Re-post: A Goodbye Love Letter to Madonna Ciccone

This is a re-post of an earlier piece as there are many new subscribers this past week. We’ll periodically re-run essays you may have missed and may find interesting. —Josh

I have a thing for Madonna. Many gay men of my generation do. We came of age when she was making good on what she told Dick Clark on American Bandstand in 1984 when he asked her what she wanted from life: “To rule the world.”

Shortly after, she got her wish. She was the queen of pop culture and stayed on the cover of every magazine for years. Girls dressed up like her. Gay boys wanted to. Both wanted to be her best friend, and to be her.

Madonna has started fires and played with them her entire career. And when she’s been burned, it’s often because of the double standards we hold for men and women. Few other women had the nerve to be as brazenly—aggressively—sexual. Starlets are supposed to be sex kittens, not lionesses in heat.

There’s never been anything kittenish about Madonna. Though she’s modeled her presentation on Marilyn Monroe, the difference is stark. Put a picture of Madonna-as-Marilyn next to a picture of Norma Jean Baker doing the original. Same hair, same makeup, same clothes, same pose. Marilyn looks at camera with an invitation. Madonna’s eyes challenge you: “I will eat you until there’s nothing left.”

That ballsiness made a lot of people angry. Mainly women. Yes, many women criticized her self-objectification on firmly second-wave feminist grounds. She’s putting women’s liberation back decades by indulging the most prurient stereotypes about loose women, they said. From their political position, they have a point.

But I suspect many other women hated her for the reasons women have always hated each other, modern protestations of sisterhood notwithstanding: Jealousy and intra-sexual competition.

Whatever “it” is, Madonna has it. Admire or despise her, the charisma is undeniable. What made this woman so beguiling to young gay men? Why did my generation make her into an aspirational idol? And what are we to make of her today, now that we’re grown up?

A few nights ago I rewatched her pinnacle performance, the Blonde Ambition tour of 1990. You know it: Cone bra, underwear on the outside. When this was new it brought gay boys like me to the peak of ecstatic fan worship. I remember screaming at the television with tears in my eyes as she executed clockwork dance moves with the sharpest makeup known to man. She was just so goddamned cool.

Watching it with 46-year-old eyes shocked me. It wasn’t just provocative, and it wasn’t merely playful. It was lewd. She was masturbating on a bed before 15,000 people to a driving drumbeat. The words of a feminist friend came back to me: “Sexual abuse has been written across her face and all over her work since the beginning.”

Yes. Madonna denies being sexually abused as a child, though we can be forgiven the suspicion. She is, of course, under no obligation to disclose anything at all about her private past. But like all of us, her past, whatever it may be, made her who she is.

If we can reduce her, just for a moment so that we can take a look, Madonna is a troubled little Catholic girl who was broken at a very young age. Her mother of the same name died of ovarian cancer when she was five years old. This foundational trauma shows up in her lyrics and in the imagery of her music videos. The stitched-together lips of the corpse at her mother’s funeral in ‘Oh Father.’ The mother she can’t find except in the grave she visits in the dream recounted in ‘Mer Girl.’

Listening to her interviews over the years about feeling neglected by her father in a working class household of 8 children, one suspects a great many things were not right in that family. Not right for a healthy personality development.

What is her personality structure? I think it’s Cluster B. And like for many people, I don’t think it fits neatly into any of the four putatively discrete disorders in that cluster. It looks more like Cluster B: features of ___.

The constant image changes, the unstable identity, these are classic Borderline Personality Disorder. The overweening sexual provocation is native to the Histrionic. Her narcissism is too obvious to comment on further. Underneath this personality style is ravenous insecurity. Desperation. Self-doubt, self-contempt.

This is the tragedy of the Cluster B mind. They are dangerous, yes, the Cluster Bs. But they are also broken; they’ve usually been abused themselves. There is an emptiness inside them. A woman like Madonna will rarely admit weakness. But you can be sure that when the lights go out in her bedroom, she hears the echo in that hollow place. I know my mother hears it.

How did Madonna seduce gay boys like me? Like calls to like. My childhood broke me in ways similar to how Madonna’s broke her. My mother didn’t die. Instead, she was my captor. Deranged by her own personality disorder, my mother ruled over her children as a trailer court Joan Crawford mixed with a healthy dose of Margaret White, the fanatical mother in ‘Carrie.’

She was pregnant with me at 18; my father left before I was born. My mother married a violent man three years later, as Borderlines so often do. When she wasn’t hitting me, her husband was. My mother had a high tolerance for violence against her own children. The bruises she found on me in the bath didn’t move her to force him out.

