by Lucy O'Brien
AFTER THE tour was finished, some of the dancers went through a dark time. Gabriel Trupin died of AIDS—“he had HIV, even on tour, but he just didn’t know, you know?” says Salim. Most found it difficult to adjust once the artificial high of the tour was over and they had to go back to “normal” lives. “We used to make a good living as dancers doing videos, but then record companies didn’t want to spend more money on dancers, so we would do the same for fifty dollars. We used to call them the fifty-dollar dances.” After feeling lost for a few years, Salim found his way back via his roots in contemporary ballet. He now runs his own dance company in New York, and has made peace with the complexities of Blond Ambition. “It’s OK,” he smiles, “I forgive her, I don’t hold grudges anymore.”
MADONNA, TOO, crashed. “I thought I was gonna have a nervous breakdown. I couldn’t take the crowds. I couldn’t do the shows. It was too hot,” she said. Comparing the end of the tour with somebody dying, she added: “I make my peace with it and when it happens I don’t feel anything…. But I know I’m gonna feel something later. And it’s really going to hurt.”
She plowed on with her personal game of Truth or Dare. She had started it, so she may as well see it through. The next big venture, the next layer to come off, was with her book Sex.
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FALLEN ANGEL
IN 1991, MADONNA’S INFLUENCE REACHED A PEAK WITH a new music business venture. “It started as a desire to have more control, and became a kind of artistic think tank,” she said of Maverick, the multimedia company she formed with TimeWarner, with a $60 million advance. “I want a real record label with real artists,” she said. “I don’t want to be Prince and have everybody be a clone of me. That’s not having a label, that’s having a harem.” She then renegotiated her recording contract with a $5 million advance for each of her next seven albums, along with a 20 percent royalty rate. Rivaling Michael Jackson as the ultimate corporate artist, Madonna generated sales for Warner of over $1.2 billion in the first decade of her career, shifting 70 million albums. For some people, she had become too powerful, and they were just waiting to see her fall.
That winter, Madonna conceived the book that was to be her nemesis. Aiming for high-art erotica, she teamed up with longtime collaborator Steven Meisel and art director Fabien Baron. A graduate of the Parsons School of Design in New York, Meisel was a provocative photo-essayist who enjoyed lacing his fashion photography with a worrying undertow, from hyperreal high-society women to heroin chic. (His 1995 campaign for Calvin Klein jeans would be canceled amid accusations that it resembled child pornography.) In 1991, the combination of Madonna and a book of erotica gave Meisel an ideal opportunity to make mischief. He must have felt like a kid in a candy store.
The art director for the book was Fabien Baron, a French art student who moved to New York in 1982 and who, after a stint at Italian Vogue, guided the 1990 relaunch of Warhol’s Interview magazine. He combined a taste for formal perfection with playful humor and anarchic typography. The Sex book had a range of influences—from punk to earlier fashion iconoclasts like Guy Bourdin (in its precise, choreographed surrealism) and Helmut Newton (in its stylized and sadomasochistic look). Along with writer Glenn O’Brien, a key observer of the New York pop scene and veteran of Interview magazine, this was the Sex dream team. It oozed style. According to London art critic Sarah Kent, the timing of Sex was impeccable. “‘The Body’ is in vogue: it’s Today’s Topic,” she wrote, referring to artist Andres Serrano’s “elegant come shots,” and The Jeff Koons Handbook, which featured fairy-tale pictures of the artist having sex with his Italian porn queen wife, La Cicciolina.
Madonna presided over the production of her book, casting herself as dominatrix and sex evangelist Dita Parlo. “This is essentially something that comes from my mind. My mind is, you know, a catalyst for the whole thing,” she said. “These are erotic short stories and erotic imaginings, visual and literary, and I’ve cast myself in the role in terms of pictorials.” Her mission, she claimed, was to empower women and stimulate debate. “Sexual repression is responsible for a lot of bad behavior,” she declared, taking the view that sex is a taboo subject because the Western world has a long tradition of silence on the matter. Social scientist Michel Foucault begs to differ, however. In his groundbreaking 1970s work The History of Sexuality, he argued that far from being ignored, sexual behavior in the West is constantly monitored and preached about. It’s part of a society that “speaks verbosely of its own silence.” Madonna is a case in point.
