I saw about three seconds of the “Erotica” video and was convinced that it was actual footage of Hell. I was also quite sure that I’d go to Hell for having seen it at all. The Madonna I knew from Dick Tracy- the first movie I’d ever seen in a theater was a Madonna movie, a fact portentous of my future homosexuality- was there, but she’d transformed into a dark, threatening spectre with slicked-back hair, raccoon eye makeup, a black mask, a gold tooth, and a riding crop. For the majority of the video she was in a mysterious, dimly lit, curtained room. Her voice was smoky and guttural, a far cry from the Minnie Mouse squeal she’d become famous for years before. Through an assemblage of stylishly grainy footage evoking the Warhol-Morrissey collaborations of the sixties and early seventies, I saw her in a multitude of sexual scenarios, always nude, cavorting with men or women or both, tied up in bondage, mouth gagged, feet in stirrups, smoking the ubiquitous cigarette. At that age I didn’t even know what sex was and had an idea that babies were conceived by kissing, but I knew that nudity was bad, and that Madonna was bad, and that a nude Madonna was the worst thing of all.
My mother explicitly forbade me from looking at Madonna in any context aside from Dick Tracy, which was deemed acceptable since her presence was kept to PG-minimum. She had this bizarre idea that Madonna had a penchant for urinating on stage- an urban legend that I haven’t found corroborated in my exhaustive Google searches- and she frequently referred to her as nasty and not nice. Ironically she would defend Michael Jackson to the end, and regarded his crotch-grabbing as evidence of his idiosyncratic talent, not at all like Madonna’s vulgar exhibitionism. As a result of all this hype I only gained the courage to actually listen to Madonna when I was fourteen or fifteen, and by then my fear of holy repercussion had dissipated and been replaced by a new anxiety: that listening to Madonna was simply too gay. I was gay, but I wasn’t that gay, so I countered the occasional Madonna listen with a barrage of hyper-masculine rock music, in the hope that it’d keep me from becoming the queen I secretly knew I was. It was a slippery slope to Streisand and AIDS, and I didn’t want to go down it.
Though she had always been known for her vulgarity, Madonna had been on a one-woman sexual rampage since approximately 1990, when she released her breathy black-and-white soft-porn music video for “Justify My Love.” It had been promptly banned by MTV, which catapulted it to enormous success as the first widely released music video single. In it, she is a lingerie-clad Brigitte Bardot type in a French hotel, witnessing and occasionally participating in a pansexual orgy with sadomasochistic overtones. At one point she kisses a woman, which at the time was quite shocking as the trend for flashy female bisexuality would not come full force for nearly another decade. She dry humps her then-boyfriend, gay porn star and model Tony Ward, who sits in a chair in a pair of corona-revealing silk briefs, legs spread wide. The video was shown on Dateline, or Nightline, accompanied by an interview with an impassioned Madonna, speaking of herself as the champion of free speech and First Amendment rights.
A year later, the documentary film Truth or Dare was released. It featured backstage footage of her Blond Ambition tour, in which she spoke candidly about sex, rolled around in bed with her gay dancers, was generally a bitch to everyone, made incest jokes, fellated a soda bottle, and pantomimed masturbation onstage. It was an enormous hit and cemented her reputation of the sexual provocateur or the moment. Over the next several years the public was hit with a barrage of interviews with the hypersexual Madonna, who would talk about how she alone says what no else will say, always dropping some new and more explicit detail about her sexuality. She became the first bisexual poster girl, though in hindsight it seems this was just part of the act. The interviews were always accompanied by glossy magazine spreads featuring Madonna in some burlesque scenario, topless or tuxedoed and top-hatted in Dietrich style, surrounded by nude men and women. She was the biggest celebrity on Earth, possibly the biggest celebrity of all time, and had free reign to do whatever she damn well liked.
