In a series called Mondo Ironico, let us discuss how fucking antithetical something in pop culture is.
In one of many vignettes from Madonna’s early years that has become the stuff of lore, it was once said that her first mentor and dance teacher, Christopher Flynn, told her that gay men only worship tragic women. This got Madonna extremely up in arms, as she knew she was not the kind of woman who could ever come across as tragic. Keenly aware of her take no prisoners personality early on, a quality she didn’t seem to understand that gay men appreciate as well.
The exact exchange, per J. Randy Taraborrelli’s Madonna: An Intimate Biography, went as follows: “While doing stretching exercises in her black leotard, she asked Flynn, ‘Why do you think you like men?’ He answered the question by saying his sexuality was something that ‘just happened, nothing I can control.’ ‘Well, I wish I understood it,’ she said. ‘Why?’ ‘So I can tap into it. Look at women like Judy Garland and Marilyn Monroe. These women are gay favorites, aren’t they? I wish I knew what it is about them. Is it the glamor? Is it their behavior?’ Oh Madonna, trying to monetize a “phenomenon” even back then. “‘I think it’s because they’re so tragic,’ offered Flynn. ‘I think that’s what it is. You see them and you want to slit your wrists. Every gay man has wanted to slit his wrist at one time or another. So yes,’ he decided, ‘it’s because they’re so tragic.’ Madonna stopped stretching. ‘Well, then, forget it,’ she said, looking at her dance teacher seriously. ‘I will never be tragic. If it takes being tragic to have gay fans, then fuck it. I’ll appeal only to straight people, I guess.’”
Ah, if only she could have known. Maybe Madonna didn’t entice gay men with her tragicness, but she did with her razor-sharp ability to tell it like it is in a shade-drenched manner. And then AIDS came along, to boot, and Madonna turned out to be just about the only celebrity willing to do a damn thing about it. So, one way or another, she got her gay audience without being tragic—though some will argue the tragedy came later, when she refused to “act her age.” In short, she got what she wanted by still doing it her way. A way that has always been synonymous with controversy.
The latest one being, of all things, recreating her interpretation of Marilyn’s death scene for a V Magazine photoshoot taken by Steven Klein. Complete with pill bottles strewn about on the nightstand. Evidently, where sex has failed to continue shocking (except when Madonna shows “too much skin” “for her age” and/or parades her twenty-something boyfriend in a PDA moment), “morbid fascination” will do the trick in causing outrage.
And perhaps M’s fascination (now turned morbid) stems from this moment of epiphany with Flynn all those decades ago. The revelation that in order to truly be lauded and embraced by gay men, she would need to possess a fragility and delicateness that she simply could not. That doesn’t exist in her ball-busting, “I’m the boss” nature (a control freak one that also allows no room for Monroe’s boozy, pill-popping predilections). Which is not a persona. Marilyn’s “little girl lost” shtick was a bit of one, but, by and large, she really was that wayward. Madonna couldn’t act that way even if she wanted to. Unless, that is, she was channeling it for a Marilyn sendup.
Yet even during one of her most memorable Marilyn moments, “Material Girl,” Madonna manages to alter the sexual chemistry Monroe had with the screen by making it more autoerotic as opposed to being about appealing to men. But perhaps Madonna has continued to subconsciously lust after that early definition of what Flynn told her being a gay icon was. And maybe, in seeking to vaguely re-create Marilyn’s death scene, Madonna is edging closer to being, at least in pictorial form, the tragic girl (incidentally, the name of an unreleased song of hers) she secretly wanted to be to secure that gay following. Not realizing that the death of her mother alone was to provide enough “tragedy cachet” to sate the homos. But then M had to go and appropriate “vogueing,” not fathoming until it was too late that gay men can so often fault rather than applaud a woman for being “spiritually gayer.”