Her garrulous defense of taboo sex fits into a strong liberal tradition, one that particularly thrives in contrast to a coy mainstream U.S. culture founded on Puritan fundamentalism. She is the equal and opposite of those religious forces—hence the note of missionary zeal in everything she does. “In all my work, my thing has always been not to be ashamed—of who you are, your body, your physicality, your desires, your sexual fantasies. The reason there is bigotry, and sexism and racism and homophobia…is fear. People are afraid of their own feelings, afraid of the unknown…and I am saying: don’t be afraid,” she argued.
Madonna also wanted to explore the notion of power in sex. “She was talking about gentle and hard, soft and violent. She was playing out all those elements in the book,” says Charles Melcher, copublisher, with Nicholas Calloway, of the Sex book. “That was reflected in the materials: uncoated, soft paper on the inside and a hard metal binding on the outside.” It was as if Madonna wanted to display her sexual knowledge as well as her body. As Foucault wrote: “Sexuality is tied to recent devices of power…. It has been linked from the outset with an intensification of the body—with its exploitation as an object of knowledge and an element in relations of power.”
SOLD LIKE a piece of art in limited edition, with each copy numbered, the book was boldly presented, encased in a zipped Mylar bag and ring-bound with metal covers. The matte paper has the feel of newsprint or fanzine. As this was the first project for Madonna’s new Maverick company, the packaging was crucial. The process hadn’t been going too well at Warner Books, which was a mass-market publisher, and there was a “communication breakdown.” At Fabien Baron’s suggestion, the packaging job was transferred to Nicholas Calloway’s bespoke Calloway Editions. “We did exquisite art books, $100 high-end, beautiful things. It was felt we might be a better creative fit,” Melcher told me. “It was a challenge for us to figure out what the form would be. Madonna wanted the book to be sealed, something you had to violate in order to get into it and enjoy.” They considered various kinds of clasps before hitting on the idea of the sealed bag “as a reference to a condom package.”
The metal cover was Madonna’s idea. “We were talking about materials for the cover, and we went into her kitchen. She pointed at the metal plate at the back of her stove and said, ‘I want something like this.’ I was very impressed with the way she interacted with her world to source things,” says Melcher. Maybe she remembered that immortal postpunk band PIL and their 1979 album Metal Box, which was originally packaged in a metal canister. Making a metal book, though, was a nightmare. “We bought a million and a half pounds of aluminum, a pound for every book. We had to do front and back covers, and each one had to be rolled, stamped, and ionized. I don’t recommend metal for books. It was a hugely difficult process,” says Melcher.
Once the reader breaks their way into the book, Madonna appears in a variety of poses, exploring some charged sexual themes. First, we plunge directly into a dyke pantomime. Madonna sits bound in a chair flanked by two topless butch lesbians with tattoos and piercings. One holds a switchblade to her throat while the other sucks her nipple. In another picture, Madonna stands astride a bidet in a leather fetish bikini, PVC thigh-high boots, and a perfectly made-up face. Making a reference to cunnilingus, she clutches the head of a cropped-haired lesbian who’s taking a drink from the water trickle beneath. What’s notable about these pictures is that the butch lesbians are dressed in battered jeans and no makeup, while Madonna wears expen
sive designer clothes. Already there is an obvious power relation at work, with Madonna carefully controlling her image.
The lesbian theme reemerges later in the book, but it is more the “lipstick” variety—i.e., glamorous, celebrity-driven, beautiful. But within these pages, Madonna shows a vulnerable side of herself that’s rarely seen in public. There she is, kissing her girlfriend Ingrid Casares, looking deeply into her eyes. It has the air of that old pioneer lesbian romance Patience and Sarah. Madonna has a softer look, as if she’s saying: “This is really who I am.” Ingrid is her haven, her caretaker. In another iconic shot, she is encased in the arms of Isabella Rossellini. With her mature, luminous beauty, Rossellini could easily be a replacement for the mother Madonna lost.
