I’m Not Afraid Of Who You Are
Madonna revolutionized the art of upsetting heteronormative ideology and abolishing the gender binary
“Poor is the man whose pleasures depends on the permission of another.”
Nobody knew the level of attention a simple music video would garner in November 1990. Madonna had a pretty good idea her black and white video for “Justify My Love” wouldn’t go unnoticed.
The video’s content raised the eyebrows of the press, religious organizations, and soccer moms. Teenage boys and girls, alike, found their hormone levels increased as they quietly realized their sexuality. We saw Madonna making out with men, women, and those in-between while other people watched. It was voyeuristic and titillating. Madonna romps through the song with sexually charged lyrics and a breathy delivery. Cyndi Lauper may have hinted at masturbation in “She-Bop.” Still, her brightly-colored, Happy Days-gone-mad video was a church hymn compared to Madonna frolicking through a hotel of unseemly acts between consenting adults.
LGBTQ people cannot forget the importance of the video and its enduring relevance. The video premiered on the heels of George Michael’s ode to monogamy, “I Want Your Sex.” But while Michael hopped to the idea of “sex is best when it’s one on one,” Madonna wanted an orgy. When the video was released smack dab in the middle of Bush Sr. single-term run as POTUS, he was promoting his version of Reagan’s quasi-Christian crusade in the 80s. Churches and God ruled the airwaves through TBN Network and late-night Jesus-y infomercials, hocked by televangelists promising God with a donation. For an artist like Madonna to release a provocative project doesn’t speak to her lack of morals but rather to the absence of acceptance for anyone who was not white and midwestern Christian.
First, a quick timeline: After the controversy over burning crosses during the Pepsi “Like A Prayer” promotion had settled, Madonna embarked on the Blond Ambition World Tour, which supported her 1989 album Like A Prayer. She annexed the show into five sections: Metropolis, Religious, Dick Tracy, Art Deco, and Encore. The religious part seemed to raise eyebrows with its masturbation scene at the end of “Like A Virgin,” as Madonna rubbed and gyrated on a bed, surrounded — and groped — by two men in cone bras. Madonna dressed in religious attire (as did the dancers) complete with a crucifix necklace. Their playlist set included “Oh Father,” “Live To Tell,” “Papa Don’t Preach,” and “Like A Prayer.” That section alone had the moral majority clutching their proverbial pearls.
The tour was so explosive and controversial that the Vatican saw fit to issue a statement condemning it — yes, the Vatican spoke out against a pop singer’s tour. The Pope himself encouraged people not to see the show, calling it “one of the most satanic shows in the history of humanity.” The Vatican newspaper called it “blasphemous” and “a complete disgrace.” Catholics were none too amused with the overt use of Catholic imagery and sexual content, falling right into Madonna’s provocation. The tour ended in August 1990. On the other side, critics praised the show’s visual appeal, the span of songs and the energy of an ever-changing set, and a crew that rarely sat still. Fans bought every last ticket. Madonna went home exhausted and the biggest star in the world. At that moment, she was arguably more significant than Michael Jackson or Prince. Prince had recently released bombed at the box office with the quasi-Purple Rain sequel Graffiti Bridge. Jackson was nowhere in sight after finishing up his Bad World Tour a year prior. While most artists would have taken time off, Madonna struck while the iron was hot. As people were still talking about the tour and things like masturbation, cone bras, religious taboos (read: “Like A Prayer” video), Madge was already planning her next attack.
“Justify My Love” — the single and video — was released alongside The Immaculate Collection, a compilation of Madonna’s hits. “Justify My Love” was one of two new songs on the record (“Rescue Me” being the other). It was a one-two-three punch from Madonna, stating, “this is what you knew me as, and this is what I am now.” After viewing the video, MTV executives had their shields up straight away. In a statement, they said, “We respect her work as an artist and think she makes great videos. This one is not for us.” The network banned it. In response, “MTV has been good to me, and they know their audience,” she added. “If it’s too strong for them, understand that.” The irony is that it didn’t stop MTV’s previously planned forty-eight-hour Madonnathon of videos, celebrating The Immaculate Collection and Madonna’s videography, including concert clips, interviews, and film clips. If Madonna knows anything, she knows controversy sells records. During Truth or Dare, her behind the scenes documentary of the Blond Ambition World Tour, Madonna’s brother Christopher tells her the police are in the building and are threatening to arrest her if she goes through with the “Like A Virgin” masturbation scene. Madonna refused to bend. “I’m not changing my show. I’m an artist, and this is how I choose to express myself.” Another crew member told her, “they’ll probably issue you a citation, and your name will be in every paper.” Madonna cheered at the possibility of enormous exposure. She recognized any publicity as good publicity.
