GLR July-August 2024

MUSIC

The Madonna of the Road

T HE ARRIVAL of Madonna: A Rebel Life , by Mary Gabriel, could not have been better timed. In the fall of 2023, the pop star launched a concert tour, which she called “Celebration,” as a showcase of her great est hits. The tour was abruptly stalled by a health scare and hospitalization for a bac terial infection. Madonna, as always, sur vived, and she played the Gloria Gaynor hit “I Will Survive” to reinforce this fact once she hit the road for her twelfth world tour. This coincided with her recertification by the Guinness World Records as the biggest selling female artist of all time (more than 400 million records sold). The Queen of Pop is unique in that she has maintained her mainstream appeal while holding onto a loyal gay male fanbase. “Each generation has its female ‘gay icon,’ from Mae West to Elizabeth Taylor to Judy Garland to Bette

mined to direct a biopic about her own life, but she pulled the plug on the project after hazing a string of actresses who were all vying for the starring role. The book is di vided into six parts, each based on Madonna’s various residences (Michigan, New York, Los Angeles, Miami, London, and Lisbon). In this unauthorized biography, Gabriel traces Madonna’s lifelong obsession with gay men to a number of formative figures: Christopher Flynn, a ballet teacher who in troduced her to Detroit’s club scene; her openly gay younger brother (also Christo

C OLIN C ARMAN

THE CELEBRATION TOUR Madonna October 14, 2023 – May 4, 2024 MADONNA A Rebel Life by Mary Gabriel Li tt le, Brown and Company 319 pages, $38.

pher); and artist Keith Haring, whom she befriended after relo cating to New York City with only $35 in her pocket. For Gabriel, what cemented Madonna’s status as a gay icon was not so much her sexual carnality as her AIDS activism. A quotation by Larry Kramer—“Can we fight together?”—serves as an epigraph for a chapter on Madonna’s meteoric

rise in the 1980s. We learn that she not only vis ited patients in the AIDS wing at Saint Vin cent’s hospital but crawled into bed with them and cracked jokes. Dying and in a mental fog, the men called her “mother.” In the current Celebration tour, she per forms “Live to Tell” while images of gay men, notably Haring and Flynn, along with Robert Mapplethorpe

Midler,” writes Gabriel. “But for many—perhaps most— LGBTQ people born between 1960 and 1980, the female icon is Madonna.” I wrote about her in this magazine when she turned fifty years old. She’s now 65 and surprisingly spry for her age, though she sported a knee brace during the tour. Gabriel relays one of the artist’s admissions: “[I am a] broken doll held together with tape and glue.” During a Seattle performance, a male backup dancer, in high heels, dropped her and, true to form, the Material Girl laughed it off. She kept singing, lying on the stage, perhaps in keeping with her song “Over and Over” (1984), in which she offers this advice: “And if I fall, I get up again now.” Much has been made of the fact that Gabriel’s biography is 819 pages long, but for fanboys like me, 819 pages isn’t nearly enough. As diva lit goes, Barbra Streisand’s new memoir, My Name Is Barbra , is 992 pages long, while Britney Spears’ The Woman inMe is a slender 275. Eschew ing the written word, Madonna is deter Colin Carman, who teaches English at Colorado Mesa University, has an article in the newly pub lished book Romantic Women’s Writing and Sexual Transgression (Edinburgh University Press).

and Freddie Mercury, appear on in dividual screens before the images quickly multiply to show hundreds of people who also died. Even Elton John, Madonna’s longtime nemesis, was impressed and said: “We’re deeply moved by the heartfelt tribute from Madonna during her Celebration tour per formance of ‘Live to Tell’ honor ing the 40.4 million people we have lost to AIDS.” Madonna: A Rebel Life is ex

haustively researched—at least five footnotes pepper every page—and the final word of the epilogue reflects Madonna’s overall theme of “celebra tion.” Ever since “American Life” (2001), which flopped because it was critical of American society while the na tion was dusting itself off after September 11th, Madonna has been smuggling her politics into pop music. My hands-down favorite is

TheG & LR Continued on page 45

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