Oh, Like a Bambola...?

 

 

Here's the thing: there's a little bit more than forty years between these two performances. The one was for a D&G post-show celebration this month and the other was for the first ever VMAs in 1984.

I'll also tell you what watching Madonna coming down that cake meant to a little gayling who was way too fem to be one of the boys but too unruly and defiant to be one of the girls: everything. When I watched Madge come down that wedding cake, I realized I was not alone. Madonna was literally, me. She was strong, and cool and daring. Projection, of course. Her Like a Virgin performance was a lesson in taking the bull by the horns. It would only be many, many years after, when I read one of the many biographies written about her that I would learn that she concocted the whole performance, that she apparently lost a shoe when she started coming down that cake and then she changed the whole routine on the spot. I also learned that the cameramen had no clue what to do with her (notice how she temporarily disappeared from the frame!) and that Melissa Etheridge was clapping in the front row (Dykon!) and that Annie Lennox thought it was whorish (go figure). Apparently it was a huge scandal. Think Janet at the Super Bowl. Madonna knew what people would think about her when she accepted the job and just bit the bullet. And it paid off.

I was reckless and restless and defiant and horny. I was also fascinated by her performance. She was BRAVE. She was crazy. She was sexy. She was cool. She was basically, goals. By the time I watched that performance, I have seen very few female (or male) performers being so defiantly provocative (it was not until 1991 that Prince would show ass in the VMAs, btw). The idea that someone (a woman!) were to be so in possession of her own body and courted desire and was in charge of her image while not really giving a damn about public opinion would was something totally new for me. She was second-wave feminism while having fun. I was mesmerized. Madonna was the blueprint.

I would have you know that I do not blend well in a crowd. There's always been something in me that men have always seen and unsuspecting straight people cannot pinpoint. And in gay culture you can only be that salient when you are undeniably masculine. I am not really very feminine, but I am also not obviously masculine, either. And Madonna in that performance at the first VMAs gave me confidence. Yes, she was criticized for it. People said it was old-fashioned and that it had sent the women's lib movement back thirty years (Drama Queens!). They said that she sounded like Minnie Mouse on helium (fair). They said she was a flash in the pan. Oh, but they were wrong, weren't they?

It's 2026 and here she is, singing for D&G (hate them) in Italian, a quintessentially Italian song, all the while referencing herself (how many artists can actually quote themselves and KNOW that people are getting it? Go ahead, I'll wait...) and looking absolutely fantastic at sixty seven. Oh, yes, she's had work done. I WOULD HAVE HAD WORK DONE, TOO if I were Madonna (or a woman in the public eye who has been so boldly and unapologetically sexual for more than forty years or had the money to do it). Let's be real: dirty old men can look literally like Jabba the Hutt and all they need is money and Viagra and they'll get laid. Women do not have that advantage. They need to look 'desirable' (young) to be considered fuckable. 

I know nothing about the inner workings of a world-famous superstar, but I can tell you that the push that watching Madonna being that absolutely fearless in that performance gave this queer boy when he was very young still propels him to this day. I still cannot fade in the background, I still make some people think twice because some of them still don't know how to categorize me. I'm still oppositional and defiant. And I still think that if Madonna could do all that when she was literally nobody I can still be me and tell the world to fuck off. 

Oh, yes. She's almost seventy. She's had work done. She's controversial and polarizing. She's still wandering around in a corset and panties. She's not perfect. And that's what I like about her. She's still goals. 

XOXO

P.S. did you watch the VMAs performance of Like a Virgin live when it took place? Did it really shock everybody? Was it really scandalous? She was immediately famous. Damn I wish Anne Marie were here and could tell me. She loved 80’s Madonna.