“I’m strong, ambitious, and I know exactly what I want. Now, if that makes me a bitch, okay.”

Fuck You, Seattle

WHEN I WAS thirteen, my parents drove us forty-five minutes from our home on a rural wooded peninsula to a suburban-mall movie theater to see Desperately Seeking Susan.

I wasn’t eating popcorn: One year after a surgery that removed a portion of my jaw, I could barely chew. This was just one of the small humiliations that had accumulated after I had been diagnosed with terminal thyroid cancer, undergone extensive surgery and testing, survived a recurrence of the cancer, and traded a death sentence for the murkier and far less glamorous reality of a rare genetic disorder. My neck was sliced halfway round, my jaw riddled with holes, and I had been diagnosed with a second, separate and distinct, type of cancer. The treatments had just started to remove the skin cancer ravaging my torso. Over the next three years I would have nearly four hundred biopsies.

I sat with cold hands tucked into each armpit, only half-awake until the movie started, and my perception of the world shifted in a sudden and irreversible way.

The film offered something that made every hair on my body stand on end: a glimpse of a world that might be out there somewhere—urban, messy, lawless; with cool, caustic boys on scooters, careless girls bedecked in ripped vintage clothes, and enormous empty warehouse apartments.

In the film, Susan was a trickster, a character with no motives, no back story, and no possessions except what she could carry with her or fit into a Port Authority locker. She was all gesture and blithe indifference. She took what she wanted, whether that was a bottle of room-service vodka, the contents of a wallet, a pair of studded boots, or sex on a pinball machine.

Roberta was different: constrained by tradition, rules, responsibilities, life. She had a place in the world, even if she did not like it. And then in an absurd flight of fiction, one knock to the head, a change of wardrobe: Roberta became Susan.

And that wardrobe change seemed to be all she needed. She found a place to stay, a love interest, a job based on her newfound clothes (and confusion). Even after she regained her memory and kept exclaiming, “I’m a housewife from New Jersey!” the truth was subsumed, not just to the cops or the people in her new life, but also to her husband and friends from home.

The movie proposed this radical vision: A costume can change not just perception, but reality.

Precisely when a thirteen-year-old most wants privacy and autonomy, I had lost all control of my body. Blood, vomit, pus, shit: Everything was discussed, examined, weighed, quantified. Doctors made the major decisions, my parents the minor. I had no choice in even the smallest details; not food, not even bathing. I was not allowed to immerse my skin in water, not allowed to shower. My mother washed my hair in the sink every third day, wrapping fresh scars in plastic to keep them dry and safe.

Other girls might have worried about their appearance, but I didn’t need to bother. I knew that I was ugly—so mutilated, in fact, that I had a permanent gym class waiver to avoid having to disrobe and endure the mockery of my peers.

The surface is indeed superficial, but it matters—it is what you show the world, what you want the world to think and know. And the primary presentation of my essential self, then as now, were the scars. At the start of 1983 I looked garroted, as though I had been hung or strangled or cut in a knife fight. By the end of 1986, I would have hundreds of jagged red slashes and pearly white lumps trailing across my face, chest, shoulders, belly. Others were more obscure, hidden. But even if you couldn’t see them, I could feel them. They throbbed.

Desperately Seeking Susan suggested: So what? Don’t try to conform. Wear the costume, be a freak, because if someone is looking at your dress they are not looking at whatever you have hidden underneath.

Just after dawn on a wet gray Saturday morning a few weeks after seeing Desperately Seeking Susan, my parents dropped me off in a semi-deserted industrial town across the bay from our house. I was early, but not the first in line at the waterbed store, queuing up to buy Madonna concert tickets.

I recognized one of the boys in front of me, Marc. He had a locker near mine in the back hallway of a rural junior high school that resembled a penitentiary. I would never have dared talk to him at school—he was in the ninth grade, while I was a mere eighth grader—but that morning on the sidewalk, we struck up a conversation. He introduced me to his friend Scott, and we whiled away the hours chatting about music.

That is how it worked back then, back there. The music you listened to made a statement of intent: This is who I am. This is what I believe.

Arguably it was not a wise choice for a fourteen-year-old boy like Marc to declare a sincere love of Madonna. The taunt “fag” was a common and casual insult used to torment my new friends, but not necessarily because of the music they listened to. People our age didn’t have the context. Even then it seemed extraordinary to me that “wannabe” and “poser” were two of the worst insults that could be leveled at a person. How do you define authenticity in your early teens, anywhere, let alone if you live in a failing shipyard town? Should we have worn steel-toed boots and welders’ hardhats?

Madonna tickets secured, I went back to my routine of school, doctors—and drill team.

I had stopped riding the school bus because this kid named Troy tried to set my hair on fire. Lacking a ride for the eight miles home through dense second-growth forests, I was forced to find an approved afterschool club.

Technically, it was less a matter of joining the drill team (I was not issued a uniform, nor did I perform) as being drafted. The young, charismatic drama teacher in charge of the group caught me hiding behind the shrubbery once too often and put my idle hands to use running the tape player as the other girls snapped their necks and hips rhythmically to the latest pop tunes.

