Miranda/Charles

Lately it's been all Miranda Lambert and Charles Dickens. Miranda released her fourth album, questionably titled Four the Record and it's a different beast than her previous ones. Her bad girl persona was sort of pushed to its fullest extent on Revolution and only shows up occasionally on Four in the "Fastest Girl in Town" and "Mama's Broken Heart," which sounds bizarrely similar to My Chemical Romance's "Mama" from a few years back. The rest of the album is a slow, leisurely, fairly relaxing experience--the sequencing flows in a way that Revolution never quite did as the slow songs and fast songs are grouped more artfully than the previous album's fast song-slow song-fast song-slow song cycle. The production occasionally gets enjoyable experimental--"Fine Tune" has Miranda sounding muffled, almost under water, as she sings an extended car repair-as-sex metaphor, and "Easy Living" has a steady undercurrent of AM radio static throughout. The general critical response to the record seems to be that it's good but a disappointment for someone as good as Miranda and I have to disagree; most of the album was written by other songwriters and Miranda is branching out and trying something different. Her wit and intelligence are as evident in her choice of material as they are in her own songwriting.

As for the Dickens: I am in a Charles Dickens class taught by a totally brilliant and hilarious professor--(when a student asked why there were no minorities in Dickens, totally straightfaced Dr. Ledbetter said "because there were no minorities then")--and while I've been a complete disaster at keeping up with the reading I've been speeding through Our Mutual Friend the last few days and am loving it. It's crazy and experimental and employs soap opera-like pacing and totally defies my stereotypical prior knowledge of Dickens. The tertiary characters are stupendously bizarre--there is a disgusting woman named Pleasant Riderhood who has a lazy eye, runs a pawn shop, and preys ambiguously on drunk sailors. Tempestuous, obsessed, doomed Bradley Headstone (played by super hot David Morrissey in the BBC miniseries) is basically the Dickens equivalent of me in matters of romance.

"Cycle"

“Cycle”

“Show me a happy homosexual and I’ll show you a gay corpse.”

- The Boys in the Band

“Throw a dog a bone, I’ll take it if I have to.”

-Miranda Lambert, “Desperation”

As usual, this one was four times the size he’d appeared in the picture. Actually, no, the picture was a deceitfully cropped close-up of his face, his cheeks stretching to either side of the tiny frame and his chin drooping lazily to the point at the bottom where the text spelled out his name, so it wasn’t so much deceit as a deliberate withholding of information. His weight and height he’d pointedly left blank and his age, 24, was probably also a lie. Another anonymous fat Mexican with a one inch dick that I didn’t want as soon as he arrived but, desperate for any semblance of the romance I never got I decided to make the best of the situation. He smelled pleasant, a combination of cheap wet hair gel that got on my hands and an underlying gaminess indicative of a long day. He’d parked across the street, called me, and I’d come outside to fetch him for fear that he’d accidentally knock on the door of the old woman across the street who had been eyeing me disapprovingly the day before for drinking from a mostly depleted handle of Jim Beam in my front yard as I smoked cigarettes and talked loudly on the phone.

“Hi, I’m Richie,” he said, shaking my hand limply. I don’t know if his name was actually Richie or if that’s just the name I’ve used to mentally organize all the fat Mexicans I’ve hooked up with in moments of drunken desperation at 3 AM.

“I’m Jack. In here I guess.” I fumbled with the CD player for some music that would make the situation seem ironic, inject me with the necessary level of detached energy I needed, the sense that I was living in a movie, that the pathetic follies of my youth were being recorded for posterity to be described charmingly in my autobiography after I’d become famous. Accidentally placing one CD on top of the other in the disc tray, I eventually gave up and flopped onto the bed. Richie automatically removed his pants and underwear. There was no indication of a penis anywhere on his body, just a massive pubic mound with no prescribed gender. God, he was fat. This was the type of person my well-meaning friends tried to get me to date; whenever a female friend said that she “had a friend I just had to meet,” I knew that it would invariably be a grotesquely obese Richie type, indicative of the level of attractiveness my friends ascribed to me. Though overweight myself I still clung to my television-instilled denial fantasies of dating or fucking only traditionally attractive dreamy young hipster types. I’d rather date no one and fuck the fatasses my friends delivered in secret than have anyone know that I’d lowered my standards one bit. Then I’d complain over lunch about how gay men were all so superficial, shallow, and appearance obsessed, and why was I the only one that saw past all of that?

