Sex

Whether you love her or hate her, Madonna is a cultural icon beyond compare. For well over the thirty years now, the Queen of Pop has re-invented herself, her music and her image time and time again, somehow managing to stay one step ahead of her contemporaries. Before the days of raunchy sex tapes and revealing hacked-from-cellphone selfies turning nobodies into celebrities, Madonna was hiring photographers (both still and moving alike) to follow her around L.A. while she visited the locker

Whether you love her or hate her, Madonna is a cultural icon beyond compare. For well over the thirty years now, the Queen of Pop has re-invented herself, her music and her image time and time again, somehow managing to stay one step ahead of her contemporaries. Before the days of raunchy sex tapes and revealing hacked-from-cellphone selfies turning nobodies into celebrities, Madonna was hiring photographers (both still and moving alike) to follow her around L.A. while she visited the locker rooms of gay bath houses, engaged in public sex acts with other stars, and dressed up in bondage gear with just about every master and slave within the thirty-mile-zone. When all was said and done, her SEX book ended up being one of the biggest news stories of 1992. It flew off shelves in record time, and even today - some twenty one years later - copies regular sell on auction sites for upwards of $400.00. If you ever hear one of you gay friends saying, "Madonna did it first," don't argue. She probably did.

Of course, SEX took a lot of heat for its sexually-explicit content, but more than one limp-wristed man (who I probably bedded around the same time) also complained about it's production quality and packaging. First it was the Mylar bag - collectors didn't want to open it for fear of the book losing its value, and even once it was opened, it looked tragically shitty sitting upon the bookshelf with a wrinkly, torn shiny bag hanging off of it. Then there was the spiral binding, which took a lot of guff because it bent in odd ways and some of pages tended to fall out. But if you could get past the hype (and believe me, there was tons), SEX was almost a masterpiece. There was nothing like it before and quiet honestly, there's been nothing like it since. Though it was intended to be one of three equally-successful, overtly sexual projects that Madonna was releasing - along with Body of Evidence (her film) and Erotica (her album) - it ended up being the only one of the three to have any sort of lasting impact or pull on the memory. Body of Evidence, after being produced with a $30 million dollar budget, was slapped with a rare NC-17 rating (think Elizabeth Berkley in Showgirls) and only managed to rake-in $13 million at the box office. It did not go on to have any sort of cult following, which sometimes helps to bolster numbers with DVD/VHS/streaming sales, and it even found a position on Robert Ebert's 2005 "Most Hated Films of All Time" list. Erotica, while praised by critics and hardcore fans alike, was Madonna's poorest-performing album of all time (until the likes of American Life, Hard Candy and MDNA - though to be fair, it's hard to compare numbers given 21st Century piracy technology), peaking only at number two in the U.S. and U.K. and selling slightly more than two million copies at a time when selling five or seven million was not uncommon.

In the end, however, SEX turned into one of the watershed moments that made Madonna the uber-celebrity juggernaut that she is today. It's most definitely one of her top five defining moments and the world wouldn't be the same without it. The next time you happen upon a copy in a shady bookstore on the bad side of town, shell out half of last month's pay and pick it up. One day when she's dead, everyone will pretend they've always loved her and were her biggest fans (just like they've done the Michael Jackson, who they only used to call a pedophile) and it will be worth even more. Think of it as an investment.

Love and switchblades,
Joey