These girls were popular, the elite of the school, with a mongrel assortment of athletes as ballast for routines. The captain was Nikki, and her co-captain was Crystal. They, like all the girls on the team, had permed hair, blow-dried and feathered up into quiffs standing several inches above their heads.

My title was “manager,” though I was neither in charge nor even a mascot. I was just there, tolerated, ignored, so long as the teacher was watching. This was the most desirable of all scenarios. If I had any goal at all it was to be unremarkable, invisible, vanished, gone.

Practice was held in the commons, a vast multipurpose room where we ate lunch and attended assemblies, with a three-story atrium and potted plants the size of small cars. I stood at a folding table next to the concrete planters, hitting the buttons on a boom box, flipping the cassette tapes, pausing and starting “Hey Mickey,” “Eye of the Tiger,” “Honky Tonk Woman.”

Whenever the team took a break, I trailed behind them to the nearest restroom, where I watched as they painted their faces with cheap drugstore makeup and curled their hair with the butane curling irons they carried in white fake-leather purses.

I was not trying to fit in with the group (and the attempt would have been useless: Outside of drill team, these girls were among my most vicious tormentors). I was studying them in hopes of creating a reasonable camouflage. Belonging with the drill team without actually having to befriend them was conformity as strategy. If that required tedious long hours listening to adolescent girls’ gossip, fine. If I could parse their mannerisms, clothes, concerns, I might be able to stay alive.

My new friends from the concert ticket line provided the first real social outlet I had in junior high, and I slowly edged toward the group of people who carried colored folders with pictures of their favorite bands cut out of magazines and taped to the front. These people shared my interest not just in Madonna but in the other things we had seen in stolen moments of the music video show Bombshelter Video, or heard on KJET radio: the Pet Shop Boys, Frankie Goes to Hollywood, Tears for Fears, The Clash, the Eurythmics.

They, like me, hid in the library or art room at breaks. We tried to go to dances and football games to fit in, but never quite looked right, even though we were buying our clothes at the same places as everyone else.

Madonna made popular music (though the popular kids in our school didn’t like it) by trading on her sexual identity, and that fact upset our elders, but we were young: asexual, maybe yearning or experimenting, but unformed. She said, decide for yourself. Our parents did not necessarily agree.

We all existed in a liminal space of possibilities, with a profound lack of agency matched by a desire for control. We sorted ourselves according to bands, liking but not quite understanding what we were listening to. It would take a couple more decades before I figured out what the heck Morrissey was talking about in “Piccadilly Palare.”

It was time for me to prepare for another round of cancer treatment. Most common foods were rigidly restricted, and I was taken off the medication that controlled my metabolism and kept me alive.

Starved of food and hormones, I could barely stay awake during the day. Classes, already fraught with social drama, turned into half-waking nightmares. I can’t even offer anecdotes and stories, just vague semi-delusional moments of horror. You’ve seen the movies: Take it as a given that if my life were scripted by John Hughes, I would be worse off than the nameless neck-brace girl portrayed by Joan Cusack in the movie Sixteen Candles. I wouldn’t want to read that story, and I certainly did not want to live it.

Outside of class, school was dangerous, even with security cameras in the halls. Violence was common, hazing and bullying were tolerated and often encouraged by staff. The worst of the scenarios, waking or dreaming, too often featured Troy, the kid who tried to set my hair on fire, or Nikki and Crystal, laughing—and the jokes often centered on me, because I could not defend myself. I was too weak to make a fist, and one tap would have shattered my jaw. I learned to be quiet, to watch and wait.

Some people believe there is nobility in suffering, and my family and doctors expected that my peers would respect my vulnerability. The reality is different; profound illness is deviance from the crowd, just like being too smart, too gay, too other. I was different, and different was bad. I was a target of harassment whether I tried to fit in or not. Too sick to succeed, and eventually too sick to care, I kept accounts, clocking each new humiliation.

My hair started to fall out, in strands and then clumps, and no amount of hairspray or sessions with a butane curling iron could hide the fact. One day, I locked myself in the bathroom at home with scissors and my father’s rusty safety razor, hacking and slashing until half the remaining hair was gone.

I was too tired to even flip the tapes as the drill team prepared for the regional championships. Instead, I hid in a restroom the girls did not frequent, sleeping in a toilet stall with my forehead pressed against the cold metal wall.

The day of the concert finally arrived. It was the first concert I had ever attended, the first night of Madonna’s Virgin Tour, and therefore the very first Madonna concert ever. I had a seat in the front row of the balcony, wedged in among my parents, an aunt, and the sole friend left from before the illness, a girl named Christine. The place was a cacophony of sound and activity, though I was drifting, not thinking about much except radioactive isotopes served in a Dixie cup and days spent in cold exam rooms holding perfectly still as enormous machines scanned my body one millimeter at a time.

I was so tired.

The theater filled with rippling waves of enthusiasm, girls in sequins and lace and sawed-off gloves, and I watched as they excitedly took their seats, clapping and hollering for their heroine.

