Where to start, when it comes to Madonna? With many of the people we cover, the selection of an image is obvious. With her, which image you choose tells people a lot about you. Her hair has lengthened and shortened, lightened and darkened. Her clothing has changed wildly. She has acted in comedies, dramas, and an opera. (That Evita is an opera and not a musical seems obvious to me, but never mind.) Her image has been changing constantly for decades. As early as 1979, she wrote a letter lying about her age, though it’s true that the part she was trying to get was for women 18-20, and she, at 21, was too old. Not the last time Madonna would face ageism.
There are pages and pages on Wikipedia about Madonna. Madonna and religion, Madonna and sexuality, Madonna and philanthropy. Madonna’s filmography. Madonna’s discography. Madonna’s influence on pop culture. There is discussion on whether or not she deserves the epithet “the most famous woman in the world.” (These days, a title probably held by Taylor Swift.) You can spend hours on Wikipedia learning vast amounts of information about her and even more time reading the scholarly papers, which are many and varied even without getting into the tardigrade named after her.
At its heart, there is the woman born Madonna Louise Ciccone to an Italian father and a French-Canadian mother. Not only is Madonna her birth name, she’s named after her mother. She was one of six children before her mother died of breast cancer when Madonna was five; her father remarried their housekeeper and had two more children. You don’t have to be a Freudian to understand her need for attention and affection in those circumstances. She was also an extremely smart and talented girl, getting high grades and studying both piano and ballet.
Her history in dance is one of those things people don’t seem to notice, but she took ballet because she pestered her father to let her. When she was in college, it was on a dance scholarship, and when she dropped out and went to New York, it was to be a dancer. She studied under Alvin Ailey, Pearl Lang, and Martha Graham. Sure, she took classical piano at her father’s insistence, but her dance training is first-rate, probably more so than any other pop star. She herself says she has dancer’s feet.
Some of the controversy she’s attracted over the course of her career is definitely more deserved than other aspects of it. It’s frustrating to hear her criticized for still being openly sexual as an older woman—criticism that was first leveled at her when she was younger than I am now—but it’s equally frustrating to hear that her handlers are instructed to keep fat people away from her as they give off the wrong energy. There is also real talk to be had about things like cultural appropriation and the issue of child trafficking for the sake of adoption in Africa and how it would be better to enable more families to keep their children instead of sending them away for a better life.
For decades, though, there has been no one quite like her. In shape-shifting, perhaps her only equal was David Bowie. She admired him, and it’s clear she learned her trick of self-inventing from him. However, what she brought to the music industry was an understanding of the art of the music video unrivaled by anyone. Director Mary Lambert of the “Like a Prayer” video has said that being on the set of a Madonna video is its own world, in which you find yourself saying things like, “Maybe we need more burning crosses.”
What Madonna has done more than anyone else—arguably even the openly bisexual Bowie—is bring LBGT culture to the mainstream. There’s controversy there, too; voguing was a black queer dance trend, after all, and it was kind of fading when Madonna not-quite-vogued her way across MTV. (I’m not an expert on that, but apparently there’s serious debate as to the authenticity of a lot of her moves.) And yes, her kissing young female artists as a sort of torch-passing was performative and absolutely a publicity stunt but also she kissed Britney Spears live on MTV, kids, and let’s not underestimate the importance of that moment.
What’s kind of frustrating, though, is all the people who phrase their complaints as “a straight woman appropriating queer culture.” Because last I checked, that did not in fact describe Madonna. I cannot, as it turns out, find the names of any women with whom she’s had relationships. Even Sandra Bernhard, whom I thought everyone knew she’d been involved with, only comes up in her main Wikipedia page for having introduced Madonna to Kabbalah. Their relationship is on Bernhard’s page, though. It is mentioned in several places that Madonna is open about having such relationships, but all you get is a list of men.
The funny thing, I suppose, is that it’s trivially easy to find a list of women any female movie star of the ‘30s slept with, all based on pure speculation. Like, is there documentation that Hattie McDaniel slept with Katharine Hepburn? Almost certainly not, but I’ve read that it happened. And I’m certainly not saying that Madonna slept with Katharine Hepburn, either, but there’s just as much documentation about McDaniel and yet here we are. It’s true that Madonna is still alive and in theory keeping a bit of a lock on her Wikipedia page, but there are an awful lot of her male lovers on it.
If nothing else, she’s a queer icon. An ally, for sure, who has slammed Putin and had drag queens perform alongside her. (Not that the kind of people opposed to drag queens and trans people like her any more anyway, of course.) She’s fully open about how much she owes her career to the queer community. No gay men, no Madonna. It’s pretty much that simple, and she knows it as well as the rest of us. Maybe it’s people like my sister doing the Madonna wannabe thing in 1984 (she didn’t have the clothes, but she wanted them) who finished pushing her to superstardom. But without gay men, they never would have seen her.
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