There has been much speculation about Madonna’s sexual preferences, but what emanates from her work is an uncomplicated, sensuous bisexuality. “She appreciates beautiful people, whatever their sex,” says one friend. “She slept with girls and boys, and no one had a problem with that. Everyone was doing it,” says another friend from her New York clubbing days. “All of my sexual experiences when I was young were with girls…. I think that’s really normal: same-sex experimentation,” Madonna declared in an interview with the Advocate. Then she went on to say: “I am aroused by the idea of a woman making love to me while either a man or another woman watches.” All her strong female role models, from Marlene Dietrich and Mae West to Martha Graham and Frida Kahlo were actively bisexual. The written passages in Sex show an intimate, almost celebratory awareness of lesbian sex. “When she comes she cries out like the seagulls circling above us. Her body shudders again and again and I drink in every drop of her sweet nectar,” writes Madonna/Dita in one sun-kissed scenario. After an interval of imaginative lovemaking, even the circling seagulls have become voyeurs. In another excerpt, Madonna refers to her female lover’s ass as “pretty fucking righteous!” The English Roses this is not.
The lesbian character was one that had been a few years in the making. We first saw her unveiled in the video for “Justify My Love,” kissing model Amanda Cazalet. “Because it was so unpremeditated, it was real. You can’t act something like that,” Cazalet said. “And yes, I’d say she’s a good kisser.” Then she was wearing a butch suit and grabbing a flapper girl’s behind in Steven Meisel’s mock Brassaï pictures. This was an adjunct to the very public parade of her friendship with comedienne Sandra Bernhard, going out on the town with her to New York lesbian clubs like the Cubby Hole, and appearing on the Late Show with David Letterman with her, both dressed in identical butch outfits. When quizzed about whether this affair was real, Madonna enjoyed keeping people guessing. “I’m not going to tell you yes or no. It’s irrelevant…” she said at the time. “It doesn’t make a goddamn bit of difference who I’m sleeping with—a man or a woman.”
Many lesbians felt that it did matter. “Some said that she was ripping us off with her pseudo-lesbian antics,” suggests Louise Carolin from Diva, the British lesbian lifestyle magazine. Writer/photographer Della Grace saw “interconnections” between Sex and her book Love Bites, a collection of documentary-style pictures of “lesbian camp and lesbian cock…an outlaw group of S&M exhibitionism” that was published the year that Madonna began work on Sex. Criticizing her for being a “sexual tourist,” Grace claimed that Madonna was “the pure playing with the perverse…a voyeur…not dangerous, not real.” Academic Jackie Goldsby called her a “cultural robber baron,” while another writer, Russell Baker, said: “Madonna isn’t the cultural elite…She’s just Mae West for yuppies.”
For Carolin, however, there were reasons to celebrate. “Madonna became meaningful in the early 90s with that lesbian chic thing,” she says. “At that point lesbian culture was really changing. We were coming out of the 80s, which had been a vehemently political and anticommercial time. We looked at the fun gay boys were having and thought, We’d like some of that. Lesbians started to be seen as glamorous and playful. Madonna caught that wave very effectively. There was a hunger to see ourselves reflected in popular culture, and she made us visible.”
Madonna did this in a way that chimed with the “coming out” of some high-profile women in entertainment, like alt-country star k. d. lang, rock singer Melissa Etheridge, and actress Ellen DeGeneres. When lang came out in an interview with the Advocate, Torie Osborne, executive director of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, said: “[She’s] the first major woman pop star who’s out and proud and fine about it. It signals a whole new era of possibility for celebrities.” So-called lipstick lesbianism reached a peak when lang appeared on the cover of Vanity Fair “butched up,” being shaved by supermodel Cindy Crawford. Before this point, to be an openly gay woman in pop was tantamount to commercial suicide. In the early 90s, a few women were testing the boundaries, including Madonna. “There she was, smooching girls in her ‘Justify My Love’ video. It was bold and transgressive,” recalls Carolin. “Madonna did an Advocate interview where she talked a lot about her long love affair with gay male culture. It was inevitable that at some point she’d look across at the girls.”
In that interview, Madonna upped the ante regarding the Sandra Bernhard question. Sick of preconceived notions about gay women being mannish and ugly, she said: “If I could be some sort of a detonator to that bomb, then I was willing to do that…If it makes people feel better to think that I slept with her, they can think it. I’d almost rather they thought that I did, just so they could know here was this girl that everyone was buying records of, and she was eating someone’s pussy.”
