Impressive Instant by Tyler Lindsay

Tyler Lindsay, a freelance writer and a MadonnaTriber has just written a piece on Madonna and how
her music has affected his life and wants to share it with our reades.

Whenever things in my life get crazy and whenever I am troubled, there is one woman I can always turn to for advice and help. She does not realize that she is such an influential force in my life, and that I have greatly benefited from her words, her laughter, and even her hardships. She may never know that she has nurtured me through my darkest hour and has taught me that I am a resilient human being. This woman is not my shrink. She is not my mother. In fact, we are not even related. She doesn’t even know I am alive. This woman is Madonna.

One is such a lonely number
As with most gay men, when I was younger, I knew I was different. I often felt like the outcast, and being an only child until I was nine, I was a loner. With the exception of a neighborhood girl that let me position her Barbie and Ken dolls in sexual poses on Barbie’s inflatable furniture, I had few friends. Always last to be picked for the gym class dodge ball game (“Tyler appears to be afraid of the ball” read my first grade report card), I was a timid boy with eager fantasies of being Princess Leia and Wonder Woman, or that perky, cheerleading red head that got to kiss jocky Josh Brolin in The Goonies.
In the backyard, I would shove four milk crates together, slap a large piece of plywood on top, and dance around on my make-shift stage to Olivia Newton-John songs. After her Physical album, her career gradually lost steam, and I gradually lost interest. Then, in 1984, I fell in love with a song called “Borderline”. My stereo was beat and worn. The record and play buttons on the tape deck were broken, and I had to jab pencils and scissors into the slots and mash them down to record from the radio. I broke enough number twos to wipe out a small forest, and what gave me the notion to stick metal scissors into the guts of a large electrical device was beyond me. I didn’t care. Music was my passion. I knew it, and so did my parents.
As punishments, they would ground me from my stereo. Once, my father unplugged, removed, and boxed up my stereo, storing it in a closet. I felt like I had lost a limb, and quite honestly, I think I would have preferred it. You see, Casey Kasem had just introduced me to Madonna. I would spend my entire Saturday afternoons listening to all four hours of America’s Top Forty, eagerly anticipating my chance to record “Lucky Star”.
When “Like a Virgin” swept the nation, securing Madonna’s position as a pop icon, I was beginning to spend less time in front of my stereo and more time watching television. I rushed home from school everyday to watch the half hour music video shows, hoping to catch a glimpse of Madonna in all her crazy and spunky glory. She would get occasional airtime between Culture Club and Men at Work, baring her belly button amid the rubber bracelets and fishnet tops. Imitating her dance moves, I wore a basketball goal net as a skirt (with whitey tighties, of course) and as leg warmers, I wore the zip-off sleeves of my Michael Jackson ‘Beat It’ jacket. (Give me a break; I was barely ten years old!)
The first cassette tape I ever purchased with my own money was Madonna’s True Blue album. By then, I had a small Walkman knock-off thats only feature was an AM/FM radio with poor reception. I would lay in bed at night, listening to “Open Your Heart” holding my radio in the air the full four minutes and thirteen seconds of the song in attempts to increase reception quality. After the True Blue album, I became a fully committed Madonna fan. “Papa Don’t Preach” spoke to my inner drama queen, while “Live to Tell” was the perfect song for a young boy riddled with secrets and melancholy.

Beauty’s where yoy find it, not just where you bump and grind it.
In 1989, Madonna released her Like a Prayer album, raising controversial questions about religious ecstasy and sexual ecstasy, and whether the two were meant to co-exist within the same sentence. (They just did, by the way.) It was around this time that I was beginning to question my own religion, wondering what the difference was in having faith and being conditioned. I questioned if I really had a faithful testimony in my religion, or if it was simply taught to me, just as I was taught to use a fork when eating certain foods. What’s more, I found it increasingly difficult to attend the services of a church that believes homosexuality is the worst sin, second only to murder. I began to secretly doubt everything about my religion when I realized that someone gay could be judged just as harshly as a murderer. Since when did making love equate to killing someone?
Because of my religious confusion and fear of my parent’s disapproval, I chose to stay in the closet. In hindsight, my being gay was obvious. What other male high school senior was actually photographed voguing for the year book? What other young man took his high school sweetheart to see Madonna’s Truth or Dare? The latter was actually a double date with my friend Allen (also in the closet), and his then girlfriend, Susan. My high school sweetheart stormed out of the theatre midway through the film, after the “Like a Virgin” masturbation scene. She claimed she was disgusted that I could idolize such a “depraved slut”. (I later discovered my high school sweetheart was sleeping with half the young men in her Baptist bible study.) Allen and I returned to the theatre for second and third viewings, leaving the wives at home, and on the way home, we practiced fellatio on Mountain Dew bottles.

