By Kimberly Chun

BLAME IT ON her Muslim upbringing or the fact that she was often the only woman in all-male crews, but Oakland MC, playwright, and actor Hanifah Walidah doesn't fly the flag of sexuality very high. Even as the out rapper Sha-Key and as the force behind the acclaimed one-woman play Straight Black Folks Guide to Gay Black Folks, she says she has rarely worn her queer identity on her sleeve.

"My whole thing is, I'm not going to come in with a 'G' on my shirt!" she says, punctuating the point with an always-ready guffaw. "That's never been me. But I think people who feel my music feel my music – period. Whether they can deal with me being gay or not – I leave that on people. I'm sticking to making my music. You can try to deny me my sexuality, you can try to deny me a lot of things, but you can't deny you like my shit!"

Nonetheless, Walidah – who counts New Yorkers like Infesticons/Majesticons brainiac Mike Ladd, poet and musician Saul Williams, and Antipop Consortium producer Earl Blaize as her underground hip-hop compadres – has been risking some heavy judgment lately.

Last week the Bronx-born and Yonkers, N.Y.-raised rapper performed at the Danny Hoch-founded Hip-Hop Theater Festival in New York. She gathered nothing but "standing O's," she says, for her performance of Straight Black Folks Guide to Gay Black Folks, now titled Black Folks Guide to Black Folks. The most important critic, however, was obviously her once estranged orthodox Muslim father, whom she had only come out to a few years ago.

"My father and his new wife was in the audience, and it was a little nerve-racking at first," she says, looking out at Lake Merritt from the apartment she shares with two roomies. "But my father, like, whew, sang nothing but the praises of it. He really, really enjoyed it. Whatever fear I might have developed about my father seeing the play, it got put to the side because people always surprise you. They always will come out of left field in ways you don't expect, and that's the beauty of conquering fear."

Wisdom rolls off Walidah's tongue easily. Out on the deck, the 31-year-old performer is basking uneasily in the sun – she's a little weary after her flight back from the festival, and she's a bit woozy after a brief power nap. But even after the last-minute travel rearrangements, she almost vibrates with life force, looking like a slender, gap-toothed version of a youthful Zora Neale Hurston.

The play finds Walidah playing everything from a femmey, gossipy baby-sitter to a card table of straight, gay, pious, and irreverent men. It's astonishing for its eye for character, its attention to everyday wit, and its pointed observations – and it's all the more remarkable considering Walidah has only one other play under her belt, Bloom, a production she cowrote with Dumeha Thompson and former partner Nyonoweh Greene, who moved to the Bay Area about four years ago with Walidah. Black Folks Guide gets a third, short local run as part of the National Queer Arts Festival this week and has just come out on video and DVD.

Walidah had seized on the title of Straight Black Folks years ago, but wasn't sure if it would metamorphose into a book or something as simple as a rhyme. "The title literally came out of the cosmos. I was over at a friend's house, and they had just finished spontaneously writing a self-help book for artists called Bullshit or Fertilizer for Artists on the Edge," she explains. "I was like, 'I should write a book called Straight Black Folks Guide to Gay Black Folks,' because I'm just fed with the subtleties. I have a lot of straight friends, and God bless their hearts, they're beautiful people and extraordinary people, but I still deal with homophobia. Even within progressive circles, especially within artistic circles."

Black Folks is only the tip of a mountain of musical and theatrical projects. The Majesticons' new Beauty Party (Big Dada) – a postjiggy "gag" record, an ode to buppie love, and the second in a trilogy by Mike Ladd – is propped up on a chair in her bedroom, next to a gauze-canopied futon that partly hides a massive Earth, Wind and Fire poster. Walidah shows up on "Helicopter Party," rapping about ghetto envy and chopper hopping – it's the latest vocal contribution in a career that's included work with the collectives Vibe Khameleons, the Boom Poetic, and Brooklyn Funk Essentials.

But Walidah says she also has to write her own Songs in the Key of Life. Her Blaize-produced EP, Adidi – The Seek Well, which includes appearances by Williams and Mums the Schemer (of HBO's Oz) and revolves around a fantastic scenario set on a hip-hop planet, will come out on her label, Trust Life, next month. She's also itching to do more work on the long-time-coming follow-up to her Sha-Key debut album, A Head Nadda's Journey to Adidi Skizm (Imago, 1994), and she'd love to put together a band.