From gay porn director Michael Lucas, the 2009 film Cock Cribs, thematically linked episodes in which pornstars give the viewers tours of their cribs, the places where they live (in several parts of New York City), covering all the rooms in turn (including a look at the contents of their refrigerators) and ending up in the sexual center of their places, the bedroom, where one or two guys are waiting. Hot-hot man-man sex ensues. The cover art:
(This is the front cover. I’ve cropped the back cover out, since it’s definitely not WordPressable.)
The linguistic point is the compound cock crib, combining the (mildly) obscene slang cock ‘penis’ with the street slang crib ‘home, pad, apartment’.
The result is a phonologically playful — in this case alliterative — compound; the gay porn world delights in such play. It’s also socially interesting, in that it illustrates the diffusion of crib in this sense from its urban African American street use into a larger vernacular use (none of the actors are black or street boys), while still maintaining some of its grittiness. (The apartments are nicely decorated, by the way. Meanwhile, we see once again the widespread affection of gay pornstars for cute little dogs.)
The history of AAVE crib isn’t at all clear. OED2 has crib from Old English on to refer to a barred receptacle for fodder, then from the 14th century on for the stall or cabin of an ox or similar animal, from 1600 on for various small habitations, from 1649 on for a child’s bed with barred or latticed sides, and finally from 1819 on in thieves’ slang for a dwelling-house, shop, or public house, or (a bit later) saloon, low dive, or brothel. (There are several more senses that are irrelevant here.)
The AAVE use doesn’t seem to appear until the 20th century (though these things are hard to track), and it’s not clear whether it’s a continuation of the 19th-century slang or a fresh metaphorical innovation based on one of the other earlier senses.
The larger point is the interpretive difficulty presented by the compound cock crib. It’s subsective — a cock crib is a crib (in the appropriate sense of crib) — but the relationship between the referents of the two nouns isn’t one of the off-shelf ones, though ‘crib full of cock(s)’ is roughly in the right territory. Cock crib is a “distant” compound, one requiring context and background knowledge for interpretation.
The crucial thing is that a man’s cock crib is his home, his crib, as used for giving and getting cock, that is, for having sex with other men, since cocks (and cum) are the centerpiece of gay porn. A compound cock crib could certainly be invented for a place that a man used specifically for sex, while actually living someplace else. That would have the relationship between the modifier cock and the head crib as a restrictive (but still distant) one, ‘crib that is used for sex’, while Lucas’s compound has a non-restrictive relationship, ‘crib, which is used for sex’.
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