A month later, after sufficient media and controversy, ABC’s Nightline played the video in its entirety, then Madonna was interviewed about the video’s content. She staunchly defended her art. When anchor Forrest Sawyer mentioned that since her video was too risque to play on air anymore, and that selling it on VHS was an excellent move to make money over the controversy, Madonna dismissed his attack with “Yeah, so? Lucky me.” Rightly so, Madonna expressed how MTV was hypocritical since it regularly aired videos that were degrading to women, violent, or overly sexual, putting a woman in a place of submission or as an object. In a telephone interview for the New York Times, “It’s the interior of a human being’s mind. These fantasies and thoughts exist in every person. Why is it that people are willing to go to a movie and watch someone get blown to bits for no reason, and nobody wants to see two girls kissing or two men snuggling? I think the video is romantic and loving and has humor in it.” Her video celebrated female fantasy and empowerment and was banned. She was right — for a woman to speak her mind and live out her fantasies seems unseemly, yet a man having ten barely dressed women around him just waiting to hop on his proverbial pole was portrayed as reasonable and acceptable in society. Madonna threatened the patriarchal ideas that men own women and have a say in what they do with their bodies. Madonna wasn’t having it.
In the video, Madonna is seen sluggishly puttering into a hotel. The door to every other room is open or ajar. As the camera passes a door, we see unusual and strange people in various states of dress or undress, sometimes with a partner or two, occasionally alone. Almost immediately, Madonna becomes aroused and rubs her inner thighs succumbing to the sexual energy in the air. She meets a handsome man in the hallway (her then-boyfriend model Tony Ward) and makes out with him. They eventually make their way into a room where Madonna makes out with another person while Ward watches. He’s longing to be part of whatever is happening on the bed. Is Madonna on the bed with her partner a fantasy of the man’s, or is it Madonna’s fantasy we are watching? He later overtakes her, and she submits to him. We also see people in other rooms delving into their imaginations as well.
One could stop there and write off “Justify My Love” as a sexual romp through a Paris hotel and call it a day. However, the video goes beyond that. The person Madonna makes out with on the bed at first looks male but turns out to be female. Her androgynous look confuses the viewer. Another person walks into the room with nothing but pants and suspenders on, and we quickly realize it’s a woman. Some men are feminized while some women emote masculinity. Two other women are dressed in male drag, and drawing mustaches on each other as Madonna giggles to herself in the background. One could almost surmise that she is giggling not because she’s seen too much or it’s her first time seeing something that appears to be bizarre to her, but that she knows the audience’s reaction seconds before. She’s giggling at us, the viewer, the shocked. Did she get our goat? Is she laughing at us being up in our feelings?
“Justify My Love” breaks every gender- and heteronormative stereotype and every sexual orientation status. It explores bondage, submission, domination, sadomasochism, bisexuality, homosexuality, sexual fantasy, and voyeurism. Madonna was no fool. She’s often called a smart businesswoman. That theory was proven because “Justify My Love” was released just four months after The Blond Ambition Tour ended in August 1990. And while Madonna stepped into deeper and deeper waters, she brought with her the penchant for mixing sex and religion. Prince once said orgasm was as close as you could get to God. For the remix of “Justify My Love,” called “The Beast Within Mix,” she uses the chanting of “wanting, needing, praying” from the original song in between quoting prophetic scripture from The Revelation of St. John the Divine in the Bible. (She would use the remix and the original versions of “Justify My Love” in The Girlie Show Tour, too.) It’s no surprise since she closely followed Prince’s career and fashioned her career after his.
In 2020, we are much closer to accepting non-binary genders, gender fluidity, sexual orientation fluidity, polyamory, thruples, and any other arrangement or personal identification one claims as to their own. But thirty years ago, Madonna was already knocking down that door. Frankly, she started to show female empowerment well before that in her music and lyrics. It was most evident in the “Express Yourself” video where she’s the boss, and the men are her worker bees. Madonna appears in a pinstripe suit, but with the darts cut out to expose her now-famous cone bra corset onesie (designed by Jean-Paul Gaultier, who also fashioned the tour). “Express Yourself” saw Madonna in masculine clothing in charge, as well as in feminine dress and still in charge. She was naked and still in charge. The imagery was so pointed and relevant that even singers like Christina Aguilera straight up copied (sometimes scene-for-scene) their version of Madonna’s “Express Yourself.” Britney Spears fashioned much of her career after Madonna’s, and no doubt Aguilera did, too.
Back to the timeline: Madonna seemed to just disappear after “Justify My Love,” but her sexual exploits and challenging gender norms were just getting started. In 1992, she released Erotica, her most raw and unapologetic album to date. The songs covered — you guessed it — sexuality, gender, AIDS, an ode to oral sex, philandering, revenge, self-doubt, and love. She also released SEX, a metal-bound picture book with dialog speaking about sexual fantasies. In her pictorial essay of sexual fantasies, she calls on the talents of Isabella Rossellini, Vanilla Ice, Big Daddy Kane, gay porn star Joey Stefano, actor Udo Kier, socialite Tatiana von Fürstenburg, and Naomi Campbell to help her fulfill those desires. The book contained simulated sexual acts (including BDSM), and some considered the publication to be soft-core pornography. The narrator in the book is named Mistress Dita, a character we hear on the opening title track of Erotica. “My name is Dita, and I’ll be your mistress tonight…” Dita takes the reader on a journey of sexual fantasy. In the supporting The Girlie Show Tour, Madonna all but obliterating sexual orientation and the two-party gender binary. The dancers and Madonna all had shaved or closely cropped hair and often wore genderless clothing or crossdressed. The show opens with a stripper on a go-go pole. It was Dancing With The Stars judge and The Talk co-host Carrie Ann Inaba. She only wore a g-string on her descent from the top of the pole to the stage. Inaba would remain mostly topless through the vast majority of the show, either only wearing a vest or no top at all and just a large necklace spray around her neck. The male dancers danced in the same shorts, or tight pants, or knee-high boots that the girls did.
