Madonna’s “Erotica” and My First Sapphic Love

“Push myself into your mind…when you least expect it”

Nostalgia for the 1990s is a contemporary trend that is reflected in popular culture of our times. Docuseries’ such as The 90’s: The Last Great Decade? (Martin Pupp, 2014), Beckham (Fisher Stevens, 2023), Showtimes’ psychological thriller Yellowjackets (Ashley Lyle and Bart Nickerson, 2021-) and Netflix’s final season of The Crown (Peter Morgan, 2016-2023) provoke us to remember Nu Metal, baggy tops tucked into cargo pants, the infancy of the global obsession with celebrity and the illusion of gender equality promoted by The Spice Girls’ version of “girl power”. For some, the ‘90s have become “a carefree decade of optimism”,¹ a rare moment of peace between the end of the Cold War and the start of the War on Terror, a time to look back fondly upon – the Rwandan genocide, the first invasion of Iraq, Clinton/Lewinsky and the rampant racism, sexism and homophobia that characterised this “postfeminist” decade notwithstanding. I was a teenager in the ‘90s, coming of age and coming out, and there are so many pop video moments I could share from that time. Like the first time I saw Tori Amos skipping around in her “Cornflake Girl”² video, my eyes focussing on her “funny lip shape”,³ and cementing a relationship with her voice that has lasted for over 30 years. I could talk about the love I had for the androgynous rock gods I listened to on repeat, Steven Tyler, Sebastian Bach, and Robert Plant – whose voice singing “Dazed and Confused” still makes my arm hair stand on end.  I could talk about the Rocky Horror Picture Show (Jim Sharman, 1975), how I went with my best friend in 1992 to see it live at Birmingham Hippodrome. He took me to a gay bar afterwards, and my Magenta costume attracted a lot of attention from the butch dykes playing pool. It was the gay bar experience that never happened again, especially when I wanted it to – I was hit on almost immediately, a denim-clad arm blocking my way to the toilet as I was asked my name and whether I was a regular. But I didn’t know then that I was queer, or that I would grow up to be on the masc end of the spectrum.  I didn’t know that there was a secret world I could belong to, a world with its own rules, dress codes, drama and language, that there were books I could read to help make sense of my life, or that I would spend my career reading them.  When I think back to that time, I think of my formative queer moments, of Madonna’s “Erotica”,⁴ and of her. 

“Will you let yourself go wild?”⁵

My 1990s in the UK were shaped by a defiant, post-AIDS gay scene that had only recently started including women. Thatcher had resigned at the beginning of the decade, making way for John Major, a rather grey politician who was nicknamed “Barnum” by some of the meaner press commentators because of his father’s history as a circus entertainer. The UK is conservative by nature; the class system and royal family make sure of that, and the flashpoints, activism and the cyclical nature of queer politics reflects this. In 1992 Section 28,⁶ a clause of the Local Government Act that banned local authorities (including their schools) from “promoting homosexuality as a pretended family form” was still in force, meaning that anything “gay” was relegated to playground sniggers and overt homophobia. At the same time, there was a growing grassroots movement that mobilised to lower the age of consent for sex between men from 21 to 18, then later 16, and to repeal Section 28.⁷ This latter campaign had, in its early years, seen lesbian activists break into the BBC’s Six O’Clock News studio and disrupt the evening’s broadcast with muffled shouts of “Stop Section 28! Stop Section 28!”⁸ It was a good time to be coming out. There was a fierceness that felt like hope, felt like possibility, and whilst in 1992 we were two years away from the first lesbian kiss on primetime television – Beth Jordache (Anna Friel) and Margaret (Nicole Stephenson) in the soap opera Brookside (Phil Redmond, 1982-2003)⁹ – and another 9 years from Willow and Tara’s first kiss on Buffy the Vampire Slayer¹⁰ (Joss Whedon, 1997-2003). There was growing acceptance of Sapphic sexuality as the decade progressed towards the era of “lesbian chic” that was precipitated by Ellen DeGeneres’ coming out.¹¹ 

Madonna reinvented herself (again) in the 1990s. As a pop culture icon, she courted controversy in a way that was very appealing to sexually confused teenagers – or at least to me. She surrounded herself with cool queers and took pleasure in ruffling the feathers of hypocritical institutions like the Catholic church. “Erotica” was next level.¹² In the video, Madonna plays Dita, a “hedonistic pleasure seeker” with a BDSM aesthetic. Sporting a riding crop and a gold tooth, Madonna grinds and groans her way through the song, kissing women and men on beaches and in clubs. It was hot, at least to my young eyes, and it was made hotter by being banned from airing on UK television, apart from a one-off special programme at 11 o’clock one night. I don’t think there was a single teen at my school who hadn’t stayed up late to creep downstairs and watch it. 

“I’ll give you love, I’ll hit you like a truck…”

Emily Gray in 1992

In 1992, I was 15. She was in my P.E. class that year; it was the only class we had together. We knew each other peripherally but found mischief in each other through that class. We played basketball and always seemed to be on the same team. We would jostle the other girls in the class and high-five each other so hard it made my hand sting and sent an unfamiliar kind of electricity through my body. We started sending notes to each other via our mutual friend Natalie (there was no text messaging in the West Midlands in 1992), and we gave each other nicknames based on our surnames. I was simply “Gray”. 

In her notes to me, she told me how she loved Madonna, loved her music and her blonde hair, and her relationship with Sandra Bernhard. Their drunken and flirty appearance on Letterman in the late ‘80s is now part of the queer canon. I was still more of a Led Zeppelin, Metallica and Black Sabbath fan at the time, but my best friend Nick, who lived across the street and had taken me to Rocky Horror, was obsessed with Madonna, and often made me and our sisters act as his back-up dancers as he choreographed routines to “Express Yourself” and “Like a Prayer”, patiently pausing the music videos to learn a new part of the sequence, and impatiently chastising me for my lack of coordination. My punishment for having two left feet meant playing the role of “Ma Makeup” rather than Niki Harris when we reenacted scenes from In Bed with Madonna (Alek Keshishian, 1991), which Nick made us watch more regularly than I care to admit to enjoying. 

