For a long time, rappers and homophobic hate speech have gone hand in hand but the time has come where MCs from Fat Joe to The Game are changing their tune and supporting gay pride.

The rap music genre’s that exploded in the early 1980s and stood apart as one of the culture’s most unregulated forums for anti-gay hate speech. Ice Cube to Eminem has spoken out against gays, lesbians and the like. MCs have unleashed homophobic rants and hurled sluts in songs without the fear of censorship or reprisal for decades.

In the last few months, there have been unprompted compassionate hip-hop artists speaking out in condemnation of old homophobic tropes, calling for greater tolerance toward gay people, urging all closeted gays to come out, and expressing admiration for the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender community in ways that would not have been imaginable a generation ago.

A while ago, there was the “no homo” movement, which swept the culture around 2009, in part as a means for rappers to distance themselves from the “down low” phenomenon. This was widely rumored but there was little explored of the subculture of undercover African-American homosexuality.

There are hip-hop veterans with a ton of street cred and platinum hits that are speaking out against homophobia, but so are up-and-coming artists. Hip-hop previously was known as a culture of resistance, however more recently; it has begun to shed its outlaw status and is maintaining the status quo in its own image.  A lot of MCs are now paying attention to how, by dropping homophobia and reaching out to the LGBT community that they can reap financial dividends. For example, Fat Joe called out Lady Gaga saying that he has no idea whether or not she is gay, but she’s definitely running the show in the gay realm and is winning at it.