Childhood Sexuality

The single most profound moment in the formation of my sexuality during my childhood was seeing Madonna’s Open Your Heart video.  One of the first images is of a peep show booth window going up to reveal two sailors in white uniforms watching the show, faces touching, hands touching.  Madonna is dancing in the peep show, and she is arguably at her hottest, with fishnets, corset, bleached hair and all kinds of sexiness.  Later, even briefer than the image of the sailors, is the image of a woman in a fancy suit jacket and tie watching intently with her hand near her mouth.  Blink and you miss her.  I was very young and much like Sarah Palin staring down Putin across the Bering Strait, I did not blink. Other peep show spectators include a perv with thick glasses and a cowboy who cannot stand to look away as the booth window closes.  The woman appears again as the last image of the peep show spectators, she is smoking a cigarette after the conclusion of Madonna’s stage performance.  How delightfully suggestive!  Or have all of us non-smokers forgotten what some women like to do after cumming? And of course there is the young boy who is barred from entering the peep show but sneaks in, and Madonna gives him a kiss and dances off into the sunset with him at the end of the video, in a spectacle of exuberance and pleasure.  From the sailors alone, I knew I was queer, I knew I was like them.  In fact, the whole cast of characters played out in my emerging sexual landscape. I knew without a doubt that I wanted into that world, the world of peep shows, strippers, sailors, cowboys, women in ties, perverts and other assorted degenerates.  As a child watching a music video, I recognized the world I belonged in!  Some may call Madonna’s forays into queer worlds cultural appropriation.  But in my suburban prison, Madonna was a breath of fresh air, the promise that another world of sexuality existed, one that was not based on the dominant heterosexual mythology of getting to various bases and painful first times.