Then something enormously startling happened: The opening act appeared, snarling white rappers from New York City. So foreign, so improbable, so wrong for this audience. They raced around the stage, waving their arms and shouting, and the crowd went calm in confusion, then started shouting back in anger.

This was the first time Seattle met the Beastie Boys, and the city was not amused.

I put my hands over my mouth, laughing so hard I could barely breathe.

The band held the stage a little longer until nearly all the little girls were booing, then they exited with the refrain “Fuck you, Seattle!”

In the interval between the opening act and the concert, the fatigue of the illness and the excitement of the night proved too much. I put my head down on the railing and fell asleep, missing the rest of the show.

It didn’t matter—I was alive, I was there, and I still own the souvenir T-shirt.

One weekend afternoon a week or two later, we boarded a yellow school bus for the long drive to the other side of the county for the drill team regional championships. The team was psyched up and ready to prove it in their matching green-and-white polyester tunics and pleated skirts.

The venue was a windowless junior high gymnasium reeking of floor polish and sweat. We watched the clock, watched each other, the various teams whispering behind their hands about minor fashion differences in the sea of feathered bleached hair: a barrette here, a slightly less-than-white sock there.

Then it was time. My team marched out on to the gym floor in formation, hair and smiles perfectly organized, arms held stiffly at their sides, waiting for the music to start.

Standing behind the table next to other managers and the judges, I was supposed to cue their signature song, “Old Time Rock and Roll,” by Bob Seger.

Instead, I hit the button and started the Willy Nelson and Julio Iglesias duet “To All the Girls I’ve Loved Before.”

Nikki did not lose her smile as she turned her head and made eye contact with me, hatred burning behind mascara, lip gloss, braces. I stared back, then shrugged, not even pretending to search around for the correct tape.

She signaled and the group dutifully started their routine, not at all in sync with the music, half the girls unable to follow the intricate patterns without the cues of the beat.

After the judges issued a verdict (we lost), the girls huddled together, several crying. I stood against a wall, arms crossed, thinking of the scene in Desperately Seeking Susan when Madonna robs her sleeping date, tips her hat, and walks out of the hotel saying, “It’s been fun.”

Sabotage? Simple exhaustion? I don’t know now, and I didn’t care then. Whether choice or accident, it happened. Motives make no difference, and anyway, those girls were never going to play nice.

The fasting, medication, and tests that had made me too tired to watch the concert were leading up to an even more intense cancer treatment, scheduled for spring vacation to avoid interrupting my schooling. But then another unrelated anomaly was discovered, another surgery ordered. The doctors and my parents nodded and whispered and wondered: How to minimize the impact on my education? The experts wanted to perpetuate this idea of a normal education, normal adolescence, normal life. I was just about ready to accept the goal of remaining alive, maybe, because it seemed to mean so much to my parents. But normal, by then, was too much to ask.

Clutching the skimpy hospital gown tighter around my shivering body, the paper on the examination table crinkling and tearing as I shifted, I said, “I’m not going back. I will burn down the school if you make me.”

Fuck you, Seattle.

The music was never as important as the delivery. The image. The style. Madonna offered a primitive and powerful idea of liberation, like many artists before and since. But her music was popular; it travelled vast distances, penetrated the forest where I lived. And, critically, her music was joyous. During the years when I had many legitimate reasons to feel sad, Madonna made music with an uplifting message: You can dance.

I made some friends, made some enemies, dropped out of school in the eighth grade. Later I went back, and that was probably the point: Wear the costume, and when it stops working, choose another.

There would be other songs, movies, concerts. Madonna embodied the dichotomy: virgin and whore, dutiful and independent, promiscuous and pristine. She did not require a lifetime of devotion—she did not even sustain her own relationships or defined interests all that long. Take what you need, and keep moving.

My life might have been the same without that concert, but it would certainly have had an inferior soundtrack.

The kids I met in line for concert tickets? We all moved away to find the urban, messy lives we were hoping for. Our friendships have unfurled across decades: adolescence, high school, college, emerging adulthood, coming out, marriage, divorce, raising our own children, travels across countries and continents. But though they are the friends who have known me longest, they (like anyone) only see the versions of myself I share and promote.

When I met one of those boys, decades later, in Europe, he asked, “Why didn’t you tell me I was gay?”

I replied, “It was none of my business.”

I asked if he knew I was in treatment for two different kinds of cancer in the ’80s. He was shocked. “No!”

The disease wasn’t what I wanted to show, and therefore, he didn’t see it.

Last year, I visited my hometown. I was sitting in a coffee shop talking to my mother about plans for the future. The question was where to move next: I was having trouble deciding. This was a conversation I’d had with dozens of friends and colleagues all over the world.

London, Paris, Berlin—which should I choose? I said the words, then started to laugh wildly at the perversity of having the discussion in that place. I was still laughing when I realized that someone at the next table was listening.

I turned to look. It was Nikki, with shorter but still-dyed-blonde hair, jogging clothes instead of the team uniform, and she was staring at me with revulsion. Just like the day I caused the squad to lose at regionals.

I stared back for a sustained moment, and it was like we were once again wielding colored folders declaring our cultural affiliations.

