NSFW images & audio for paid subscribers only. TW: Photos allude to bestiality, underage sex and rape fantasies.
“Can you explain the Gen X obsession with Madonna?” A text from a Gay man ten years younger than me. Madonna’s baffling and problematic antics were in the headlines again, her latest face covered in TikTok filters. An army of Gay men had taken to socials to remind everyone to leave her the fuck alone because of what she had “done for us.” It’s a familiar cycle but we always stand by our girl. I don’t know any other music divas who require this much upkeep. In fairness, I don’t see the same vitriol and ageism directed at say, Dolly or Cher.
Gay men my age really get in our feelings about Madonna.
Defending her almost feels like a duty. Sure, we get “Obsessed!” about Beyoncé, Lana, Janet, Gaga, Whitney, Mariah, Ariana, (and whoever you want on that list), but with Madonna, it’s deeper than love of music or style. It’s a sense of debt.
I had to ask myself, “Now, why would a forty-year-old Brown Queer man feel indebted to a 60-year-old rich white woman who I have never met?” That requires unpacking.
For most Gay men, “what she did for us” is traced back to her most visible Queer & AIDS activism set between 1989’s Vogue and 1992’s Erotica and SEX. Thirty years ago and I remember the unveiling of “The Book” like it was yesterday. Puberty cauterizes images in our brain.
In 1992, I was a closeted immigrant kid in Arizona, in the cradle of modern American xenophobia and homophobia. It was a desert heat which was horny and claustrophobic, even in that sprawl. Pre-internet, abstinence-only sex-ed, my only glimpse of sex was in Penthouse. “Social media” was a handful of TV channels and grocery store magazines. That media had two defining messages for Gay kids: 1. You are invisible. 2. You will die of AIDS. This was affirmed daily at school. We were told constantly that sex could kill us. I remember body horror on a sunny afternoon in 7th grade, a slideshow of cauliflower-sized genital warts and gaunt men dying of AIDS. Then when I got home, news reports on AIDS and Tom Hanks with KS lesions in Oscar-bait trailers for Philadelphia. Sex and death, linking in my mind as I was starting to define both. Gay boys lost a lot of sleep during those years. Our mothers did too.
The week of October 21st, 1992, Gays were neither invisible nor dead. Every show was reporting on Madonna. At the peak of AIDS hysteria, here was the biggest artist on the planet in androgynous-nymphomanic-pixie-dream-girl cosplay, fake gold tooth, blindfold, holding a horse whip, chuckling at the sweat of interviewers and censors, not just talking about “normal” sex but Gay sex, anal sex, S&M and condoms. In our family living rooms.
A generation before, Donna Summer had caused the same ruckus with her 12 minute orgasm “Love to Love You.” Grace Jones, Marilyn, Mae West, Josephine Baker, Madonna is part of a long lineage. She was just more explicit and brought the sale of multimedia scandals into an art form. Two years prior, MTV banned her bisexual fantasia Justify My Love. She broke records by selling it as the first ever video single. At the start of her career, when nude photographs she took as an art model were non-consensually leaked, her quote in the headlines was “So what?”
But nothing had been so all-encompassing as the shock and awe of this release. It was like a Happy Meal movie tie-in. Her music had always been sexual and Gay but the media had coded language it used to leave Gays out of the conversation. Gay anthems were for “niche audiences” or “the dancefloor.” But a book carried a different weight. SEX’s letters, written by her alter ego Dita, were really dirty and ya can’t talk your way around Gay porn.
Like the Justify My Love video, the book was not as explicit as people expected or protested, definitely not by today’s standards. It’s what they thought they saw and the fears they reflected onto its metal cover. It was just staged softcore out of a “Skinemax” movie. Steven Meisel’s images were gorgeous but not groundbreaking. Robert Mapplethorpe had done it in the 1970s and was a clear inspiration. Madonna hadn’t plucked his imagery from obscurity either, he was a photographic titan. In 1990, his posthumous obscenity trial re-uploaded his hardcore work into the pop consciousness. It was another Vogue: Queer culture repackaged, stolen or borrowed, depending on who you asked.
For a Queer boy who barely spoke English, the complex socio-political or racial dynamics of the book went over my head. All I knew was that up until then, I had no words for my fantasies about other boys. When you are invisible, hearing your name is enough.
The news reports are embedded in my mind. The lines outside of Tower Records as the book sold out. The nervous laughter and anger of anchors (“She’s gone too far!”) My first look at American hypocrisy in real-time. Night in and night out, they took turns shitting on this woman for nudes and Gay sex. Meanwhile, Basic Instinct was one of the highest grossing films of the year. My favorite news report was the one with the firemen (of course). The fire department was having a fundraiser and one fireman had snagged a single copy. The department placed it behind a black curtain and charged $5 to take a peek (that’s $10 adjusted for inflation.) After all the bitching, the book was coveted, exactly what it was meant to do. A jolt to an AIDS-weary boy. This was the power of Queer sex bursting through death.
It’s mind-boggling how Gay visibility expanded since SEX. We were starving for visions of us. Now, over-exposure and lack of privacy seems to be the Achille’s Heel of our new Queer generations. Funny how it seems to be Madonna’s too.
I don’t recognize the current Madonna. I don’t know who she’s for now but I do miss her ‘90s cackle! Deep and hearty. Come think of it, I haven’t heard Madonna laugh in years, maybe I don’t follow her enough. But it doesn’t matter. Only humans need to laugh. She’s now an avatar, retouched beyond recognition. “Iconic” in the literal sense, a symbol bigger than her form.
I can’t speak on all the symbolism of The Book, otherwise I’d get lost in Madonna’s hall of mirrors. Women are better suited to speak on whether the book propelled or held back feminism. A Black woman could speak on how white privilege affords Madonna post-scandal redemptions not given to her Black counterparts. It’s for a Black man to speak on how racial anxieties and interracial sex sold her products. It’s for a person from India or Japan to speak on how Madonna depended on cultural appropriation and Orientalism for her comeback after the book’s fallout. It’s for Gen Z and Alpha to decipher her grills and how they feel when she’s grinding on reggaeton stars a third of her age. All of these are pieces of Madonna’s myth.
The Book is a piece linked to my terrifying, lonely, closeted adolescence. In that storm of hormones and disease, it didn’t matter who operated the lighthouse and frankly it doesn’t matter what they did after. I wonder now if this debt we feel to Madonna, our reverence for that time, is a trauma-bond disguised as nostalgia. I do know we all get one piece of Madonna. I cherish the one I have.
I finally got my own copy of SEX! Here’s my favorite spreads. Photos by Steven Meisel
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