That only came when her own survival was threatened the night he pinned her down and tried to strangle her to death while her three children screamed.

There was much more. But the end result for me was being made a ward of the state at 13 years old and placed in a glorified orphanage with budding criminals my age. Arsonists, rapists, brawlers. At 16 I went to court to become an emancipated minor. I dropped out of high school and began my career as an alcoholic who slept around, as teens like me do. Almost always men, not boys. (Pederasty is endemic in gay male culture, though we’re not allowed to say it.)

I was pretty and clever, and I gloried in it. There was satisfaction in being able to seduce, or be seduced by, men old enough to be one’s father. No, it’s not healthy. And it doesn’t absolve any of these grown men for their sins. But complementary puzzle pieces fit together.

As cliched as it sounds, the stereotyped explanation is the correct one. I was starved for love and affection. For a father. Yes, we do eroticize (and neuroticize) the things we should have had. But we distort them and make them perverse, too. I had none of the healthy kind, so I took the substitutes at hand.

Madonna was a template. If a girl from Bay City, Michigan could have any man she wanted, why not me? I could be cool—no, cold. Above it. Beautiful. Desired. I bleached my hair and drew my eyebrows on to look like the Amazon queen stomping the stage to Express Yourself, pushing men down to their knees while looking at the camera like a conquering coquette.

None of this was real, and how it appeared to others was obviously different from how I saw myself. It was unstable and unhealthy. Though never diagnosed, I spent several years as something right next to an anorexic. Likewise, I was never diagnosed with it, but I suspect I had Borderline Personality Disorder myself, or a form of complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder close enough for government work.

Despite the way I lived my life, I managed to graduate from a top private college with a bachelor’s a bit late at 25 years old. The worst of my mental problems (but nothing was worse than my late teen years) started to resolve in my 30s. What remained made substantial progress when I put my mother out of my life at 41 years old after seeing her for who she really was.

She had ever been thus; a man can tell a thousand lies to himself for a long time.

The taxonomy of Cluster B retroactively explained my life with my mother and woke me up to the real world for the first time. If I were religious, I would call it an awakening. Meaningful recovery from severe child abuse is only possible after facing the hardest truths, the ones that haunt your nightmares, but that you chalk up to your imagination. “You always have had an overactive imagination, Joshua,” my mother so frequently said when she needed me to believe I was crazy.

At 41 years old, I accepted the truth. My mother did not love me, and probably never had. More than that, she took pleasure in hurting and exploiting her children. A broken character structure like hers does not understand love, and is neither capable of giving nor receiving it. My lifelong nightmares about my mother—that she had me put in prison on false charges, that she had my college diploma revoked, that she humiliated me as a fraud in front of an auditorium of my colleagues—weren’t imaginary fears. It’s that I didn’t believe them until I had to.

I put down promiscuity years ago. And one day, I nursed my last hangover and didn’t take a drink again. I am not free from episodic anxiety and depression. It is probably my lot to have heightened neuroticism for the rest of my life. But I sleep at night, and the nightmares haven’t come for several years.

It was from this perspective that I turned to Madonna recently. Madonna at 62 years old, in 2021. Dressed like a street hooker in a frozen mask of what was once one of the most lovely faces ever photographed. Writhing against a wall in stillettos, stomping across the bar in a gay club whipping up a crowd high on its own excessive pride.

Madonna Ciccone left a mark on the 20th century at a level achieved only by an Elvis Presley, a Michael Jackson. Her pop music is canonical, and it’s seriously good. She will be remembered for the music, not just the salaciousness, in time. She has every reason to bask in her accomplishments, every opportunity to retire from the roundtop and create work that reflects the burnishing that age and experience can bring.

There was no trailblazing, ballsy Italian girl in that performance. No mature icon, no seasoned cultural institution. I watched an aging prostitute with no way out. A private dancer, a dancer for money, and any old music will do. I turned it off and cried.

There’s a humiliating truth about who you are, when you come from the place that creates people like me. As children, we were often told how “wise” we were, “how mature for our years.” “An old soul.”

It isn’t true. We are emotionally retarded, and we don’t know it until and unless we’re fortunate enough to find our way out of the squalor. What I know at 46 I should have learned by 20. I’m lucky I learned it at all.

I wanted something better for Madonna. Yes, I know. I’ve never had a relationship with her except in my own mind, the way fanatics do. In a way, it was no different from the relationship I had with my mother; an illusion. But I suspect I know some things about Madonna that she doesn’t know herself.

I don’t think she will ever learn them.