Madonna and Me (17 page)

In the 1992 film
A League of Their Ow
n, Madonna played the streetwise and sexy ballplayer Mae Mordabito, a character much like herself then, but her character also showed a softer, more human side by falling in love with a G.I. in the movie. This role provided a dimension to Madonna I’d never seen before: Even if it was just acting, she could be womanly, coquettish; not just brazen, but rounded and complex. It was a critical turning point for how I wanted to be as a woman. I wanted to have it all, while being it all.

As I grew older, Madonna did too. And my Madonna religion waned. I loved her but didn’t need her as much. I was still with her in 1993 when she released “Rain.” My cousins stayed with us that summer and we snuck out to the neighborhood cemetery at night and smoked cigarettes in the woods. It was my favorite song of the 1990s, a powerful ballad about catharsis and letting go of love.

Madonna’s music videos were instruction manuals, and in so many ways Madonna was my true protector, best friend, confidante; I listened to her when nothing made sense and crucial relationships
and beliefs in my life dissolved at a rapid pace. Always untouchable, Madonna withstood years of condemnation, but I believed I understood her the way no one else did. Madonna emblemized happiness, a life without limits, and I knew I wanted that and not my parents’ humdrum version of living: their tired bodies dragged out of the house each morning, the gruff churning of the engine, the invisible desire to flee.

Even more of a quandary for me than Madonna’s supposed pact with Satan was that she only had one name. I was blithely naive to the idea that Madonna was anyone’s child, that she was birthed as routinely as any infant in a local hospital. Before Madonna, I had never envisioned myself without my parents; we were one body, an entity, but with just her name Madonna showed me independence; she was whole and alone and was seemingly born that way.

She was with me in 1994, when the blood pierced my panties on a Sunday morning and I called to my mother for assistance. I knew something had finally happened, and I was finally transitioning into a woman.

And as I aged and changed and began crafting my own life, my feelings toward Madonna changed. Where I had once worshipped an idealized version of her—youthful, sexual, beautiful—I now see much more, even fault. How I now view her is entirely unlike my childhood idol. I look back at those years with a sad fondness for us both, the struggling girl and the female on top, both bemused, giddy, exasperated; and I think of her as a mother of sorts, the person who taught me not
everything
I needed to know about being a woman, just a lot of the important stuff.

Christine Bachman

 

 

 

 

 

I WAS SEVEN years old, dressed in sparkly plastic heels, my mother’s slip, my father’s fake boobs (yes, that’s right), and makeup clumsily caked on my face: It was my wedding day.

Actually, it was my wedding day almost every afternoon when I played “house” with my next-door neighbor, Lucy. We would solemnly hum “Here Comes the Bride” as we walked slowly down the red-carpeted hallway and approached my stuffed monkey, Coco, who would momentarily join us—Madonna and Michael Jackson—in holy matrimony. And while the focus was on the ceremony itself, the game didn’t end there. We would play on, simulating the consummation of our marriage, which would then result in the birth of the couple’s first child. And as we, Madonna and Michael Jackson, managed our successful careers, we also found happiness in all the mundane chores of a “normal” middle-class life: cooking dinner, tidying the house, and teaching our children proper table manners.

Years later, as I look back on this well-rehearsed performance of
my childhood, I attempt to make sense of the freakish union of the King and Queen of Pop, two of the biggest queer icons in pop culture. Why was
this
union—with marriage being the epitome of het-eronormativity—which places heterosexuality as the foundation of normalcy and all that is socially acceptable—such a focus of my young life, and why was Madonna, in particular, my leading lady?

As my father’s fake boobs suggest, my childhood was a little unusual. I was raised by a German mother and a gay father; one parent uprooted from her country, never to fit into the cookie-cutter suburbs of America, and the other an escapee of Salt Lake City, who ultimately ended up living among a chosen family of gay men. I was the product of their marriage (and later, when my father came out, their divorce), and believed for years that
everyone’s
father must be gay, and that all mothers revert to speaking German whenever they are counting or cooking. I grew up in an impossible family, a family that made no sense compared to the heterosexual, two-parented families around me, but I felt loved, supported, safe, and happy. Maybe that’s why, when constructing my fantasy family, I chose another impossible couple. The make-believe romance of Madonna and Michael—the parents of my idealized world—married the normative and the queer, allowing my seven-year-old brain to make sense of the contradictions that I experienced in my everyday life.

My youthful obsession with Madonna herself, however, was a much more superficial idolization. I was surrounded by gay men who knew her songs, her dances, her history, and her gossip. Through Madonna, they shared a language and a borrowed identity—one Madonna appropriated, in part, from gay and black culture—to express their own. To be part of their world, I learned this language and grew to identify with the perspective of my gay adult role models, who looked up to this icon of “fabulousness.” Yet I also grew to identify with Madonna
herself
, as the only woman in the room, the model of idealized femininity, whose performances simultaneously glorified enforced, and then
destroyed
the rules of gender and sexuality. In this
way, my make-believe games blurred into my reality and the creation of my own identity, shaping the way I would understand my place in a world of gay men.

There is a growing community of children and adults that have been raised by queer parents. Some of us call ourselves “queerspawn.” We queerspawn are familiar with living between the dominant heterosexual world and the often less conventional world of our parents. We inhabit both of these worlds as insiders
and
outsiders. It’s quite a powerful position to occupy, having access to the safety of socially acceptable rules and codes, and also to a universe that transcends traditional boundaries, giving us a passport by birth to explore a more radical and imaginative territory.

