With the release of Confessions II, I have been reflecting on what Madonna represents in my world and why I’ve spent so many years defending her.
I’ve been there almost from the beginning.
I was in Grade 3 when I started listening to pop music, the only one in my immediate family who really did. Madonna quickly became an artist I followed closely.
She was my first concert – that famous third night at Skydome for the Blond Ambition Tour, I went with my cousin Erika. Since then I’ve seen her two more times—The Rebel Heart Tour with Scott, and The Celebration Tour with my cousin Kirsten.
People often dismiss Madonna as someone who simply chased attention. Certainly, she knew how to get people talking, and she’s talked at length about that very topic. I think many people stopped at the spectacle without ever asking why she was truly creating it and looking deeper.
As a young gay kid growing up in rural Ontario in the 1980s, I wasn’t hearing many voices telling me that I mattered.
Madonna was.
Most people remember the controversy. I remember the education.
What she taught me during those days was that I needed to protect myself – I vividly remember the “Don’t be silly, put a condom on your willy!” message before Causing a Commotion during the Blond Ambition Tour to a huge applause.
I remember the HIV/AIDS information included with my Like a Prayer album. I remember safe-sex messaging woven into interviews, performances, and her work at a time when misinformation was everywhere.
She didn’t just teach caution. She also taught that intimacy wasn’t something to fear.
Looking back, that’s what stayed with me most. The message wasn’t “don’t have sex.” It was that there were ways to protect yourself while still allowing yourself to love, to connect, and to be close to another person.
That balance mattered to me as an adult.
I think this is one of the reasons so many gay men—particularly those who lived through the height of the AIDS crisis—call Madonna “Mother.”
She was speaking to us and has continued to through her career.
For countless people, the dance floor became a place where grief, fear, joy, and freedom all existed at once. Her music didn’t erase the pain. It gave people permission to keep living anyway.
I was too young, naive, sheltered, too isolated to fully understand what was happening.
I was outed in grade 6 and didn’t know any gay men until I was 16 or 17 (1990/1) as I was starting to truly figure myself out. I knew HIV/AIDS was something that would shape my generation, but I experienced it from the edges rather than the centre.
I didn’t lose friends to AIDS in those days because I was simply too young to have found that community yet. I would later.
My generation lost a whole generation of mentors, activists, people who could counter the messaging young LGBTQ2S+ people were receiving and continue to receive. My mentors lost their lovers, partners, chosen family, friends and peers.
Being too young and being far from what would become my community didn’t stop me from becoming an activist within my school community within the Halton Roman Catholic School Board in the day, contributing to a coffee house on HIV/AIDS to talk about, educate and raise awareness and wellness to counter homophobia and hate.
At the time, I hadn’t even accepted that I was gay myself.
This would then turn into volunteering with the AIDS Committee of Toronto, helping with the Totally outRIGHT program, being part of a panel discussion at the Gay Mens Sexual Health Alliance conference about how health care professionals can better reach the LGBTQ2S+ community with reframing communication and outreach.
Madonna played a role in that—not because she told me what to think, but because she modelled empathy. She showed me that standing beside people who were being marginalized wasn’t controversial; it was simply the right thing to do.
She stood beside the community at a time when many people were telling us we were immoral, disgusting, dangerous, or disposable. She insisted that LGBTQ+ people deserved dignity, deserved joy, deserved love, we were and are worthy, and deserved to live openly.
We still get this today, and she still stands by us.
For a lonely kid trying to understand who he was, that mattered more than I could have realized at the time.
Listening to Confessions II—especially songs like “Danceteria,” “L.E.S. Girl,” and “Fragile”—I hear someone looking back on the people, the places, and the community that shaped her. Reading about the names she references in “Danceteria,” and remembering the people she honoured during “Live to Tell” on The Celebration Tour, I understand more clearly what she was carrying.
She wasn’t standing beside the community from a safe distance. She was living through it with her closest friends—her chosen family.
I can only imagine how exhilarating, heart breaking, such a whiplash of emotions during that whole time period. Trying to build the biggest pop career in the world while watching people you loved become sick, disappear, and die must have been emotional whiplash.
Yet somehow she kept creating joy. She kept telling people to dance. She kept reminding us that we were worthy of love, joy, intimacy, and life itself.
That’s her legacy,
It’s easy for the media to reduce Madonna to controversy. They’ve been doing it for over forty years and that totally misses the point.
The provocation was never the destination. It was the invitation. It forced conversations that many people wanted to avoid and made us question why they made us uncomfortable in the first place.
She was someone challenging shame, prejudice, misogyny, homophobia, and silence.
Was she perfect? Of course not. She’s made mistakes, some of them significant. But she’s also shown a willingness to learn, apologize, and keep growing—something many public figures never manage to do.
As I’ve listened to Confessions II, I’ve found myself crying more than once.
Partly because of the music, but mostly because it reminded me of the person I was when I first heard her.
A scared kid. A closeted kid. A kid afraid to be himself.
A kid who desperately needed someone, somewhere, to suggest that his future might actually be okay.
That’s why she matters to me. Not because she’s flawless, or that every album is a masterpiece, or that I agree with everything she’s ever done.
Madonna couldn’t know that kid, but somehow she reached him anyway.
She matters because, long before I believed I deserved a full and joyful life, she was already singing as though I did.
Sometimes, that’s enough to change someone’s life.
Listening to Confessions II, I don’t just hear new songs. I hear someone still asking us to celebrate life, to choose joy in the face of loss, and to keep dancing. Confessions on a Dancefloor II is not just a sequel to Confessions on a Dancefloor, I believe it’s also a sequel to Ray of Light with how vulnerable and thoughtful she is on.
THIS is the Madonna I adore.
Thank you, Madonna. Thank you for helping me become the person I am.