In 1995, Madonna published a second book that was to accompany the tour (it wasn’t the tour program purchased at the venue) called The Girlie Show. The hardback book came with a CD which contained three songs from the show (“Like A Virgin,” “Why’s It So Hard,” “In This Life”), as well as large photographs and dialog throughout. The written narrative was that of a sideshow barker, harkening a passerby to see the wonders of The Girlie Show, claiming that their genders would change before your eyes.
Madonna didn’t use “Justify My Love” as the jumping point of sexual content as much as she chose to step out of the box and question the social norms of femininity, masculinity, gender, and sexuality. While people like Sylvester, Boy George, and RuPaul were on the scene and bending gender norms, it feels like Madonna took it to a new level. It was the same way Madonna brought voguing to the mainstream. She had an eye for communities who were pushed to the side and considered alternative or underground and put a spotlight on them. “Justify My Love” saw a group of people who weren’t afraid to live out their fantasies no matter who was in the room. It was “live your best life” before Oprah ever thought of it. With sex comes power, and, likewise, power allows for sex. Projects like “Justify My Love,” Erotica, SEX, and The Girlie Show Tour knocked down church doors, destroyed stringent conforming rules, and gave teenagers and young adults endless permission to voice their sexuality, express their gender, and engage their fantasies. The running theme throughout these projects wasn’t just sexual fantasies, but female empowerment, and most importantly — consent. If two women or two men could openly experiment and play with gender in “Justify My Love,” then why the fuck couldn’t they do it in their life?
So while people enjoy “Pose” on FX, RuPaul’s Drag Race, or appreciate Laverne Cox on Orange Is the New Black, much credit is due to “Justify My Love.” Madonna helped draw the blueprint and pour the foundation of creating a safe space to have these conversations. It gave people who didn’t fit the nuclear family mold to proactively exist and flourish as they saw fit.
By the end of the video, Madonna is seen with her suitcase, clutching at her overcoat, giggling to herself while running out of the hotel. We can only surmise that the preceding acts of debauchery and sexual exploration were a dream for her. Perhaps she did check into her room and sleep off a daze of transgender and non-binary people while simultaneously opening herself (!) to the people around her to gain sexual gratification. Or, perhaps, she checked into that night’s funniest hotel and got a damn good scoop of lovin’ herself. The viewer is left to decide whether it took place in her life or her mind. Moreover, the viewer is left to figure out, “I’m turned on, but by what, exactly?”
“Justify My Love” is still considered one of the most controversial music videos ever released. Two weeks after MTV banned the video, Madonna and her record label Warner Bros. Records released as a video single on VHS. It quickly became, and is still, the best selling short-form music video ever released, and was the first such type of released on VHS in the United States. The VHS reached platinum status four times — a VHS tape that contained one track. MTV later played the video unedited and in its entirety while counting down the most controversial videos. Billboard lists the song as number five on their Madonna’s 40 Biggest Billboard Hits.
As of March 2019, sixteen states have yet to formally repeal sodomy laws on the books that don’t involve children (i.e: child sexual abuse and child rape). Some sodomy laws include references to bestiality, and no subsequent acts have been made to separate it from the sexual acts between consensual adults. Thirteen states still have statutes that ban all forms of sodomy, including oral intercourse, regardless of the genders of anyone involved. Those states include Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Louisiana, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, North Carolina, Oklahoma, and South Carolina. Three states specifically target same-sex relations only: Kansas, Texas, and Kentucky. Consensual sodomy was banned in the U. S. military until Barack Obama repealed it in 2013 (in the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2014.)
Madonna is no longer waiting, needing, or praying for anyone to justify anything she does. She never really did. It’s just that it’s taken most people this long to play catch up with the provocative nature of her career. It’s taken people even longer to accept a non-binary gender equation and a full spectrum of sexuality.
“See, I get what I want.” — Madonna in Truth or Dare (1990)
Ernest Sewell was born & raised in Oklahoma. After living across the U.S. in places like Philadelphia, Los Angeles, and Minneapolis, he’s settled in upstate New York for the past twenty years. He’s authored and published two books and is working on a smattering of new material, including a new horror novel. He shares his home with a friend, three cats, and his vinyl collection, all of whom have the same level of love from him. When he’s not causing an uproar on Prince forums or social media, he enjoys reads (a lot), trying new recipes, and prank calling people.
“Don’t take yourself too seriously. No one else does.”