I waited for Richie to undo my pants; I didn’t want to put forth any effort with this one. I was merely participating in the unending cycle of self-destructive sexual humiliation that all gay men set up for themselves; I’d been at the receiving end of it many times myself, in bed with someone who clearly had much higher expectations for the take-out they’d ordered that night while I marveled and drooled at the fact that I’d ended up with such a catch. The common factor in all male homosexual experiences is that there must never be an equal distribution of mutual attraction; there must always be one ravening, starving slob designated as “the ugly one,” and another person who has, through sheer force of will, imagined himself to be on a higher plane of attractiveness and has convinced himself that he isn’t hungry. There is never that sense of love and a mutual exchange of affection that is present in fictional depictions of homosexual relationships intended to instruct straight people that we’re Just Like You--only a sweat, brief, paranoid entangling of limbs and body parts on which, for one shining moment, you can project, mask-like, the face of the one person you truly believe you have loved.

I am once again on the road to San Marcos with Bull. I stare out the truck window thinking of all the things I should be doing instead of tagging along with him as he drives thirty miles to purchase two pills with the $20 his parents have given him for gas. “I’d buy one for you, I just don’t have any money. And I’m addicted,” he says good naturedly.

“Oh it’s fine. I don’t have any money either.” I smile back. I roll down the window and the air is unexpectedly brisk. I’d do opiates with him if he gave me one just so we’d be on the same level but I can’t for the life of me understand why he loves them so much. The one time I snorted them with him I felt pleasantly high for a while but woke up panicked and unable to breathe. I’ve had a crush on him for three years, been friends with him for six months, and been in love with him for two.

Driving past downtown he gestures to the skyline and says, “I wish I could remember all the hotels I’ve had sex in. The Omni, definitely. And the Radisson. . .”

“I’ve never had sex in a hotel. You manage to hook up with a higher class of men than me,” I respond.

“You need to get on Adam4Adam is why. Grindr’s bullshit.”

He is gorgeous—that effortless, messy, dark gorgeousness of lost young men—greasy brown hair falling on his forehead in an artful array, brown, heavy-lidded chocolate lozenge eyes, a musty, warm odor of unmade bed and car ashtray. His father is Mexican and his mother is white. He used to be perilously thin, wan, wasted, but graduation and unemployment have added forty pounds to his tall frame giving him the sturdy, manly comportment that mothers desire when they tell their sons to “put some meat on their bones.” An ambiguous red lesion on his upper cheek—opiates cause you to scratch yourself endlessly—is the only clue to the strain his body is undergoing.

After endless deliberation in traffic we arrive in San Marcos. He’s always in such a busy, talkative mood when it’s assured he’ll have drugs in the near future. We enter a gated apartment complex near campus and he drives to the back building and parks, knowing exactly where to go. We ascend a nearby staircase and knock at the door of an apartment I’ve been to with him once before. A thin, hippie-looking girl in a large sweater answers the door and greets Bull, gesturing for us to come inside.

“Hi, I’m Mark!” volunteers a red-faced, portly young man on the couch. There is an advertising banner for Smirnoff vodka the size of a door hanging on the wall.

We make uncomfortable introductions. Bull has left his money in the car so I’m briefly left alone with Mark, the girl, a husky, and a rat terrier. It’s convenient when people have dogs because they provide endless fodder for mechanical small talk. The girl sweeps invisibly into a bedroom and returns with an orange prescription bottle. Bull enters the door, hands her a twenty, and says, “I’ll just take two for now.”

Moving to the counter he begins crushing up a pill with a shot glass. He grabs the twenty the girl has just set down, rolls it up, snorts the line, hands it back to her, says a quick thank you, and we’re off.

Our friendship developed from an intense mutual understanding that neither of us had ever experienced with another man; an openness about our sexual sleaze, bad decisions, addictions, and darkest secrets met with a total absence of judgment to produce a shared comfort that hummed quietly, oddly, and reliably along like a space heater. He’d been passing as a heterosexual virgin under the scrutinizing and confused gaze of his straight stoner friends, all the while journeying solitarily into the night to have sex with strange older men and not telling anyone about it. I had been openly gay since middle school but also felt the intense shame that comes from keeping too many secrets; I felt like a doomed failure because my early sexual encounters had not been the meet-cute mutual learning experiences with people of my own age that television narratives had assigned me. The first time I had full access to a man’s body it was a moustached forty-five year old pool cleaner whose name I didn’t know, not a loving, monogamously committed boyfriend. Even as I gained my first gay friends I felt alien and sordid around them; they were fresh-faced, good looking young men that either didn’t share my sordidness or concealed and denied it to within an inch of their lives.