Did Nikki recognize me, or was she just annoyed to have her morning interrupted by the loud chatter of an interloper, someone so obviously from out of town? I’ve lost my rural accent. My clothes, the things I carry with me, communicate that I do not live in the Northwest, or anywhere in the United States. I can’t help it—that is just true.

I’m still the raggedy girl in spectacles, the drill team manager who hits the wrong buttons, dreaming of elsewhere. Nikki is forever the carefully groomed captain, the boss of her small syncopated corner of the world. Maybe there were no possibilities after all: Maybe we were simply what we were, and would always remain.

And maybe that is okay.

Madonna in My Corner

Ada Scott

THERE WAS MADONNA on the cover of another magazine: spreadeagled against a ring post, in leopard shorts that were more panties than boxing trunks, a black sports bra, and a cross dangling between her breasts. It was 2008 and Madonna’s flair for self-promotion was as impressive as ever—she was looking mighty, and I hadn’t been feeling mighty at all lately. I grabbed a copy of the magazine (celebrity news rag LaLate), brought it home, ripped off the cover, and taped Madonna to my wall.

As an eighteen-year-old in 1984, I could have been an extra in Desperately Seeking Susan. By day I was attending classes at Brooklyn College, and by night I roamed Manhattan’s clubs, from Danceteria to Pyramid to the Peppermint Lounge. I didn’t plan it this way, but in 1985, soon after Madonna married Sean Penn, I got married. When she divorced Penn in 1989, I divorced too. I guess we were both, well, too young to sustain young love.

Later, when Madonna adopted her daughter Mercy, I was a single mom taking care of my daughter by another man. I didn’t travel across continents for my child, but just as Madonna went to Malawi to adopt, turning hopelessness into hope, I used my meager resources to create a good life for my daughter Chava.

Chava is no longer a child. She’s old enough to take the bus home from school, old enough to hang out with her teen friends and, when it comes to music, she’s old enough to choose what she listens to (and deliver opinions about what I listen to). With my daughter often out of the house desperately seeking her own Susans, I found myself with the kind of freedom I’d never had when I became a mother.

So I had time on my hands when I first saw that image of Madonna, looking fighting-fit and staring at me from the magazine rack. I’d wanted to get back in shape for a long time, so long that the desire was more about habit and less about truth. But when I saw Madonna, still looking young and strong in her fifties, still scowling for the camera, I thought, why not? Why not let this woman, whose music I danced to, whose gossip I ate up, whose films brought me to the theaters, why not let her push me in a new, selfish way to work my own body? Madonna’s “Give it 2 Me” had just hit the air, and the song’s lyrics spoke to me:

What are you waiting for?
Nobody’s gonna show you how
Why wait for someone else to do what you can do right now?

I was old enough to know the importance of carping the diem, so I said again, this time out loud, “Why not?”

I knew a little about boxing. Some of my earliest memories were sitting in the living room with my mother and father on Friday nights watching the fights. While they drank cans of Schlitz and cheered their favorites, I played with my kid brother, holding open my palms so he could hit them with his small fists—my kid brother ended up winning the Golden Gloves. I was never an avid fan—I argued with my parents about the brutality of boxing—but when a match started and two men were fighting for their lives and for glory, I couldn’t help but admire their spirit.

Two subway stops from my apartment, tucked under the shadows of the Brooklyn Bridge, is Gleason’s Gym, one of the most famous boxing gyms in the world. Gleason’s is home to many former and current champions, but the gym also offers white-collar boxing classes to nonfighters who want to get in shape and learn the rudiments of boxing. Though I grew up blue-collar (the fights on my streets were about violence, not fitness), I figured a white-collar class would be a safer introduction to the sweet science. Even from outside, standing on Front Street on a Saturday morning, I could hear the grunts of men and women working hard. When I walked up the stairs to the gym, which fills the second story of a former warehouse, I could smell the sweat.

Posted at the gym’s entrance was a plaque with the poet Virgil’s words (I must have had Madonna on my mind that morning because I read the sign as “Virgin,” not “Virgil”).

Now whoever has courage
and a strong and collected spirit in his breast
let him come forth, lace up his gloves,
and put up his hands.

Just as Madonna kept reinventing herself, I was ready to change: to update my body, to upgrade my mind, and to find something that heightened what I readily admitted was mundane—the life of another (somewhat disgruntled) single mom in the big city.

I moved my eyes away from Virgil’s words and took in the boxing gym: three boxing rings; a dozen heavy bags hanging like thick pillars to develop power; a row of speed bags shaped like inflated teardrops to develop coordination; the whipping sound of leather ropes slapping the cement floor; the deeper sounds of men and women grunting; and the beauty of people in motion with physiques that were more dancer than Hollywood thug. I imagined Madonna walking into Gleason’s. I saw her surveying the scene with her signature bravado, cocky confidence in her eyes, daring the world to question her blonde ambition just before striking a pose or jumping into a frenzied dance step. Madonna in my head, I steeled myself, collected my spirit, and walked in.

