If you're on this website, you don't need me to tell you that Italy loves Madonna. She was rolling out an album both times I've visited. I have this crystalline memory of the 4 Minutes video on a café tv in Vatican City - Jonas and François doubling down on Madonna and Justin's did-they-or-didn't-they bait with a mashup of Body Worlds and Raimi's Spiderman, down the street from the headquarters of a religion whose theology states they'd literally burn for literal eternity if they did, with 80% of its host country claiming adherence - one of those formative moments of feeling without understanding that all this is a lot more messy and mixed-up than I'd been told. A few years later I was messy and mixed-up too, convincing myself that I was merely "half-out" of the closet while listening to MDNA on loop on a schooltrip. The truth was that everyone knew but most people didn't know what to say - a catholic might make a gospel-disco megahit pointing directly at her faith community's contradictions, but evangelicals prefer to quarantine the glitches in their matrix with whisper networks and closed-door pastoral visits, so often their only defense against a compulsively visible fuckup is sweatily talking around it. "Great track, weird video," said one of the boys I was rooming with when we caught the hunks-in-heels "Girl Gone Wild" clip on TV before bed in Florence. My memory gives his voice a retrospectively familiar tone, like he expected me to respond (I knew not to by then) yet feared what I might say.

YouTube video by Madeon