During this period, Madonna was linked with a number of women. It was rumored that she and Sandra Bernhard fell out because Madonna transferred her affections to Bernhard’s girlfriend Ingrid Casares, the chic club owner from Miami. A furious Bernhard said: “I look at my friendship with her as like having a gallstone. You deal with it, there is pain, and then you pass it.” Though she vowed never to speak again to “Schmadonna,” some years later the two reconciled. They had too much in common, and the celebrity world is a small one. Ingrid, meanwhile, the self-confessed “spoiled rich kid” of Cuban exiles moaned that “I could discover the cure for cancer, and I’d still only be known as Madonna’s best friend.” Madonna also spent a while chasing the “Justify My Love” model Amanda Cazalet. “There was a lot of communication the following year (after the video) and I know if I’d been open to taking what was on offer, something would’ve happened,” Cazalet said.
And one of Madonna’s favorite lesbian friends was Japanese-American runway model Jenny Shimizu. “I believe she’s a credit to gay culture,” Shimizu told Diva magazine. “[Madonna] truly is what she represents: an open-minded individual who explores different lifestyles to educate herself about who she is. I can’t imagine a better friend to our community than Madonna.” Like Bernhard, Shimizu was a high-profile lesbian with an alternative glamour. She was first seen in her trademark tank top, jeans, and tattoos, modeling for Calvin Klein. Since then, her gamine, androgynous image has been muse to a succession of designers from Versace to Gaultier. “I think I’m attracted to powerful, aggressive, confident, sexual women. A lot of the women I’ve dated share those qualities,” said the Harley-driving model in 2006. One of her former lovers was movie star Angelina Jolie, and she has said that whenever Jolie called, she’d drop everything and join her “wherever she was in the world.” Madonna, too, became an important friend.
“I met Madonna when I was in her ‘Rain’ video around 1994–95, right about the time I started modeling for Calvin Klein, and we ended up hanging out in L.A., Paris, and New York. I ended up feeling like I was this lesbian hustler getting on planes meeting women,” said Shimizu. “One of my tattoos says HAULING ASS 1; it’s not a reference to hauling my own ass around, but in reference to my motorcycling—driving superfast. Madonna showed me a lot of things—took me to the theater and museums, and it was nice to hang out with her. She’s a lovely lady; a totally smart, confident woman.”
In the early 90s,
Madonna’s woman-centered side was at its strongest. Many saw that as a positive rather than fake. “The lesbian subcultural references…borrowed by Her Madge to enhance her vision of freewheeling female sexuality aren’t our possessions,” argues Diva’s Louise Carolin, “they’re our legacy, our contribution to the show.”
Lesbianism wasn’t the only taboo tackled by Madonna in her Sex book. Another prominent theme was that of sadomasochism. As well as being tied up by L.A. dykes, she plays with whips, ropes, and candles in a New York dungeon called The Vault. Dressed in a Nazi-style black cap and boots, she whips a large lady in a PVC dress. In other pictures, a menacing-looking biker nestles between her legs and drinks a dubious liquid from her high-heeled shoe. Making the connection between S&M and the self-punishment of religion, she lies horizontal, with bound hands and feet, under a tall, bare cross. This was echoed later, in a more modest form, on her 2006 Confessions tour, where she is tied to a giant mirrored disco cross. In Sex, Madonna looks like a sacrificial victim, alongside a man lying prone with candles on the back of each hand, placed like the nails of Christ on the cross. Redolent of a theatrical self-abasement, this shows one more aspect of Madonna’s journey with the crucifix.
“There is something comforting about being tied up,” she writes. “Like when you were a baby and your mother strapped you in the car seat. She wanted you to be safe. It was an act of love.” In this scenario, she shows how she has internalized her Catholic mother’s self-inflicted punishments. The crucifix wasn’t just about pain and martyrdom, however. It was Madonna’s talisman, because it symbolized both spirituality and sex. According to the Spanish art historian J. E. Cirlot: “Placed in the mystic Center of the cosmos, [the cross] becomes the bridge or ladder by means of which the soul may reach God…The cross, consequently, affirms the primary relationship between the two worlds of the celestial and the earthly…it stands for the conjunction of opposites…Hence its significance as a symbol for agony, struggle and martyrdom.”