Madonna ‘The Truth Is She Never Left You’ The Advocate Interview

Madonna recently sat down with The Advocate for a revealing interview in which she discusses W.E. and the parallels drawn with her own life, motherhood, reading Patti Smith‘s Just Kids (which I’ve raved about here) and pining for a time of spontaneity, and her relationship with her gay fan base.

The interview talks about how she ‘identified with the collective gay male sense of self’ and how as she appears to have  moved on some of them feel abandoned by her recently.  Addressing this, Madonna only talked about hanging out with her social circle and I feel the interviewer could have gone deeper and asked her why she had not been publicly involved with AIDS charities etc in recent times, which is a complaint I hear often and seems to be what he was getting at in a wider sense. She also recounts her experience of the AIDs epidemic…

“That it’s OK to be gay, period,” Madonna says emphatically before launching into an impassioned recounting of her experience of the AIDS onslaught. “I was extremely affected by it. I remember lying on a bed with a friend of mine who was a musician, and he had been diagnosed with this kind of cancer, but nobody knew what it was. He was this beautiful man, and I watched him kind of waste away, and then another gay friend, and then another gay friend, and then another gay friend. They were all artists and all truly special and dear to me.”

Another part I  loved was when the interviewer had the audacity to ask her how she feels about being the “Lady Gaga of the 80′s” as one TIME interviewer put it, he notes that a chill came over the room – I bet it did! When he rephrased his question to ask “What do you think of how Gaga connects with her fans, and is it parallel to the relationship you had with gay fans early on?” This was her reply..

“It seems genuine,” she says, also seeming genuine. “It seems natural, and I can see why she has a young gay following. I can see that they connect to her kind of not fitting into the conventional norm. I mean, she’s not Britney Spears. She’s not built like a brick shithouse. She seems to have had a challenging upbringing, and so I can see where she would also have that kind of connection, a symbiotic relationship with gay men.”

I agree with what about why she has that connection, but I don’t know how genuine Gaga is and nor do I believe the “challenging upbringing” part either!

Read the full interview at The Advocate.