The Hall of Lust: Tyra Banks

I don't like Tyra Banks the talk show host or reality show lady. I like Tyra Banks the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit model vixen! All her talk, talk, yikkity yak is a bit of a turn off, but I guess it is better to have that than a model who can only say a few words of English like: "Feed me cracker." The very first swimsuit issue I ever owned was the one with her on the cover.

Tyra Banks was the first African American cover girl for the SI swimsuit issue. I also figure she was the first African American girl that truly turned me on. I am far from being racist, but I was raised in Missouri in small towns where black people dare not tread. Times have changed and the population of the state has become more varied, but back when Tyra was a swimsuit model black folks seemed mainly happy in the major cities: Saint Louis and Kansas City. Saint Louis being on the East border, and Kansas City on the West, you had a bunch of scared, ignorant white folks raising children in between. They were trapped and surrounded! Tyra opened my eyes to all sorts of things like her boobs and how great they looked in a bikini. One could say she also did the same thing for some in the movie "Higher Learning," I mean about the color blindness of attraction and racism issues, not the boobs in a bikini thing.

The SI swimsuit issue with Tyra on the cover is to this day the only issue I have ever enjoyed; take that to mean enjoyment in every way possible. It also was a book that got me into a lot of trouble when my mother decided to "clean" my room one day and stumbled across it buried in the center of a pile of other magazines. She must have been individually dusting each thing on the book shelf?

So, Tyra Banks is responsible for awakening my mother to the fact that teenage boys are going to "read" magazines filled with pictures of women in bikinis. My magazine was confiscated, but eventually returned to me after no one else seemed to think it was a big deal. See: scared white folks! My father, when he found out about the book, merely said he was upset that I did not let him look at it.

I've never been a consistent recipient of the Victoria's Secret catalog, so I feel like I've missed out on some great Tyra Banks moments there. Tyra is a brave woman though, going on her talk show without her hair weave, maybe she will be brave and accommodating for the lustful in the future then and do some more sexy modeling.