The Power of Madonna: How She Showed a Boy Trapped in the Closet the Way Forward

The Spice Girls were my gateway drug into music. The summer of 1997 I found myself listening to so much music from radio and MTV but it was all current music. Madonna would mark the first time I would get into older music by a musician who also had a large back catalogue. Of course I knew of Madonna since she had been a huge superstar ever since I was born. Her look, style and sound had been copied and parodied everywhere, including Tiny Toons, which I loved as a kid, but I didn’t really know Madonna’s music. This began to change in the fall of 1997.

First I saw the music videos for Material Girl, Vogue and Like a Virgin on MTV and they immediately grabbed me. Her whole look, style and sound was so fabulous. I could now start to see why everyone was either trying to copy her or critique her. Eventually I scrapped together enough money as an 11 year old to buy Like a Virgin for 12 dollars. I asked my mom to drive me to Borders where I picked up the CD and listened to it as soon as I got home. Now my parents didn’t mind me listening to that album because they liked early Madonna since she was on the radio before I was born which meant Madonna’s first 2 albums were released when my parents were still actively listening to top 40 radio.

My next contact with Madonna’s music was in the car when my family was driving up to San Francisco for Thanksgiving. The radio station they had on played Like a Prayer and I was taken with the song immediately. We stayed at a Marriott right next to the Virgin Megastore. I remember picking up the Like a Prayer album there and listening to it on my headphones in my hotel room. I also remember hearing Express Yourself for the first time right after the title track ended and loving it upon first listen as well.

For the next several months those were the only 2 albums I had by Madonna. Then MTV announced their Ultra Madonna weekend. To capitalize on the hype and lead up to Ray of Light and the release of the music video for Frozen, MTV celebrated her entire career by playing interviews, performances, and promos she had done on the network over the years. The centerpiece of the weekend was a 4 hour music video documentary that played all her videos in chronological order inter-cut with interviews and clips as well. Well let’s just say that after being glued to MTV that whole weekend I now worshipped at the altar of Madonna and I needed to get my hands on anything and everything she was attached to. My birthday was just around the corner so I asked for most of her albums. After getting all her albums on CD over the next few months I started buying the VHS tapes for all her tours and music videos and then I started getting books, posters and more. I needed as much Madonna as I could get my hands on.

Everything about Madonna appealed to me. I loved how feminine yet tough she was. How she made pop music but was in control of every aspect of her career unlike a lot of female pop stars. Madonna also helped me explore human sexuality for the first time because through Madonna I learned words like virgin, masturbation and erotic. At a time when I was starting to struggle with my own sexuality and I was going deeper and deeper into the closet Madonna’s music gave me strength and showed me the way.

She was also a strong ally for the LGBTQ Community.

Madonna constantly championed the gay community while also bringing awareness to the AIDS crisis. In her concerts for The Who’s That Girl Tour, Blonde Ambition Tour and The Girlie Show, all of which I owned on VHS and watched over and over again, she made a point to discuss AIDS and the urgent need to find a cure for it. For the release of The Like a Prayer album she included an insert that talked about the myths and truths about AIDS which was so bold and groundbreaking for her to do. Before the internet most of what people knew about AIDS were false scare tactics and over exaggerations from the media. For her to do this helped raise more awareness and understanding of the AIDS epidemic. I can’t reiterate enough how most other pop stars didn’t discuss AIDS like she did back then because it could have hurt their careers. Madonna was one of the few people trying to use her platform to educate people about AIDS while the AIDS epidemic went unchecked by the government & media since it was seen as “gay disease.” The lack of empathy from the government and media in turn decimated the gay community in the 80s and 90s. Madonna was being an ally before it was cool to be an LGBTQ ally and through her music, style and the people she surrounded herself with I could see myself as did many other gay people who had few role models or allies to turn to.

Madonna also showcased her backup dancers in her tours, music videos and MTV performances frequently and most of them were gay. When she performed Vogue on the 1990 MTV Video Music Awards it was by FAR the gayest moment of the entire night. Her backup dancers vogued and pranced around the stage fiercely with some of them wearing tight gold colored short shorts. For that one performance that night gay people existed on MTV.

There’s also a reason why Vogue in general continues to endure as a gay anthem to this day. Voguing came from the underground gay ballroom scene and it’s something that continues to this day in gay clubs across the world. For most straight people “Voguing” was just another dance fad like The Hustle or the Macarena but for the gay community it continues to be another way to express ourselves and feel beautiful and loved. It’s why younger gay pop stars like Troye Sivan still include Vogue on their Pride Playlists to this day.

Then there’s the Truth or Dare documentary about Madonna’s 1990 Blonde Ambition tour where we not only get a glimpse into Madonna’s life but all her dancers as well. Through this movie myself and many other young gay men finally saw gay people living their lives warts and all. There has been a great documentary made recently called Strike the Pose which is about what happened to all the backup dancers from Truth or Dare in the years after 1990. It’s a documentary that shows how much most of these gay men struggled, faced prejudiced and in one case died due our culture’s hostility and apathy towards the LGBTQ community. It’s heartbreaking in places but it also shows you the strength these men have to continue living their lives. Strike a Pose also shows younger gay men who were so impacted by Truth or Dare because for a moment they finally first felt visible as gay people after seeing that film.

One of the things that really defines Madonna for me has always been her strong work ethic and drive. Madonna is not only in complete control of her career, she never half asses anything either because she is a perfectionist. This drive inside her to keep making music and art is rare. Unlike most of her peers who have all fallen at this point (Michael Jackson, Prince, Whitney Houston, George Michael) Madonna lives on because she has the strength and courage of a warrior as far as I am concerned and people call her a bitch for it. I like to call her a feminist instead. I think that’s where a large part of her appeal resides within the gay community. We as gay people have to build up an emotional shield around ourselves and we have to be fighters in order to get through a culture that wasn’t built for us. We have to be the epitome of steely strength even when we dress in drag because we have so much to lose and to fear and all because we just want to live our truth. Madonna also wants to live her truth and gives zero fucks what anyone, especially men, thinks about her and that’s been empowering for myself and for many people in the gay community.