Though Bull told me from the start that he wasn’t interested in relationships or guys his own age- a case of reverse ageism that plagued me like a persistent sore in my mouth—he and I got drunk and fooled around soon after we started hanging out. He suggested we jack off to porn and I took this as an invitation to suck him off. I tried to kiss him and he didn’t reciprocate, so I ate out his ass. I ate his ass on a later occasion after he once again refused to kiss me. It wasn’t until the night we got thoroughly trashed at the pragmatically named gay trucker bar Bout Time—complete with a hand-painted illustration of a ticking clock on the wooden sign—that we kissed on the mouth. A long, passionate, deep kiss that I seem to remember him initiating, right as I was about to tumble out of his truck to my front porch. Did he actually grab my face and turn it toward him like they do in the movies or is that only how I choose to remember it? That was the first and only time it happened.

The next day I awoke feeling ecstatic despite my hangover. He’d kissed me. My tongue had finally found its way from his ass to his mouth. Were we now going to act on our admitted love for each other in a more . . . traditional way? Would he give me a chance? I hedged forth and brought up the previous night online, through the emotionally leveling filter of instant messaging.

“So what happened between us last night?”

“Fun between friends I guess. I’m fine with it I just have no desire for a relationship.”

“Yeah. It’s just funny that we made out, haha. We’ve never kissed before.”

“Oh. I totally forgot that we made out.”

He totally forgot that we made out.

Now I’m on the bus to school and this old gay man that talks to me all the time is sitting in the seat adjacent eating a Jack in the Box hamburger voraciously, lettuce and onions tumbling down the front of his shirt, talking while chewing. I think this man has been sent by God to make me as uncomfortable as I make other people because he’s the only person who’s managed to legitimately shock me in years. He tells me about the glory days of poppers and unprotected sex which he somehow managed to live through and hits on me blatantly. He could probably be pretty cute if he wasn’t wearing goddamned sweat pants and oversize tee shirts all the time; as much as I enjoy his company I do not find him an appetizing sexual prospect. He hands me some rectangular device that’s either a digital camera or a cell phone or some combination of the two. On it is a picture of a rail thin young man with long, feathered hair in skin tight high wasted jeans. “That’s what I used to look like,” he says.

“Wow, you were gorgeous. I mean you’re still very good looking but this is a great picture,” I correct myself.

“Oh, it’s okay. I know. I fell apart about ten years ago.”

“You didn’t fall apart,” I argue. I genuinely like him and am amazed whenever I meet one of these survivors, these men that somehow lived through the most exciting and deadly period of gay history—they all deserve respect and admiration, to be treated like the icons they are. Instead they are greeted with revulsion by their younger brethren.

“Oh, thank you!” he camps at my compliment, running his hand through his peppery hair in effete caricature. “I make sure to moisturize. I use . . . oh what’s it called—Nivea cream. I dream of lying in a bathtub full of Nivea cream. Which reminds me . . . one time I went to an orgy—it was these people I didn’t really know but my friends knew them—and so we got a little drunk, arrived there, and what are there but about twenty mattresses laid out on the floor and covered in plastic. And then there are these trash cans on the side—trash cans full of Crisco. You were just supposed to grease yourself up and dive in.”

While I’m laughing nervously and delightedly at his story, he has a sudden realization. He fishes in his bag for his wallet, pulls some cash out of it, and hands it to me. “Here’s what I owe you, plus interest,”

“Oh, you don’t have to give me this much! Those things cost like 99 cents!” Last week I ended up accidentally paying for his bag of chips at the convenience store and he didn’t have cash to pay me back. He’s given me $6 instead of $1.

“It’s a loan, don’t worry about it. I mean it’s interest. I mean . . . if you should ever need a loan, need a carton of cigarettes or anything, need fifty bucks or something . . .” He clears his throat. “I can take care of it.” He makes unnervingly direct eye contact with me.

"Eden"

Eden was launched by the design house of Cacharel in 1994. Its release was accompanied by a lavish party in an airport hangar in France in which nude teenage models were hired to be part of the scenery on a fake tropic island. The scent itself is a sweet green concoction, beginning as a canned fruit salad and evolving into a pungent, decadent patchouli musk. Throughout the scent’s progression it becomes ever stronger, almost suffocating, creating a humid, sweaty greenhouse atmosphere around the wearer. It lasts on skin interminably.

