Loco for Coco

TRUE STORY. Two gay men recently stood in front of a newsstand in New York City, transfixed by an ass. A gigantic, superhuman, glistening ass, sitting on a chair, crack side out. The ass was bisected by a thong and attached to a body'arms, legs, hair (shiny, bottle-blond), the appendages of a female Homo sapien tacked onto the ass like needles sticking out of a pincushion.

' 'Coco's wildest photo shoot ever,' ' said Gay Man Number 1, reading from the cover of Black Men Magazine.

'Coco? Who's that?' said Gay Man Number 2.

A young man in a do-rag who was passing by overheard the conversation and stopped in his tracks. 'Yo, that's Ice T's wife!' he exclaimed, sounding a protective note. 'That's Coco!'

Silence.

'Oh. Hey, thanks.'

The do-rag dude sauntered on, leaving the two gay men to scratch their heads and speculate on whether Mrs. Ice T had had surgical enhancement to her posterior.

Coco, or more precisely, Coco's ass, may not be the gay man's cup of tea, but something about the Coco phenomenon hints at a deep-buried kinship with our straight black brothers. For one thing, there's the, um, embrace of the ass as a sexual object. Black guys are generally less inhibited about this'remember Sir Mix-a-Lot? What's more, the sexual tastes of gay men and (straight) black men sometimes tend to the hard-to-attain'for many gay guys, it's unstraightening a heterosexual man; for some black men, it's snagging a lily-white blond. So much the better, then, if she's 'dragin' [sic] some wagon' or has 'one hell of a caboose,' as one Coco fan noted on the Web.