Speaking of Homoeroticism...

I know this is a little old, but given the earlier post about "No Homo" and homosociality and homoeroticism in Hip-Hop it seemed appropriate. So I told you all about Laurance Ralph's panel presentation at the Race, Sex, Power conference, and one of the points he made is the fact that often hip-hop marketing will take play with homoeroticism in order increase profitability. He spoke about the fact that when you see 50 cent without his shirt on, that is marketing to men (gay and straight) as much as it is directed at women.

To demonstrate this point I present Lil Wayne's Strapped Condom ads...



This one eventually got pulled because of the way that it was being coded as queer. There are a lot of visual codes of queerness in this add from the cop bending Wayne over the hood of a car (a very common fantasy that Wayne actually talks about in "Mrs. Officer", but with a "lady cop" instead of a male officer), to the tag line "Go down strapped" (um, hello?).

On hip-hop message boards people were saying that they couldn't believe that the people that made these ads didn't catch the blatant homoeroticism in these ads, but whats to say they didn't? Yes the ad was pulled and replaced by a more benign ad (see below), but maybe that was part of it.



The ads have queer visual cues and innuendos that are very easily accessible to young queer men. Even the new ad still relies the physical interaction between Wayne and a male officer. After criticisms that the previous ad was "too gay" it would make sense for the male cop to be replaced by a female officer, but then the ad wouldn't be effective. The new ad is able to be read by multiple audiences and can be extremely effective in promoting safe sex among youth of different genders and sexual orientations. Bravo for latent homoeroticism.