Driving home Jon remembers it’s there right nearby, right down the street. Emboldened by liquor and a recent viewing of a documentary on pre-AIDS urban gay hedonism he says to himself Why Not. He performs a quick U-turn fifty feet from his house and heads toward Lennox Avenue. It’s somewhere on Lennox Avenue but he can’t remember if it’s close to the highway or on the opposite end. After some confusion he spots it, a three story brown box with only an underlit sign a foot high reading 4608 to identify it. There are two small parking lots on either side of it and the entrance faces away from the street. He fails to notice that there are only four or five cars parked outside.

Stumbling and smiling to himself and clutching his wallet to make sure it’s there, he walks up the zig-zagging wooden handicap ramp to the double door. A cacophony of bathroom and pool smells-- chlorine, industrial-strength air fresheners, shit, sweat, and ammoniac urine- blows onto his face from an air conditioning vent. He is in a small, white, linoleum-floored room with a desk and glass partition on one side and a locked door on the other. He approaches the partition.

Hello how’re you doing tonight?

Fine. How can I help you?

Oh, I’d like to get in. I don’t exactly know what to do.

OK, you’ll need a valid ID. There’s the list of admission prices. It depends on what you want.

The haggard boy behind the partition points to a ballpark-style menu of options with varying prices. Jon spots one that says STUDENT: $10.

He hands over the money and his ID and the boy files them away in a box. He is given a towel and a key through a hole in the partition and the double doors are unlocked with a loud beep. Inside the smell is stronger and the room vibrates from pulsating, far-off Hi-NRG disco that is coming from the floors above and below. The bruise of fluorescent light near the entrance fades into a watery red-black after several yards. He sees an assortment of unoccupied exercise machines in one corner, a square section of lockers nearby, and a glass-walled room with a large television casting a sleazy blue glow on some empty couches. There is a stairwell from which the red light emanates. There isn’t a human in sight except for the boy behind the counter. The room has the abandoned feel of a department store after closing.

After finding the locker that matches the number on his key- it is on the very bottom row, so he has to crouch on the floor to access it, he undresses totally, laughing out loud at the absurdity of the situation, telling himself he’s doing it for anthropological purposes like an undercover journalist, not just because he wants to fuck the first warm male body he sees. He wads up his shirt and shorts and stuffs them into the locker, retaining only his cigarettes and lighter. The towel is not quite large enough to stay around his waist so he has to hold it up with one hand.

A short pig-like man in a tank top carrying a stack of towels abruptly passes by. He is fully clothed so he must work here.

Hey, um, can you help me out?

What?

So what do you do here? Jon laughs.

What do you mean? The pig makes his impatience known. The pool’s out there, there are private rooms upstairs and down below. I don’t know what else you need to know. He waddles off with a sigh and enters the area behind the desk.

Up, up the stairs to the second floor. The disco gets louder, the stairs thump harder. Cigarettes, lighter, and key in one hand, towel clutched to his waist in the other, it is not easy walking up two flights. At the top all is totally red and before him are a serious of numbered rooms stretching thirty feet to the left and right. The walls stop a yard short of the ceiling. He turns left and walks to the end and around the corner. More rooms, more numbers, more flimsy thin walls. He takes the first left down another cramped hallway and then right. After this he doesn’t think about which way he is turning. He is savoring the surreal atmosphere and the feeling of endlessness about the place. Cartoonish female voices, sped-up to an ominous distortion and bolstered with pounding, shattering bass and icy electronics, act as an advertisement for the drugs he wishes he had. His mouth is parched and his throat keeps sticking to itself, causing him to gag. Occasionally he will pass small fluorescent-lit corners like condensed doctor’s office waiting rooms with two chairs and a small table on which sits a bowl of condoms. It might just be one corner that he passes multiple times, he can’t tell. He looks up at the end of this particularly dark stretch of doors and sees blue light leaking from one that is slightly ajar. Padding toward it he sees a small television, a bald man, and a pair of legs. Some tinny pre-recorded moaning registers under the disco. Frightened, he heads back in the direction of the stairwell.

He is in a large Jacuzzi with another pig-like man. This one has an upturned nose and wide, flaring nostrils. He looks like the other one in a previous evolutionary state. His chest and shoulders have recently been shaved and poking out of the skin are thick black bristles.

So where’re you from? Jon tries to sound casual and seductive and makes an effort not to slur. He is aware of his erection underneath the bubbling water. He gets his cigarette wet and the lit half breaks off and falls in.

I’m from out of town.

Have you ever been to a place like this?

No. I’m from out of town.