What my momma told me, let my father mold me
In 1992, Madonna’s Erotica album came out, and so did I. The Erotica album was the perfect ‘coming out’ album. Songs like “Erotica”, “Bye Bye Baby” and “Fever” had a tough but fun dance floor sensibility, while “Rain” and “Deeper and Deeper” revealed a never-ending yearning for love and acceptance. I began sneaking into The Coachman, the only gay bar within two hours of home. It was a small bar, with a tiny dance floor. The DJ played a lengthy Madonna mega mix, and I’d shake and gyrate among the granola kids from the Quaker college and the beer bellied old men. Allen and I skipped our classes at the commuter college we attended and camped (and vamped) outside the Waldenbooks for our copies of the Sex book. With the Erotica album playing, we sat in the mall parking lot pouring over every page.
Of course, my mother found my Sex book in my closet while snooping. Her focus fell on a few key pages, and not reading the book in its entirety, she missed the point of the book and its message. My parents knew I was going to gay bars as well, and the Homeland Securities “Is My Son Gay?” Threat Alert System went from code orange to code red. I eventually came out to my parents, and was told I could not live under their roof. My mother cried and said she would rather me be a drug dealer or murderer. This was coupled with the alienation I felt from my religion when I declined to serve as a missionary for two years. I felt rebellious, lonely, and afraid, but for the first time in my life, I felt like myself.

Happiness lies in your own hands
After a couple of years exploring my new found sexuality, and getting banned from the college campus newspaper for writing naughty Madonna-inspired poetry, I was ready for a romance. I started dating Phillip, a fledging fashion design student at a prestigious art school. I eventually moved five states away from my parents to live with Phillip. The morning I left my hometown, I saw my father openly cry for the first time. I realized that although I resented my parents for judging me and forcing me from their home, their approval meant the world to me.
In 1994, Madonna was on the backside of a furious media fervor caused by the overtly sexual Erotica album and Sex book. Madonna lashed back at the back lash by releasing the Bedtime Stories album. With lush R&B arrangements, this was one of Madonna’s most personal albums, revealing a lonely and heartbreaking vulnerability with songs like “Love Tried to Welcome Me”, “Inside of Me” and “Take a Bow”. There were also sentiments of renewal with “Secret” and of course, Madonna responded to her detractors with the slightly defensive “Survival” and the less subtle “Human Nature”. As a young gay man, this album provided the perfect soundtrack for that stage of my life. When things between Phillip and I went sour, this album taught me to embrace my mistakes and to have “absolutely no regrets”.

This is my religion
In the subsequent years that followed, Madonna’s music continued to mirror the happenings in my life, and I considered it no coincidence. In 1998, Madonna released Ray of Light, an album about new beginnings, and I relocated to a larger city in hopes of a new beginning. “The Power of Good-Bye” became my favorite break-up song, while “Ray of Light” and “Nothing Really Matters” kept me dancing, but more importantly, thinking. Madonna’s personal life became an influence as well. I named my dog Lola, after Madonna’s first born and I started to dabble in the Kabbalah. When the Music album was released, my favorite accessory was a cowboy hat and I listened to music and read books Madonna cited as her inspirations.
Allen, my friend from high school, is still one of my closest friends, and every year, we celebrate “Madonnica”, a holiday celebrating Madonna’s birthday on which we exchange Madonna rarities purchased through E-Bay. After I nearly destroyed my friendship with Chad by getting him fired from his job, it was Chad that made the first move towards reconciliation by calling me to discuss the finer points of “Beautiful Stranger”. Madonna’s music really does make the people come together.
You’d think I’d outgrow following her career so intently, but the more music Madonna creates, the more I relate and the more insight I gain. Madonna is due to release a new album later this year. Of course, the night before, I’ll be first in line at Tower Records waiting to buy the CD at the stroke of midnight. I’ll rush home to listen to it, pouring over the CD booklet, following the lyrics of each song. I’ll call both Allen and Chad to share my thoughts and listen to theirs. I’ll have the same giddy excitement that I once expressed as a ten year old waiting by the radio (scissors in hand) for the chance to record “Into the Groove”. And as I listen to her new songs, I’ll feel “like a virgin, touched for the very first time.”

For those interested in reading more of Tyler’s work, which has been described as a
gay ‘Sex and the City’, follow this link:
http://www.livejournal.com/users/tylerlindsay
To send your fan writings about how Madonna inspired your life simply use our email at share@madonnatribe.com