The outspoken star feels “gay rights are
way more advanced than women’s rights”
The Many Heresies of Madonna Louise Ciccone
Photography by Mert & Marcus
"Why was she gay? Come on!”
Irked, Madonna twists her fingerless lace gloves, exposing a bejeweled skull on her ring finger. It’s a Friday night in the dead of winter, and we’re sitting in a windowless office in an anonymous skyscraper in Midtown Manhattan. The drab space has been enhanced at Madonna’s request with a few cultural cues: Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless streams in an adjoining room, while Carl Dreyer’s 1928 masterpiece, The Passion of Joan of Arc, streams in this one, as the Queen of Pop lashes me for my ignorance regarding the Maid of Orleans. The lashing is figurative, but Madonna’s impatience is real. I’m only stating the obvious, I think, in observing that the virgin warrior must have been gay, but what this lazy assumption tells Madonna is that I have completely missed the point of Joan of Arc.