I changed in back and my shorts felt too long, my tank top too scant, and my sneakers too clean. When the trainer taught me the basic two-step of boxing, I felt awkward and foolish, especially when I saw the graceful movements of professionals dancing in the ring. And when I started to hit the bag, I felt weak. It was truly heavy, and my punches hardly moved the red pillar with the word Everlast printed down the side. There was nothing Hollywood about my first days in the gym, no soundtracks of power and victory. But I kept going back.

It’s now been two years since I started working out at Gleason’s Gym. I have worked with veteran trainers on my jabs and hooks and uppercuts. I have thrown thousands of punches at the heavy bags. I have learned to create my own music on the speed bag, the rat-tat-tat triple rhythm that fills every boxing gym. I have even sparred with some of my fellow white-collar fighters. My nose has been bloodied. My ribs have been bruised. And my muscles have lengthened and tightened. There are days when I leave the gym so exhausted I can hardly get down the subway steps to catch the A train back to my apartment, but by the time I do get home and dry out my hand wraps and shower off the sweat from the day’s work, I feel young again—almost like a virgin, when the possibilities of life seemed possible.

Which brings me nearly full circle to my purpose here, to Madonna.

Part of staying in shape, part of every boxer’s regimen, is road work. I force myself to run at least twice a week so when I do spar, I don’t collapse from exhaustion. Boxing is really about balance and legwork, which is why Madonna would make a better prize fighter in real life than, say, a muscle-bound Stallone. I get bored of running the streets in my neighborhood, and when I have some extra time, I take the A train past Brooklyn into Manhattan, to Columbus Circle, where I can run Central Park’s loop. One relatively early morning, climbing Cat Hill on the park’s east side, I saw two runners approaching: a tall man and a small woman. The man wore shorts and a tank top. The woman wore sweats and sunglasses. Just before we passed each other, I recognized her face: Madonna, out for an incognito run with her bodyguard. I didn’t stop to gawk. I didn’t call out her name. I didn’t ask for an autograph. I’m a born-and-bred New Yorker, too cool to lose my cool over a star, usually uninterested in celebrities. What I did do was look in her eyes—what I could see of them behind her tinted lenses—and nod my head. She nodded back. Of course she didn’t know she was one of the catalysts for my Central Park run, but that moment of connection felt perfect.

Madonna striking a pose on a poster. Me striking a stance in a boxing gym.

I still have Madonna’s ring-post poster above my bed. My daughter, now eighteen, mocks my home-decorating technique of taping magazine pages to the walls (along with the picture of Madonna pretending to be a fighter, I’ve taped photographs of real female fighters sweating real sweat). Chava rolls her eyes in exaggerated embarrassment when I walk around in tight T-shirts that show off my bantamweight arms, or when she catches me shadowboxing in the living room, kicking the ass of whatever opponent is in my head that day. Sometimes I even throw punches to the tunes of early Madonna, when she was just a kid coming up.

Madonna Louise Ciccone. She was always more than a could-have-been contender. Like the best champions, she inspired millions. She helped shape me in my could-have-been years when I was young and felt I could take on the world. She helped motivate me in my non-contender years when life as a single mom seemed a little too tough. And she got me to Gleason’s Gym. It seems Madonna has been in my corner all along—sometimes directly, usually tangentially, a song playing in the background, a line of lyrics in my head.

Borderline: Madonna’s Rebel Stance

Maria Raha

I’VE ALWAYS LOVED badasses.

And before her strange adoption drama in Malawi; before her rather unwitting embrace of Kabbalah; and before those acts belied her supreme narcissism, Madonna was, in my eyes, a definitive badass.

Her first album, Madonna, invaded suburban radio stations in 1983, when I was eleven years old. I had grown up listening to Joan Jett, Pat Benatar, the Go-Go’s, and Blondie; I had always liked, respected, and dreamt of becoming like these women, whom I admired for their rough edges. In short, I liked women I was slightly scared of. And because of that, there was no good reason why I should have been so astounded by Madonna.

But I was.

That fascination had to do with the fact that most of the women prevalent in ’80s pop culture had bodies that didn’t look like my softening pubescent frame. The most admired women then were perfectly sculpted and toned—they fit the standards of beauty that were slapped, crammed, and cramped into magazines, from Cosmo to Playboy. The women of Charlie’s Angels, plus Loni Anderson, Suzanne Somers, and Bo Derek—hell, even The Dukes of Hazzard’s Daisy Duke—were entirely too perfect for any preteen to model themselves after. Besides, they bored me. They preened. They posed. They wore completely uninteresting, mostly pastel clothing, and curled their gleaming, mermaid-like hair. Even ’80s rock stars, including Joan Jett, had angular, athletic bodies. But I was pale and freckled and sported insolent cowlicks; I had thick, short legs, wide feet, and broad shoulders—and I was always picked last for teams in gym class.

But Madonna seemed more like me than she did a celebrity. She had risen to infamy with a belly she wasn’t afraid of. Unlike the compulsive tummy tucking of Jane Fonda’s workout—and later, Suzanne Somers’ ThighMaster—Madonna was initially unapologetic about that extra layer of chub. Instead of pretending that she didn’t have it, she showed it off. She framed and bedazzled it with rhinestone belts and cropped T-shirts. She burst out of bustiers while my friends and I were busy trying to flatten our stomachs and hide our “flaws” from the world.