The pig is not interested and exits the Jacuzzi with a splash. He retrieves his towel and disappears inside.

On a couch in the TV room sits a bearded man in a towel. His body is taut and wiry. His feet are resting on the coffee table, next to a stack of magazines. He is staring intently at the news program on the television, black blocky closed captioning running underneath the female reporter.

Can you believe they’re doing that? The whole system is so backwards. America is fucked.

The man is the first person in the bathhouse that speaks without being spoken to. Jon finds him instantly attractive and moves from his isolated chair to the couch. He props his feet next to the man’s, on top of the magazines.

Oh I know.

Any idiot knows that doing that will just increase the deficit. Any idiot knows that. Me, I’d just let it run its course. I’d just let it run its course and then we’d be back on our feet. It’ll heal itself. As it is the system just fucks over the people like me, the people like you and me. Well I don’t know anything about you but it certainly fucks me over. Twenty-five years I’ve been dealing with this, no, more like thirty years-- I forget how old I am. They keep interfering and the deficit’s just gonna get bigger, and you’re gonna be paying for it. I’ll be dead but you’ll be paying for it.

Oh I know. Jon slides his foot up the man’s firm leg and pokes at the hot, tightly closed thighs. This requires some awkward positioning on the couch. The man continues talking, seemingly unaware. Jon doesn’t hear a word he says but attempts to pry open the hot thighs with his big toe. Eventually they give and he brushes against something hairy and gelatinous. The man scoots down further away to the opposite end of the couch and continues his speech.

Down the stairwell to the bottom floor. It looks like the second floor but the walls are splattered with day-glo paint. The rooms on this floor are arranged in a square around a large open space in which hang various chains and stirrups and harnesses. All are unoccupied. Surveying the scene, Jon notices an open door across the way. Not cracked accidentally, totally open. As he approaches it, his testicles shrink up close to his body. He sees a prone, naked figure lying face-down on a cot. On the small table next to the cot are a pair of glasses, a box of tissues, and a wallet. There is a towel crumpled on the floor.

Hi, he tries, tentative now.

Hey handsome.

The figure doesn’t turn over.

How’s it goin?

Fine, fine.

After a pause Jon says, I want to fuck you.

Okay.

Surprised that it was that easy, he crouches onto the bed and gets astride the man and turns him over gently. The man has a full head of black hair and looks to be of Latino descent. Jon cannot easily ascertain his age. In the darkness he can see a pair of hollow black eyes and a thin-lipped wet mouth, slightly ajar. Jon presses his weight on top of the man and inhales his scent. Around the neck is a powdery, faded barbershop odor that reminds him of his father. His head travels to the armpits and he presses his nose in the damp, straight hair, savoring the stale cumin ripeness. At the navel he inserts a stiffened tongue and licks a trail down to a nest of wiry fur. He presses his nose under the man’s limp penis but does not place it in his mouth. The scent of the man’s genitals mirrors the armpit but is amplified, enhanced.

I won’t do it without a condom.

Well then go get one, the man says, annoyed.

Jon hurries out of the room to one of the condensed corner doctor’s office waiting rooms and scoops a couple of condoms out of the bowl. He is still fully erect.

Back in the room he kneels at the end of the bed and spreads the man’s legs. He opens the condom wrapper with trembling hands and extracts the greasy object inside. The harsh, medicinal smell of latex bursts into the air. Examining the condom, he momentarily doubts that he’s putting it on the right way. He slides it over his penis and presses it to the base. The man hands him a greasy bottle of lubricant, which makes a loud ketchup fart when he squeezes it. Jon coats his penis and squeezes a stream down the man’s furry crevice. The legs are lifted over his shoulders and he presses on the sphincter. It gives with surprising ease, and he is inside. The man releases a high, child-like moan and a sharp, musty odor fills the space.

No, noo, noo no. Yes. Noo, no-oh, no-oh, nooo, aw yeah, noooo.

What’s that you’re wearing? You smell great. Jon is sitting at the foot of the bed. The familiar guilt that floods his head at the precise moment he orgasms is making him feel clammy and nauseous. His mouth is drier than ever, and he wants a tall glass of ice water and another cigarette and the safety of his own bed.

Old Spice. With an insinuating tone, the man asks, And what’s that you’re wearing?

This? Oh, it’s called Eden. Cacharel. I just got it the other day.

Interesting…

A pause.

Well, uh, thanks for a good time. Jon mechanically kisses the man’s cheek.

The next day he throws the nearly-full bottle of Eden in the trash can.

Madonna's Hypersexual 90s

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.