Madonna recently sat down with The Advocate to discuss her new film W.E., in select theaters this Friday, and upcoming album MDNA, out March 26.
In the article Madonna talks about her connection with the main female character of her movie W.E, Wallis Simpson, the experience of directing a movie and being affected by the AIDS onslaught. She also discusses the feeling of abandonment many gays feel from her and she dishes about Lady GaGa. Here are some excerpts:
On Wallis Simpson and the royal family:
“I was intrigued,” Madonna says of the royals. She had a vague awareness of Wallis but only really got to know her story when she moved to England. “Like Wallis Simpson, I felt like an outsider. I thought, Life is so different here, and I’m used to being a New Yorker, and I have to learn how to drive on the other side of the road. Suddenly, I found myself living out in an English country house and trying to find my way in this world, so I decided to really take it on and do research and find out about English history and learn about the royal family.”
On Criticism:
“If you are threatened by me as a female or you think I’m doing too much or saying too much or being too much of a provocateur, then no matter how great of a song I write or how amazing of a film I make, you’re not going to allow yourself to enjoy it, because you’re going to be too entrenched in being angry with me or putting me in my place or punishing me.”
On the connection she feels to Wallis Simpson:
“It’s intriguing because we are raised to believe in the fairy-tale kind of love, that we are going to be swept off our feet by … you know, in both of our cases, Mr. Right, and our knight in shining armor is going to come along and save us, pick us up, and put us on the back of his beautiful steed, and we’re going to ride off into the sunset and live happily ever after.” She pauses. “God knows, that doesn’t happen.”
On being affected by the AIDS onslaught:
“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.”
In retrospect, Madonna sees that as the moment when her sense of self became entangled with that of gay men. “I saw how people treated them differently,” she says. “I saw the prejudices, and I think probably I got that confused with, intertwined with, you know, maybe things that…ways that people treated me differently.”
On The felling of abandonment many gays felt:
“I never left them,” insists Madonna, echoing a lyric from Evita. “When you’re single, you certainly have more time to socialize and hang out with your gay friends, but then you get married and you have a husband and you have children, and your husband wants you to spend time with him. I’m not married anymore, but I have four kids, and I don’t have a lot of time for socializing.” She’s been back in New York for two years, after splitting with Ritchie.
“I hope nobody’s taking that personally. It certainly was not a conscious decision. As it stands, most of my friends in England are gay. But I’m back,” she says, adding reassuringly, “Never fear.”
On Lady GaGa:
One such successor speaks to a new generation of LGBT fans. Recently Time magazine referred to Madonna as “the Lady Gaga of the ’80s.” When I ask about this, a bit of a chill sweeps over the room.
“I have no thoughts,” she says. “What’s the question?” So I ask it a different way: 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?
Madonna pauses for a moment, composing herself. “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.”
Read the full article via THE ADVOCATE