Madonna herself seems unclear on why she made the Sex book. I recall seeing an interview with the newly reformed spiritual Madonna of the late-nineties in which she is asked why she did it. She stutters for a minute and then just admits, “I don’t know.” She also sometimes makes it seem like she could foresee the coming backlash, and alienated everyone on purpose, as an artistic statement. Regardless, she did it, and it is by far the most transgressive celebrity gesture of the twentieth century, and has yet to be topped by anyone else. At midnight on October 21, 1992, Madonna’s career seemed to be over.
Sex is a monolithic, expensive metal-bound coffee table book full of provocative pictures of Madonna shot by Steven Meisel. The “Erotica” music video which had so frightened me as a child was actually edited from video footage shot for the book. Again, Madonna is featured nude in sexual scenarios just this side of hardcore, running the gamut of taboo sex acts in the company of several other celebrities. She is seen hanging out with some topless butch lesbians with nipple piercings. She is depicted in a mock-rape, in a schoolgirl outfit on a basketball court, surrounded by menacing skinheads. She is seen sitting topless on an old man’s lap. In a corny jungle fever-themed spread, she is sandwiched between Big Daddy Kane and Naomi Campbell. She stares at her vagina in mirrors. Most shockingly to me, she is shown with her face buried in a man’s shapely ass, exposing Middle America to a sexual practice they probably had no idea even existed. The pictures are accompanied by stream-of-consciousness text by Madonna, in which she talks about her early sexual experiences, her preferences, or just says things to get a reaction, such as, “Sex with the young can be fun.”
The book sold out immediately, but as evidence of the prudent hypocrisy of the American public, caused a backlash so intense that Madonna’s career looked like it might be over for a few years. It was embraced by no one. It was condemned on the right for basically being mass-marketed pornography and it was condemned on the left for not going far enough. I’ve read a book of critical essays about it called Madonnarama, and no one, but no one, was about to risk their status in defending the Madonna book. They all claimed that it was derivative, and other more legitimate artists like Robert Mapplethorpe had produced for more provocative work, but in saying this they were missing the point entirely. Sex might not have gone as far as it could have, but it didn’t need to, because it was remarkable mainly for the fact that the biggest celebrity in the world put out something so scandalous, on purpose, simply as an act of fuck-off exhibitionism. Marilyn Manson did similarly shocking things in his heyday in the 1990s, but it was expected of him since he was a gothic shock rocker. Madonna was a universally appealing entertainment spectacle, and her initial fan base had been comprised of little girls. Furthermore, one had basically no choice but to look at Sex, it was forced into every mundane retail outlet, not confined to adult bookstores. Lavish displays were set up in mall bookstores. My mother told me she leafed through a display copy at Tower Records, which is probably what set off her decade of Madonna hatred. So, even though the book promptly sold 3 million copies at $49.95, no one would admit that they liked it. Instead, everyone turned against Madonna.
It took Madonna awhile to win back the public, and she went to great lengths to do it. In 1997 she returned in a spiritually-conscious, cleaned up maternal state with her Ray of Light album. I recall seeing her on the cover of Good Housekeeping or some similarly dowdy magazine, posing with her baby, wondering how this could be the same woman that had been famously photographed hitchhiking nude for the final page of Sex. My mom started to like her because of this and the musical Evita, and I cautiously downloaded the Ray of Light album and listened to it in secret. I eventually grew to embrace every aspect of Madonna’s career, and now find her more endlessly fascinating and layered a character than any other in pop culture. I sincerely respect her for throwing it all away with the Sex book, though. Madonna was instrumental in bringing about a more liberal sexual feeling after the 80’s, during which time AIDS had brought about not only a fear of homosexuals, but a fear of sex itself. Madonna was physical with gay men at a time when many still thought that you could contract HIV from touching and kissing. Though the world tired of her sexual escapades, she left an unimaginably large impact. Virtually every other music video seems like it is put out by Madonna’s spiritual children. They rehash the same black leather S&M scenario endlessly, and it still inexplicably ignites minor controversies. If Madonna was leading us on the road to Hell, then I’m glad to be going with her.
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