Like Nick, she loved Madonna in a way that we’ve come to know as Stanning. She wrote about her often in her notes to me, how excited she was about the Erotica album, how she longed to see her live. We wrote to each other about thinking that we might be bisexual, like Sandra Bernhard, and admitting that made me feel powerful. Though I must confess that by then, on the rare occasions that I kissed boys, I had started to imagine that they were women – usually the shaven-headed Alien 3 (David Fincher, 1992) iteration of Sigourney Weaver or Michelle Pfeiffer as Catwoman in Batman Returns (Tim Burton, 1992). Sometimes, often, I imagined that those boys were her. I didn’t much like teenage boys, nor the way they would push me around and take control of my body without ever asking when I kissed them. 

Before I could really understand what was happening to me, I was thinking about her all the time. I looked forward to P.E. class for the first time in my life, and during them our high fives got harder, and the feelings they provoked in me became more intense because of the words we wrote to each other. We would laugh and maintain significant eye contact, and this would make my stomach flip. One afternoon we ended up alone in the changing room under the guise of both needing the toilet. We sat close to each other, our hands almost touching as we leaned on the bench and I remember feeling so scared, and so happy. A moment that was sharply punctuated by the P.E. teacher, Miss Burski, who yelled from the door for us to “stop sitting there like a couple of lemons”. 

After that, our notes became more frequent and more intense. Poor Natalie spent hours finding us around the school or on the bus. Call it instinct, but even in those early days I was mindful of the need for a Sapphic slow burn. Partly it was because I wasn’t sure if the flirtation I had with her was real. Partly it was because I was scared, after all in 1992 being gay was a big deal. I didn’t really know any lesbians – only stories of my mum’s friend who had fallen in love with a woman, left her husband and lost her kids, and who used to hide near the playground of the school they went to, just so she could watch them play. Later in life I would read about how queer stories follow a particular narrative,¹³ and how stories of queer unhappiness are part of an archive of resistance,¹⁴ that we can read these stories defiantly, proudly even. But as a 15-year-old, as exciting as queer feelings were, they also made me scared of an unhappy life. 

It therefore took months for me to boldly write that I liked her, and for me to know what that meant for myself. After receiving these words from me, she sent Natalie back with a question: Was I joking? I told Natalie that I wasn’t, and Natalie encouraged me to ask her out, assuring me that she would say yes if I did. So, I asked her out. 

On our first date we walked around the town where we lived, and that day, everything looked new and full of possibilities. We held hands and shared cigarettes, and I couldn’t look at her. I offered to walk her home over Church Hill, the highest point in town and a place alive with the memory of generations of romantic trysts, including more than a few of my own. We sat down outside the church at the top of the hill and looked out over the town. We sat close and looked at each other, and then suddenly we were kissing. She held my face, and I held her, and I loved how our mouths felt together. When I got home and my parents asked about my day, I felt as though our date was written all over my face, and I retreated to my room feeling something like excitement and shame.

True Blue (Madonna, 1986)

After this, we dated for a while; we would make out for hours in her bedroom listening to the Erotica album, putting our hands all over each other’s bodies. The bedroom itself was plastered with images of Madonna – a huge True Blue poster and literally hundreds of magazine clippings. It was hard to concentrate with a thousand Madonna eyes bearing down on me, plus her mother would hover around outside of her bedroom door, desperate that her daughter be “normal” and not, as she suspected, snogging me all afternoon behind closed doors. 

We burned bright in those early days, but it didn’t last more than a few months. We quickly came to realise that we didn’t really have much in common, and when the school year finished, she went off to college and I stayed on at school for Sixth Form, and we broke up.

“Once you put your hand in the flame, you can never be the same…”

Flyer for Gavans Club in Wolverhampton, Credit: Gay Birmingham Remembered

¹⁵

Soon after, I started hanging out with a load of gay boys who were all obsessed with Madonna. Over the next year, we would cosplay her various eras on nights out at Gavans nightclub in Wolverhampton. When I think of that place, I can still smell Marlboro Lights, CK One and Poppers. My friend Jamie would dress as Madonna’s Erotica album S&M alter-ego, complete with a badly made mask that made him look more “stand and deliver” than “my name is Dita”. I wore the pinstriped suit of her “Vogue” era, minus the conical bra. We all went to see Madonna’s Erotica tour, The Girlie Show at Wembley Stadium in 1994, and being in a crowd of 70,000 fans felt amazing. Being queer felt amazing. The show itself was epic – Ma Makeup even made an appearance, emerging from between the huge red velvet curtains that hid the stage and waving to the crowd before the show started. The BBC were recording the event to broadcast on Radio 1 – I tape recorded it and would listen to it endlessly on my Walkman, amazed each time that I had been there. The BBC had apparently asked Madonna not to swear so of course, and to the crowd’s delight, every second word she said was “fuck”. The live version of “Erotica” mimicked the video and Madonna writhed around on a huge red bed with her lithe and gorgeous dancers. She gave a performance art reading of the “Book of Revelations” and did a turn as Marlene Dietrich, inspiring me to buy a top hat and tails, which I wore to many raucous nights at Gavans. 

Madonna is part of the sonic landscape of queerness and is certainly part of mine. And when I hear “Erotica”, which let’s face it has aged really badly, I think of that time. The song makes me remember her and my first Sapphic kiss up on Church Hill, and the endless possibilities it opened up in me.

Endnotes