Rap comes out as star targets the gay market

He has described himself as 'hip-hop's homosexual Jackie Robinson', a reference to the black baseball player who broke through the game's racial barriers.

Now Caushun, the Brooklyn rapper whose debut album Shock And Awe comes out this summer, is about to find out whether the homophobia of which rap music is so often accused presents as high a wall to climb.

The bid to subvert rap's traditionally heterosexual image will coincide with the launch this summer of America's first all-lesbian television series and the announcement of a boom in ad revenue for gay publications ten times the national average. But it also comes at a moment when one of the Republican party's most senior members has equated homosexuality with incest and bigamy.

It has been quite a week for Caushun, a 25-year-old former hair stylist to the likes of Jennifer Lopez and Sarah Michelle Gellar, who has been trying to hit the big time for the past four years. An interview in Newsweek , a writerly piece in the New York Times and tens of thousands of hits on his website, thegayrapper.com, add up to recognition which seemed to be eluding him: in the past one rap radio station would not even let him start to perform because he sounded so gay.

Caushun told Newsweek : 'Every hip-hop artist is like, "Oh, keep it real, keep it real". I'm definitely keeping it real because I'm not straight, so I can't keep it real by trying to act straight and play straight.'

Meanwhile, the first all-lesbian TV series, The L Word , starring Jennifer Beals, will be launched on the Showtime channel this summer.

And in their annual evaluation of gay Hollywood, published on Friday, Variety , the entertainment business newspaper, pointed out that ad revenue for gay publications shot up by 284 per cent over a five-year period, compared to 32 per cent for all publications. The ad business has been influenced by the fact that 32 per cent of gay male households and 17 per cent of lesbian households in the US now have annual incomes of more than $100,000, compared with 12 per cent of the rest of the population.

One incident earlier this month summed up how much the climate has changed. The veteran television interviewer Barbara Walters asked Julianne Moore about her kissing Toni Colette in The Hours . Moore told her 'there wasn't any issue. It felt very comfortable and non-threatening'. Walters asked her: 'Am I threatening?' When Moore told her she was not, Walters replied, 'Let's try it then,' and kissed her. Variety said this week: 'The Walters-Moore kiss can be said to constitute a breakthrough in celebrity interview history.'

Last week, there was a demonstration of the gulf that still exists when Republican Senator Rick Santorum from Pennsylvania responded to a Supreme Court challenge to the Texas laws banning sodomy. Santorum, third in the party hierarchy, said that if gay sex was permitted, 'then you have the right to bigamy, you have the right to polygamy, you have the right to incest.'