something more. Most understood. Some were even attracted by it—the radio interviews, especially the tearful second one, made him famous, or more famous than he already had been. But the truth is, “at this point in my life, I can't even begin to try to be in a serious relationship with a woman. That's the point that I'm at now: What do I want? Where am I at? Now that it's out in the open—everybody knows, I know—where am I going from here?”
He knows the illegal activity needs to stop—“If I get arrested right now for that same type of activity, I'm doing sixty days in jail, hands down, done”—and that he could lose his job if he gets caught again.
So he's trying to figure it out, though to hear him talk, he hasn't figured it out at all, really. When I ask point-blank if he's gay, he says, “Absolutely not. And it's nothing—it's no offense to transgender women, but I only get with transgender women for one thing and one thing only, and that's for oral sex. Like I said: I never had sex with a man. I never had sex with a transgender woman.”
So he's come a long way, and now he's nowhere.
Twelve o'clock today, you on?
Twelve o’clock today, I'm on.
Source: GQ.com
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