For about 4 years (late 97 through late 01) Madonna was my everything. I remember learning the choreography to Lucky Star, Express Yourself and Vogue in my bedroom and through her music and dancing I could express my self in a way I couldn’t anywhere else. I remember the joy I felt when The Beautiful Stranger video came out not just because the song was so good but because all my guy friends liked it due to the Austin Powers connection so I could listen to it without judgement from all the straight boys and men in my life. I remember watching the American Pie video and seeing a shot of 2 men kissing and being very touched by that moment. I remember the lead up to Music and buying the CD the day it came out. I remember making countless mix tapes of her music for long trips and vacations. I listened to lots of other artists in the late 90s and early 00s but Madonna was my Queen, my goddess, my strength.

Eventually Grunge and classic rock took hold of me around late 2001/early 2002 and I started turning away from most of my pop divas. The early to mid 00s was also not a great time for pop divas and so it was with Madonna when American Life bombed. It debuted at #1 but it quickly fell down the charts and had no significant radio hits. So it was kind of easier for me to ignore American Life at the time. Eventually when I went to college I finally started coming out of the closet. I met someone who quickly became a good friend and even more quickly figured out I was gay. All of a sudden I felt like I had someone to talk to. At the same time I got American Life and started giving it a fair listen. While I didn’t love it at first I grew to appreciate it. Over the years my love for The American Life album has grown but it was with Confessions on a Dance Floor in 2005 that me and Madonna were completely in sync again.

After coming out and finally living my life as an openly gay man freshmen year of college I started making friends and forming friendships that would last for the rest of my life unlike High School. I also started hitting the gay bars and clubs with my friends and I started dating other men. Confessions on a Dancefloor came out when all that was happening for me. That album really was the soundtrack to my life as a newly out gay man and the best part was how great that album was. Madonna was back in peak form releasing some of the catchiest and most danceable music of her entire career and songs from Confessions were playing in every gay bar and dance club I went to throughout the rest of college. I also remember watching the Confessions tour on Thanksgiving day on TV in 2006. I was blown blown away by the size, scale and spectacle of it! Over 20 years into her career Madonna was still taking the pop concert to next level and pushing forward.

In the years since Confessions on a Dancefloor Madonna’s presence on the pop charts has dwindled but her status as an icon & living legend only grew. Much of that was how she threw herself back into touring once she gave up on a career in movies. Her tours in the last 15 years or so have seen her take the pop concert to a whole new level of ambition and scale. I finally got to see her myself with some friends in 2015 for the Rebel Heart Tour and while she was pushing 60 on that tour she still outperformed most pop girls half her age. It was one of the best concerts I had ever attended. After years of wanting to see her live I finally did and she blew me away!

At the time of my writing this Madonna is now 60. Seeing her continue to fight for her right to still make music long after most female pop stars are put out to pasture by a culture that treats women as worthless once they are no longer “sexy” is both exhilarating and tough to watch at times. Besides a select few female pop stars before her such as Cher, Madonna is now operating in uncharted territory for women in pop music. Just by continuing to exist in the public eye and record music Madonna is still breaking barriers for women and causing controversy. What’s tough to watch though is to see just how much our culture really does demean women, especially older women, for partaking in the same things that men their own age don’t get any criticism for. Nobody criticizes Mick Jagger for continuing to record, tour and still be ultra sexual in his performances as a man in his 70s, but that’s because men are allowed to age and women are not especially in pop music.

As Madonna said a few years ago the most controversial thing she has ever done as a female pop star is simply stick around and that alone shows you just how sexist the music industry and our culture as a whole still is. There’s also a reason EVERY female pop star to emerge in the past 20 years (Britney Spears, Miley Cyrus, Taylor Swift, Lady Gaga, Katy Perry, Nikki Manaj, Ariana Grande, Girli) have all rallied around Madonna and continue to celebrate her. The reason is that Madonna is STILL paving the way for this next generation of female pop stars. The further Madonna goes as a recording artist as she ages the more glass ceilings she is shattering, which is also paving a path for the pop girls of today to have longer and more fruitful careers and not have to “gracefully” retire when they hit 40. Her 2016 speech at Billboard for winning woman of the year really drives this point home as well as the sexism and cruelty Madonna had to endure for her most of her career, except when she was married to Sean Penn because as she says “I was off the market then and therefore no longer a threat.”

And yet her fight to continue to exist and be taken seriously as an artist is something the gay community knows all too well. Our struggle is simply that people acknowledge that we exist. That we deserve love and happiness just like anybody else and it can be very exhausting and heart breaking to keep up that fight every day. Madonna showed girls and gays that we don’t have to settle for less. That we can achieve our dreams because we deserve it. Most importantly she told us that we deserve to be seen and to be loved. In a world that sometimes wishes all Queer people would be wiped off the face of the earth it’s a message that can mean so much to so many. God knows it meant a lot to me when I was in the closet and afraid that the world would reject me if it saw the real me. Her message as a feminist and LGBTQ ally continues to mean a lot to me as a gay man in his 30s with a husband and career who still fears his rights could be ripped away any day now under this current administration. Her recent GLAAD speech once again re-affirmed why she has been one of the biggest LGBTQ allies in pop music for the past 4 decades.

For those reasons and more Madonna will always have my utmost respect and love and she will always be my favorite female pop star of all time.