The more I was inundated with her early image, the more I found myself wanting to be brasher and less apologetic—Charlie’s Angels be damned. And to hell with pastels. I wanted the same bows, hats, combat boots, rubber bracelets, and ragged skirts that Madonna wore. I wanted to stick out more than fit in. Suddenly, I wanted to take up room—a surprising thing for a girl at the height of an (extremely) awkward stage.

As Madonna’s image and career evolved, so did my sense of self. I felt increasingly uncomfortable as I endured twelve years of Catholic school and attended mass every Sunday. I started to feel suffocated by unnecessary guilt and the church’s unwillingness to progress. At the same time, Madonna’s Like a Prayer era relied heavily on appropriated Catholic imagery, appalling my teachers and church leaders. And in the face of the AIDS crisis, the ongoing abortion debate, and the resurrection of censorship in the late 1980s, that album and her insolence reinforced my own developing view of the Catholic Church as oppressive, patriarchal, and censorship-happy.

These views stoked restlessness in me. Luckily, I lived about two blocks from the Long Island Railroad, which shuttled me to New York City in forty-five minutes for about seven dollars. When I was seventeen, I began spending as much time there as I could. And it was then, when I began meeting more political, artistic, marginal people, when I started to witness true rebellion and began growing more isolated from the suburbs in which I had grown up, that I realized exactly how Madonna had gotten so far.

I would have had to be comatose to have missed the gaping chasm that existed between New York City and the suburbs. Obviously, this was pre-Internet: There was no easy access to non-mainstream culture. For me, mix tapes, magazines, newspapers, word-of-mouth, and eventually, long days wandering around downtown New York, introduced me to abundant, thriving subcultures populated by punks, drug addicts, poets, painters, activists, drag queens, drunks, and hustlers. I tripped over a world of progressive and experimental style, music, art, and politics that operated on its own, with open contempt for the middle-class suburbs that shored up its borders. I fell head-over-heels in love with outsiders and was almost instantly seduced by a city full of them.

But the more at home I felt in New York City, the more I grew isolated on Long Island—and the more Madonna made me livid. I wore clothes my peers couldn’t understand. I saw films they had never heard of. My friends tolerated me enough to ask for advice on new albums or stores that were located downtown. But almost no one wanted to hear about the drag queens and junkies that decorated the streets. In true suburban spirit, they just wanted to be one tiny hair past the Joneses. And outside of urban America, my friends were exactly the type to whom Madonna appealed.

Madonna’s suburban fan base could be fascinated with something that was new to them, something slightly different, without having to risk social rejection or venture into urban environments themselves. They could ignore the gay-friendly artistic lifestyle she flaunted, but love her music, which never strayed far from their comfort zone. Not only did the music keep her fans within their comfort zone, it also kept Madonna in hers. Marketable music isn’t a bad thing on its own. But compared to the passionate struggle and sacrifices of other, more marginal artists like Keith Haring, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and Kim Gordon, her “rebellion” suddenly seemed calculated and cold.

The aforementioned people from whom Madonna lifted her image struggled for a lot less reward. For example, Haring addressed the political and social issues that plagued New York at the time—crack and AIDS being the most urgent. He painted in public, and both the messages and beauty were free. Not only was he making public art, he ran the risk of being arrested (and he was) for doing so. Basquiat spent much of his early life making public art, too—and living on the streets. Though musicians such as Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore and Kim Gordon have become icons of a different kind since the 1980s, they did so by holding fast to their vision, playing mostly for small (and confused) audiences, and tolerating the years it took for culture to catch up with them.

Unlike Haring, Basquiat, Moore, and Gordon, Madonna didn’t take artistic risks. She released love songs and dance anthems that might set the inhibited free, but she never really reflected the times in sound, like the hip-hop that flooded the streets managed to do. Unlike the other artists with whom she mingled downtown, she never addressed her generation in her music. Madonna only dipped her toe in substance when she sang about an unexpected teen pregnancy in “Papa Don’t Preach”—and reinforced the status quo when she insisted on “keeping the baby.” It wasn’t a rebellion that challenged the conservative culture of the 1980s, but it was just enough rebellion to tiptoe between shock and marketability.

Additionally, Madonna’s rebellion never veered far from the visual, and appearance is what American culture has always used to distinguish women from each other (and from the norm). She might have given an accusatory glare, but it could also be misread for seduction. Her reliance on assertive sexuality made conservatives uncomfortable while enabling her to remain sexually available, an ever-fuckable fantasy to a swooning—and paying—audience.

The downtown ’80s scene wasn’t the only wave she rode. The release of the single “Express Yourself” in 1989 kicked off a decade of extreme notoriety for Madonna. She looked part pinup, part bodybuilder, and ultimately this was less accessible to young girls than her earlier images. She was also plucking more pieces from other subcultures than she had done before. One case of this lifting was “Vogue.” While black queens were vogueing during drag competitions in Harlem, Madonna was making millions imitating them without the sociopolitical baggage that the lifestyle inevitably carried with it. Even her version of the dance was dumbed down: Harlem’s vogueing took definitive skill, flexibility, improvisation, and spontaneity. It used mimicry and humor; it had its own language and symbolism. Madonna’s version was humorless, rigid, simplified, static, and robotic. In some ways, her hijack of vogueing was a contemporary version of the white washed way the music industry promoted rock ‘n’ roll as “white” music, even though its roots were in black culture and blues.