Unlike me, Madonna was not lucky enough to have a queer parent, though a community of gay male fans adopted her early in her career. And as a gay icon, a sexually provocative pop star, a rule-breaker,
and
a privileged white woman from a traditional Catholic family, Madonna has also spent most of her life straddling both worlds as an insider and an outsider. This “hybridity” permeates her work, merging elements of both worlds into her performances, as she evokes Marilyn Monroe (the iconic heterosexual ideal of feminine allure), while indulging in a variety of illicit sexualities and ambiguous genders in her banned 1990 music video “Justify My Love.” In this video, and in so many of her performances that borrow themes from the mainstream and the queer worlds, Madonna exploits both realms to gain access to new levels of cultural relevance and power.

By the time I entered young adulthood, power was much more interesting than sparkly plastic heels and pretend weddings, though Madonna was still my leading lady. As an undergraduate, I chose to write my senior thesis on Madonna and her successes and failures in disrupting, or “queering,” some of our most seemingly stable binaries: sexuality, gender, race, class, and age. My thesis provided me with a legitimate excuse to throw myself headfirst into a thorough examination of Madonna’s career, and my academic quest to
understand Madonna and her relationship to queerness and power became a fierce obsession.

Ultimately, I was in it to discover how this gay-male icon—this legend of pop-star greatness—claimed access to untethered power. Desperately I read between the lines, committing every Madonna lyric, movement, and performance to memory. What did these performances
mean
? How did Madonna, a character that had played such an integral role in my coming of age, move between traditional and queer spaces so successfully? And how could I, a queerspawn born in the age of Madonna, channel my insider/outsider status to question, resist, challenge, and ultimately
celebrate
access to both conventional power
and
queer power? Madonna was the key to understanding one more piece of this power puzzle.

As a college student, when I wasn’t poring over hours of Madonna music videos, I was testing the new limits of my world as a young adult, discovering my passions and learning how to act on them: from coming out as a queer-identified straight woman, to creating an institutionally supported space for queer studies on my college campus. Madonna had guided me through my early childhood, providing me with the tools I needed to communicate with my world of gay men, while opening my eyes to the rigid rules of femininity as well as the strength she found in breaking them—seemingly just for the fun of it. As a college student, she guided me again, taking me through each of her performances until I was finally satisfied with the knowledge that I had had all along: Our real strength is our ability to move, adapt, change, grow, be part of and separate from the worlds which we inhabit. My childhood fantasy, in which I, Madonna, married Michael Jackson, was not just a mockery of a heterosexual ritual, it was also
exactly
where I felt most comfortable and powerful.

Thus, it is ironic, informative, and fitting that I am now recreating this duality in my real life as I prepare to get married. Though my partner is neither Michael Jackson nor the clueless neighbor that grew to know her part so well, he too understands the life of an
insider/outsider. As a competitive triathlete, model, and all-around privileged white man, he is a poster boy (literally) of mainstream America; but as a feminist and queer-identified man committed to exploring the limits of gender-bending, he feels more at home at a drag show than at a football game, though he can easily pass in either arena. Our partnership has always balanced the thin line between the queer and mainstream worlds, and exists as an anomaly in both: We look like your typical heterosexual couple, but we subscribe to the ideologies and values of the queer world. Thus, as our relationship has grown, so has our shared commitment to challenge our conventional facade in order to identify with and reveal the radical, queer position we take in our communities, our politics, and our sexualities. To shake things up, as it were, Madonna-style. What would she think, I wonder, of our “Save the Date” cards, complete with a photo of me in a tuxedo and my blushing groom in a white wedding gown?

As a composite creation, I have much fear about this “next step” in the script of conventional heterosexual romance. Will I lose my membership to the queer world that has raised me? Will I gain permanent acceptance to a heteronormative world and
become
a straight girl? These thoughts terrify me. Struggling with the idea of entering—’til death do us part—a world of mainstream heterosexuality, I find myself trying to signal my disapproval and resistance. But doesn’t Madonna teach us that the most effective way to change the rules is not to resent them or ignore them, but to upend them and make them your own?

Embracing her many contradictions, Madonna does not shy away from celebrating ambiguous genders and sexual identities, nor does she refuse to champion the myth of heterosexual romance. Rather, she marries elements of her queerness with traditional ideals of conventional sexuality, experimenting with drag and gender-bending, as she did during her 1993 tour The Girlie Show. Performing “Like a Virgin,” Madonna mimicked Marlene Dietrich with a low voice and thick German accent, but also evoked
Cabaret
’s “Emcee,” dressed
sharply in a tuxedo and presenting the audience with a deliberately confused masculinity. Her ever-present bright-red lipstick undermined her claims to manhood, and as she slipped into the Detroit accent and persona of a working-class male in “Bye Bye Baby,” her character was aroused by three androgynous dancing girls—exotic for their gender-bending as well as for their racial ambiguity. Madonna’s performance throughout the piece emphasized the ways in which she borrows cultural cues from queer staples, and from traditional heterosexual scripts. And with this unexpected combination of the mainstream and the queer, Madonna brings something new to her audiences, tapping into a power not limited by conventional rules
or
the rules and expectations attached to carefully maintained queerness. I relate to that.

She reminds me to find strength in the insider/outsider identity that has defined me since my make-believe weddings to Michael Jackson. As a queer-identified woman with a queer-identified male partner, our marriage will be just as freakish and fun as my imagined childhood weddings. So, I owe her thanks, for reminding me from childhood onward, to always “express yourself, don’t repress yourself!”