Racing through the backroads of upstate New York on a rainy night, I can no longer tell the difference between my tears and the rain on the windshield. With visibility low even absent my crying, the salty water further muddles the obscured view I had. It feels only right since everything else in life feels so wrong. The car careens to the side of the road, rain still beating against the windshield, while the wipers do their best to stave off blindness. I do not mind in the least. Destruction is welcome here.
I am on a self-appointed date with death, driving on one last journey before I’d return home to end my life, while the remnants of some hurricane wreak their weakened havoc on inland New York. In a couple of days Madonna will release her ‘Erotica’ album – the album that formed the culmination and central-crisis of a career that has always defied the odds. So it was that as my heroine was bringing me along on a sexual journey, I was on a path toward self-annihilation. Sex and death were instantly and irrevocably intertwined at that moment, as if entering adolescence under the specter of AIDS hadn’t fucked enough of us burgeoning gay boys up. Determined to be in sole control over how it all ended, and despondent for any number of closeted reasons, I’d made the determination to end my life… immediately after I heard the new Madonna album.
The whole world knew it was coming. More than ‘Like A Virgin‘, more than its follow-up ‘True Blue‘ – even more than the ‘Like A Prayer‘ brouhaha – ‘Erotica’ was probably the most-hyped album of her career, coming as it did with the never-before-or-since-duplicated ‘Sex’ book. Madonna fans especially watched and waited with keen anticipation, and back then radio stations had early copies to play as they wished. The local station was playing it as I drove along on that rainy night – if I got to hear it all, there might not be anything left to wait for.
Maple leaves fluttered messily down as the wind and rain ripped them from their perches. The air was filled with debris and it felt like the whole world was bearing down on the car as I slowed and pulled off the road. Sitting there, I listened as the song ‘Rain’ came on, its calming harmonies and steady ticking momentarily quelling my tears.
Somehow, I survive the next week.
{Here I have to pause. That sentence contains more than you will ever know – more than I will truly remember – and leaving it there like that, or even less, is all I can muster.}
Somehow… I survive.
I don’t remember getting back on the road, or sneaking back into the house. I don’t even remember which Madonna song they ended on (they didn’t end up playing the whole album after all). I only know I made it back home, back into bed, back into the impossibly forlorn state that a teenage boy just barely 17 years old could uncomfortably inhabit. I couldn’t feel more out of place and alone – and somehow I understood that it was only the beginning. Maybe that’s why I wanted so badly to give up then and there. The totality of such a difficult journey presented itself in full. I didn’t know enough to take it one minute at a time, to focus on that present moment, to feel the joy, however hidden or obscure or absent. The only time I came close was when a Madonna song was playing.
But something kept me from going through with the planned execution process I’d marked in the book ‘Final Exit’ that week, and it was enough to see me through the night. And the next day. And the next. And when at last Tuesday, October 20th arrived, my friend Ann and her Mom drove me to Rotterdam Square Mall to pick up the ‘Erotica’ album and the ‘Sex’ book.
At that scary time in my life, my friends, and often their parents, indulged me in such nonsense. It was as if they could tell, sometimes more than I could tell at times, that I needed something to hang onto, to keep going, to not give it all up. If that came in the form of a new Madonna album, maybe it was enough to get me past the danger zone. The expanse of an entire life looming before a teenager is more daunting, taunting, and debilitating than most of us as adults ever seem to remember. But some do, and they held out a hand for me at key moments. By the time Ann and her Mom dropped me off at my house, half of the album had been played, and all of our laughter had helped.
Back home, in the safety of our unfurnished basement, beneath two brightly clinical bulbs of fluorescent light, I open up the ‘Sex’ book while the ‘Erotica’ single played in the background. This was Madonna’s grand project – the ultimate union of music and visuals – and as I unzipped the book from its mythical mylar encasement like some enormous condom, feeling the cold metallic covers in my hand, I was grateful for being alive in that month of October in the year 1992. I knew I almost wasn’t.
Linking sex with death isn’t the healthiest way of discovering your sexuality, but we don’t usually get to choose the way sex enters our lives, we just have to make the best of when it does. In this case, the detached artistic take on the subject was the safest way to get down and dirty in the age of AIDS, and exploring the topic with the vastly varying songs of the ‘Erotica’ album was a roller coaster that included life and death moments, such as on ‘In This Life’, a ballad dedicated to two friends Madonna had lost to AIDS.
Those two gay men, long gone by the time Madonna released ‘Erotica’, had taught her the power and importance of art and beauty, and their memories had stayed with her. The majesty and might of making a piece of art was suddenly understood as a way of survival, even in the face of death. The rest of the ‘Erotica album was soaked in further brilliance ~ the whirling escapism of its greatest single ‘Deeper and Deeper‘ or the cinematic masterpiece of ‘Bad Girl’ or the psychedelic melodrama of ‘Secret Garden‘ – it was all waiting there for further exploration. That kept me going for the next few weeks and months. With each new video and performance, I sat mesmerized and enthralled by what this pop icon goddess would do next, watching and waiting and finally finding something on which to grasp to make it through the rest of the wilderness.
Thirty years later, the scratch of a vinyl record still evokes that iconic opening of the ‘Erotica’ album, and then that insinuating bass-line brings it all crashing back – a baptism and rebirth and the very point ‘Where Life Begins’ – and the first furtive, fumbling motions to finding my own sexuality as I writhed through equal parts desire and destruction. Madonna led me down the rabbit’s hole, and I willingly followed, needing sexual fantasies to distract me from suicidal fantasies, and even if it was a profoundly fucked-up way of beating one set of demons, it worked and got me through that rough patch. To this day, I am grateful to Madonna for that, as silly as it sounds. You never know what little thing might serve such a pivotal role – in this case it was a woman breathily singing the word ‘erotic’.
There would be other attempts at self-destruction to ensue, even as I understood the stupidity of what I was doing, even as Madonna survived her own reckoning in the fall-out of the ‘Sex’ book and ‘Erotica’ album. She would help save me then too.
At that time, however, the only way to make it through some nights was by putting on a song like ‘Rain’, imagining what a future might look like, and letting Madonna lead me away from the sadness and loneliness I felt. Thirty years later, she still casts that spell.