But stripped-down choreography was her lesser offense. The Harlem male-to-female transgendered and transsexual community lived meagerly, fighting to “pass” as women when they could, partially for survival. They starved for their art and culture, and they risked their lives when they ventured to parts of the city that didn’t accept drag as readily as the subterranean scene they moved in. For example, many of the lead subjects in the 1990 documentary about Harlem’s drag circuit, Paris is Burning, either were murdered or died of AIDS since the film was made. Madonna, on the other hand, moved safely about that world, sent listeners into a robotic vogueing frenzy, and barely gave a nod to the Harlem queens that not only inspired the song, but invented what she turned into a nightclub craze. Not to mention how she made more money from that one single than a drag queen from Harlem is likely to make in a lifetime.

For all the ways in which Madonna spoke to me when I had a more limited frame of reference for female rebellion, I could finally see past the veneer. She was a collage of b-boy, punk, bohemian, gay man, drag queen, old Hollywood screen star, and heretic, not the free-spirited, free-thinking badass I had wanted so badly to model myself after. Because Madonna only toyed with social exile without fully committing to it, she hadn’t truly taken any risk.

In the early 1990s, while Madonna blithely urged women to “express themselves” (to men, of course), a third wave of feminism bloomed—and so did a backlash. Along with other artists and activists, musicians such as Kathleen Hanna, Tobi Vail, and Ani DiFranco, plus bands such as Bratmobile and L7, faced scorn for their stands on abortion, reproductive rights, a more inclusive feminism that accounted for race and class, sexual harassment, and violence against women. The right wing deemed feminists fascists, hence the term “feminazi.” Evangelical preachers such as Pat Robertson accused feminists of being witches and baby-killers.

For feminists of the third wave, empowerment wasn’t as simple as finding a partner who would let them express themselves, as Madonna seemed to advise. Some of these women drew strength from challenging men perceived as allies for marginalizing women’s issues in punk and indie music. These women rebelled by using the stage to explore issues such as rage about rape and incest, and they withstood vitriol from both the mainstream media and the punk/indie scenes.

The most prominent face of this new DIY feminism, called riot grrrl, was Kathleen Hanna, lead singer of the 1990s punk band Bikini Kill. Hanna became a bull’s-eye for punks and indie rockers who revolted against the idea of feminist dialogue in punk rock. Hanna, her bandmate Tobi Vail, and other women in their scene loudly encouraged feminist dialogues, inspiring hundreds of other young women. The media, of course, had a field day, boiling down feminism to simplified black-and-white terror tactics and quotes taken out of context.

I heavily identified with these outspoken, courageous, intelligent women who took risks and remained relatively marginalized due to their lack of compromise. Once again, the sexuality Madonna leaned on allowed her to keep her femininity intact—and her fame afloat—even as vocal, politically active, angry women with lesser public images were tossed to the wolves.

In the wake of that new feminist backlash, Madonna seemed more shrewd than cool, more constructed than spontaneous. Instead of being silenced or misconstrued, Madonna could move in and out of the feminist label as it suited her, and use it only enough to garner more attention. In the end, it was third-wave feminism that thrilled me, not the vague skimmed-from-the-top self-expression that Madonna promoted. Rather than being a rebel, Madonna simply played her cards right.

I still listen to that first album, though. I still love the rumpled punk-orphan image from her early years. The Gaultier bustiers she wore were gorgeous, and I still think she looked fabulous as a platinum blonde. But now I can see clearly that she was just a gateway to the real risk-takers and visionary women who would inspire me—the ones who saw a better way for us in life, politics, and art. Madonna might have influenced me as a girl, but real rebellion, and real feminism, made me who I am as a woman.

My Movie and Madonna

Caroline Leavitt

PICTURE THIS. I’VE just sold my novel, Into Thin Air, to a publisher, and suddenly I have a bona fide producer named Dan interested in making it into a movie. I lie my way into writing the script (I say I have written many scripts before, and when Dan realizes I haven’t, the only thing keeping me on the project is the fact that I blurt out that I will work for free). People are excited, and then a new producer—we’ll call her Adelle—comes on board, and things really start to spark, because Adelle just happens to also be working with Madonna on an indie film.

“What’s she like?” I ask, and Adelle tells me she is a consummate pro, that she comes to work on time, that she knows not only her lines but the lines of just about everyone else on the set. “I carry your novel to work with me every day,” Adelle tells me. She also carries her little girl, and she tells me that Madonna is really, really interested in both. “She’s thinking about making her directorial debut,” Adelle tells me. She nods enthusiastically. “And when she asked to borrow your book, I gave it right to her.”

