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By Neal Broverman
When Madonna barked at me to “Get up on the dance floor!” I was 12 and lived in a town four years away from having a juice bar. But I heeded her orders like any good disciple and turned my kitchen into Danceteria, voguing in Hanes socks and studying my reflection in the door of my mother’s range.
Before the Vogue era I knew of Madonna but hadn’t paid much attention. Like a child, I judged her from other people’s perceptions, which consisted of “She’s a slut!” “She touches herself!” “She’s a slut!” By 12, I was ready to stomach her intoxicating mix of glamour, allure, and self-confidence. She had boyfriends, money, beauty, smarts; she went to nightclubs, lived in Hollywood and New York. She was the girl everyone talked about. I wanted it all and she said I could have it.
As I matured, my love for her didn’t wane but rather spiked at various times; I found myself especially drawn to her when coming upon her darker songs open to interpretation. Ray of Light’s “Skin” was all sex and drugs, two subjects I found eminently fascinating in the late ‘90s. A few years later, the romantic desperation of Music’s “Don’t Tell Me” played to my first failed love affair. I was intrigued -- and mystified -- by Madonna’s anticonsumerism anthem, “Nobody Knows Me,” on American Life.
Some can’t reconcile Madonna’s wildly varying characteristics -- “How can she write a sex book and a children’s book?” “How can she be on TV but not watch TV?” “How can she be nearly 50 and still like sex?” Yet her contradictions only make my devotion grow deeper (and deeper). She’s conflicted and complex, ever morphing and growing, right often but wrong plenty. She’s a Leo like me.
Her habit of shedding skins has never seemed manipulative but rather the natural growth process of an interesting person. I’ve been a hippie, a raver, a rebel. And even if I don’t wear Birkenstocks anymore, that time is still part of me, as I’m sure all her “personas” remain part of her.
While she’s forever changing up her style and tastes, through it all she’s always been around, reassuring in her constancy. I mean, I still dance to her music in my kitchen, only now I’m wearing better socks.
Broverman is The Advocate’s associate editor.
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By Michelle Garcia
Being the liberal, freethinking, power-to-the-people kind of folks my mom and dad are, the most logical course of action concerning my development was to put their oldest daughter in Catholic school. For the first five years of my academic career, I was taught mostly by disgruntled old ladies who were able to hit you and make you feel guilty for just about anything.
Each year at the Immaculate Conception School, each teacher stood before his or her class and gave detailed examples of sins not to commit: "You may not use the words 'shit,' 'damn,' or 'ass,'" Sister Francis told our first-grade class. I imagined Bishop Daily of the archdiocese of Brooklyn and Queens distributed an official decree, sanctioned by Pope John Paul II himself, to each teaching nun to allow one day per year that she may use swear words, strictly for instructional purposes.
"You also must stay away from a musical artist named Madonna, the name stolen from the Holy Virgin Mary," she said, making a sign of the cross. "She is dirty and obsessed with material that is not appropriate for young children."
At age 5, I was only vaguely familiar with the Material Girl, but I felt I had to know more in order to form my own opinions about her. And besides, I could have been watching a blood-filled soft-core porn movie, and my grandma, who watched us after school, would not have lifted her eyes from her latest Tom Clancy novel.
So that afternoon, I left the safe waters of PBS and Nickelodeon to turn on MTV back when it played music videos during the day. "Vogue" eventually came on. Not only did I wonder how the video was supposed to be harmful or provocative, but I found her captivating and powerful. Granted, I wasn’t watching “Human Nature” or “Like a Prayer,” but I wouldn’t have known any different.
It seems that through my childhood and into adolescence, adults shunned Madonna. I've been told to stay away from her more times than I can count: Don't listen to her music, don't read her book, don't wear dominatrix outfits, and so on.
But as I watched her vogue for the first time, sing passionately in front of a burning cross, and wear a cone-shaped bra, I saw Madonna for who she is, beyond the labels of sex and rebellion: an artist who pushes boundaries and defies the status quo. We need more people like her in the world, at minimum to keep things less boring, but more important, to keep us moving forward in thought and artistic expression.
Garcia is The Advocate’s editorial assistant.
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