So this week is NYC Black Pride, with upcoming festivities this week that I will be featuring, so I will be largely ignoring the news. Instead of bringing you my normal mix of news analysis and pop culture crit, I am going to feature news about Black LGBT/Queer life specifically. In addition to my normal post, I will also post a music video that I think is particularly queer-whether the artist is queer or not. So often GLBT gets reduced to white, and Black gets reduced to str8. But there is a visual culture that is black AND queer, and many artists who know that they have black queer audiences, make use of these visual or language cues that speak to that audience, while the heteros are none the wiser. That’s partly what this series is about.
So today’s “So Black and So Gay” pick is Ciara’s “Like a Boy.”
I first saw this video on VH1 Soul a few months back, and I gagged. The song itself is a woman asking her boyfriend what would happen if she did to him all the things that men do to women. Ciara is dressed as herself in this super-hot babydoll dress AND dressed as a man dancing with “herself.” All of the backup dancers are women dressed in a real butch/AG drag effect.
It’ super hot, and so Black and so Gay! Enjoy!