Adelle’s smile is the size of Jupiter, but I’ve had my heart broken by Hollywood before. I know what that word “interest” means, and that and a dollar won’t get you very far in the New York City subway. “She’s reading you,” Adelle tells me. “And no matter what you think of her, if she takes it on, you and your book will be famous.”

That night, when I go home, I mull all this over. What do I think of her? Not that much, I’m afraid. I don’t really like her music, which seems too boppy and synthetic and just plain overproduced for my taste. I don’t really like her style, which seems calculated to me. I know from a friend of a friend who wrote the movie Desperately Seeking Susan that the star of that film was supposed to be the divine Rosanna Arquette, and supposedly Arquette felt that Madonna took over. All the press wanted to talk to her, not Arquette, and the film even began being called “The Madonna movie.” (“She takes over everything,” Adelle tells me. “But then again, she’s Madonna.”) Do I want this to happen?

I know already how producers change stories, and I begin to imagine what Madonna might do to mine. Into Thin Air is about a young woman vanishing into a whole other life hours after giving birth to her child. Would the Madonna-ization of it change my book into something I not only don’t recognize, but don’t like? Already, under Dan and Adelle, my main character has gone from a waitress to a phone sex worker (not my choice!) to a photographer. Characters that die come back to life and then are knocked off again. I know movie-making is a collaborative effort, but I can’t shake the feeling: You don’t collaborate with Madonna. She’s too strong-willed. She calls all the shots, and maybe my job would be just to agree with her or not say anything at all.

I’m more and more wary, but Dan and Adelle are so excited that they almost never stop talking about it. Dan sits me down and tells me not to say anything to anyone about what might be happening concerning Madonna and my movie, that it must stay hush-hush until there is a firm deal in place. “But a story this big could leak out,” he tells me. “Imagine the phone calls! We’re talking People magazine! We’re talking The New York Times! You have to be prepared when that happens.”

“But I don’t know anything about what’s going on,” I tell him. “I don’t know what Madonna is thinking about my book, or when she might decide, or what she wants to do with my story.” I ask if I can talk to Madonna about my book. I figure I can be smart and charming, plus—I admit, I really want to meet her. He looks at me as if I have asked him to run through Times Square without clothes on. “You’re the writer. You don’t really talk to anyone,” he says. “And when you do, when the calls come, you say what we tell you to say.”

“You can’t be serious,” I say.

“‘Please talk to my producers.’ That’s all you say,” he tells me. And that is that. I wait and wait, but the calls never come, and I confess, I’m getting a little peeved. I know that being associated with Madonna will boost my career, that some of her sparkle might even rub off on me. But it frustrates me that I have no contact with her, that I can’t meet her and make a case for myself and my novel.

“She’s reading it,” Adelle keeps telling me. I think of Madonna reading and I wonder if she’s imagining certain actors and actresses as my characters, if she’s plotting out the visuals or even thinking about distribution deals. But I don’t actually imagine we will be friends, Madonna and I. Or even that I might like her. I’m shy and bookish and her flamboyance bothers me because it seems like an act, an irritant to get a reaction. What would we ever talk about? I just want her to make my movie. “Don’t tell anyone about your Madonna connection,” I am warned again by my producers, and so I don’t, though truthfully, I don’t think anyone will believe me, anyway.

Two weeks later, while deep in a reverie about how I am going to convince Madonna to shoot the last act, I hear it on the TV news: Madonna is leaving on a worldwide concert tour. Heartsick, my fantasies crashing, I call Dan. “Oh,” he says. His voice is dull and faded. “We were going to tell you. She decided to go make music instead of movies.”

“But what did she say about the book? About me?”

“She said she was going on tour. That’s Madonna for you.”

So there I am. Does it bring me any sort of fame by association to know that Madonna read my book? Or had she not even read it, only skimmed it? Maybe she didn’t even like it.

Suddenly, everything else about my film begins falling apart, as if Madonna is the first domino to fall, and look out now, because here come all the others. Dan falls in love with another new producer and they are talking about moving to France. Adelle is busy with a new film. Suddenly, no one is answering my calls or making any calls to me.

I think of Madonna, the way she simply tears off to do her tour when she could be directing a movie of my novel. And then I remember this story a friend had told me about her—something she had read in a magazine. When Madonna was struggling, she had been rejected by some record company executive. But instead of caving or feeling humiliated, she walked back into the office, ignoring the receptionist who tried to stop her, and she said to the executive, “Someday, you’re going to wish you had said yes to me.” I hate the Madonna who isn’t going to make my film, but I like the one who stood up for herself like that. I like the way she was confident, that nothing was a slight to her—only a mistake, or a misjudgment.

In the end, Hollywood could have broken my heart. And Madonna could have, too. Instead, I choose to look at both in a different way. No one can make you feel small or wrong unless you allow it, and I’m not going to let that happen to me. I might have lost those producers, I might always wonder what would have happened if Madonna had directed my novels, but I don’t give up, no more than Madonna did when that executive told her to get lost. I get new producers, and make new deals. I write more books, too. And yes, occasionally I think, “Someday, you’re going to wish you said yes to me.” But then I let it go.

You could say this change in me—this decision to never play the victim—was the one gift I got from Madonna when she almost, almost made my movie.