This week in 1989, Madonna hit #1 with “Express Yourself”…in Cashbox magazine. She was blocked from the top of the Billboard chart by Martika’s “Toy Soldiers.” I don’t know her.
Like most songs then, I first heard it on MTV. I was grinding out my last semester that summer at Bowling Green State University in an A/C-free apartment.
My pending graduation stirred up equal parts excitement and dread because I had decided to skip searching for jobs in Ohio to pursue a career in PR in New York. Where I knew no one. Or had a job. Or anywhere to live.
Madonna’s video was a “ray of light” through my anxiety, mixing Hollywood glamour, the 1927 film Metropolis, and half-naked men, sweaty from work or wet from rain falling as they exercised. Because they had the $5 million budget for it.
I simultaneously ogled and envied the men. They were way too hot to ever notice a scrawny kid like me. Surely, I wasn’t worthy of their touch. But I appreciated seeing them.
Madonna was already a gay icon in 1989, promoting diversity and inclusivity for everyone in her work. Like in Open Your Heart where she added the two handsome sailors nuzzled together in their peep show booth. OK, she may have featured homoerotic subjects for shock value. But for me, seeing the rare gay-positive image right there on basic cable in the Midwest signaled a wider, more accepting world elsewhere.
Up to that point, guys overall had been too much for me to even think about. I knew I was gay, but didn’t know where to start. I wasn’t ashamed; it was how I was born just like I had brown hair and hazel eyes. (Green, depending on what I wear) But I certainly cared what others thought. I was petrified too. People joked that “gay” stood for “Got AIDS Yet?” And I there I was aching to move to Ground Zero of an epidemic that seemed to target me.
But “Express Yourself” was a beacon, representing the glamorous city life to me: Creativity, freedom, and the money to pursue both. That was the New York of my dreams. Madonna said to express yourself. I had to give it a try.
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