Madonna’s fifth album, Erotica, came out in 1992 when the AIDS epidemic reached its height and the Moral Majority and Reagan/Bush era ended. The broad culture portrayed sex as shameful and fear-inducing, while Erotica (and its accompanying pornographic coffee table book called Sex) celebrated it. Conservatives immediately castigated Madonna, who was in her early 30s. But the songs and book were more sentimental than sexual, according to Michael Dango, professor of queer and feminist theory at Beloit College and author of the book Erotica (September 2023).
He tells KCRW that like many gay men, he grew up listening to Madonna, who represented queer culture before he even knew what to call it.
Releasing Erotica and Sex wasn’t just Madonna trying to be rebellious, scandalous, and sexy, he argues.
“She is responding to a couple of different things that are going on. One are the larger cultural wars, including a lot of government anxiety around queer media. … [Plus] we're about a decade into the AIDS crisis, which is devastating the queer community, something that has been neglected and stigmatized by the government. And so there's a real need for her core audience of queer listeners to celebrate a sexual culture that is also slipping away and that is under threat at this time.”
Erotica was Madonna’s follow-up album to Vogue, which was influenced by the queer, Black, and Latino underground ballroom scene. And while the singer became an LGBTQ icon and ally, she also faced criticism over cultural appropriation.
“She's a part of a larger LGBT community as an ally. But we often forget that within that queer identity there remain racial distinctions and class distinctions. And so when she's primarily also borrowing from this underground scene, then that's where these questions of appropriation emerge where she might be profiting off of something that folks with less privilege are not able to make as much money off of themselves.”
The newfound visibility enabled some musicians to go on global tours, but a large threat of violence hung over them. Dango points out, “The dangers of being visible, the backlash that can happen to visibility is something that somebody like Madonna will be sheltered from relative to others.”
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With his book, he hopes readers will learn to sit with their ambivalence around stars like Madonna.
“It's not the case that it either has to be praised or scorned, or that she got everything right politically or everything wrong. It's about spelling out what she made possible for marginalized communities at the same time that she obviously had other motives for doing that, including making a lot of money.”
Dango says Erotica is Madonna’s danciest album to date, and its song “Deeper and Deeper” is about wanting human connection — not hookups.
“If you're a member of the queer community for whom sexual practice might be an important part of your identity, but that is slipping away, then Erotica is trying to figure out other ways of having safer sex, something that might be … more sentimental than openly pornographic.”
In his book, Dango ultimately argues that by selling sex through music, Madonna was a sex worker.
“She's really conscious of how sex work … is a kind of model of what work itself is. And so especially as the kinds of jobs are shifting in the later 20th century, with the expanding rise of a service sector replacing manufacturing, for instance, a lot of work starts to look a bit like sex work, because it's about making your clients happy. It's about the emotional labor of giving them a good experience. And Erotica, as an album, is trying to make you feel good.”
In “Why’s It So Hard,” Dango says she questions what’s going on politically in the 1990s.
“Madonna might know what kind of questions to ask in this particularly charged political moment, but maybe doesn't always herself have the answers to that question. She has a tendency, sometimes, to appropriate politics itself, as a way of making pop seem more serious, to have that gravitas of a political connection.”
In retrospect, Dango says he respects Madonna as an artist — despite his criticisms.
“I also just have a lot of respect, as we should for our elders, in this case, who have done a lot of work before our time and continuing into the present that deserves as much praise as incredulity. So I don't approve or agree with all of her choices, but what matters to me is the public presence that she also has as an artist, and in some cases, a political force.”