ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on Justify My Love and its reception in the mainstream and gay press to consider Madonna's resonance in lesbian and gay culture, particularly her privileged, if ambivalent, position in gay sexual politics. Wearing a loosely sashed black coat over lace lingerie, Madonna enters a hotel corridor, her high blond hair barely contrasting the stark walls. Tony Ward, former gay porn model and Madonna's lover on camera and off when the video was shot, joins her from the end of the corridor. Madonna remains the essential female spectacle, made up and laced up to denote her unambiguous feminity and thus her appeal to heterosexual male fantasy. In Justify My Love, Madonna's bad-girl repertoire includes her declaratively sexual persona and her acknowledgment of power relations in sexual fantasy and practice. In the mainstream and gay press alike, much is made of Madonna's perpetual transformations.
