That's the title and instigating question of this Daily Beast blog post by Elizabeth Gates—"a former intern at Vogue [whose] interest in image, art, and fashion has driven her desire to contribute to the vast narrative of modern culture in America and abroad"—who consults both Harvard professor Marcyliena Morgan and hiphop style guru Fonzworth Bentley in her search for an answer.

Here's her opening:

When Kanye West and his sartorial cohorts left the Comme des Garcons show during Paris Fashion Week, it was business as usual. Dressed to the nines, they were quickly met with the customary sparkling of paparazzi flash bulbs and fashion enthusiasts, stray wanton women, and BlackBerry buzz. However, as images of the internationally mod clan hit gossip blogs back on the mainland, things started to get ugly.

“Only gays wear that [crap]!” wrote blog reader “TheTruth,” while another reader advised that they should “go taste the rainbow.” “Bootylishious” wrote that he/she simply “feel(s) sorry for all those gay dudes,” and sadly, the list goes on. It seems that just as we settle into our most modern America yet, the tradition of black fashion has been lost.

Gates soon gets to this:

If young audiences would dare to conduct a comparative study, they'd inevitably find that Kanye West’s 2007 Grammy outfit really had nothing on Eddie Murphy’s red-leather get-up in his 1987 stand-up film Delirious, and that Prince and his bedazzled unitards would quickly render André 3000’s Top-Siders and patterned suspenders meek and perhaps even typical. So what’s gone wrong? How did the community that once welcomed Little Richard become so violently judgmental?

The problem with all of this: Both Prince and Little Richard were roasted mercilessly for their perceived fagginess. The "welcoming" they received from the community was primarily financial—hit records, sold-out shows. This exact same "welcome" is bestowed on Kanye West, who has yet to release a record that hasn't sold in the multi-millions. The real difference between what happened with Little Richard and Prince and what's happening with Kanye and Andre 3000 is the internet, which provides a permanent, cached home for the same kind of homophobic chatter that's swirled around Prince and Little Richard their entire lives.

Despite the faulty premise, Gates' piece touches on some interesting ideas (perceived gayness versus actual homosexuality, for one), and features this quietly amazing Fonzworth Bentley quote:

"I was raised with confidence. If I’m walking down the street and a man and a woman are kissing on one side, it wouldn’t bother me if on the other side two men were kissing. I’d just keep going forward. I believe that if you pay too much attention to all that, it says more about you than them quite honestly. ”

Read the whole thing here.