I was a lifelong Madonna fanatic ... until I saw her in concert one last time

Madonna's new album "Confessions II" just debuted at the top of the Billboard chart, giving her her 10th No. 1 album. It also makes her the first artist to score No. 1 albums in four different decades.

Madonna's fans have come through for her once again. Years ago, I would've been right there with them, on the edge of my seat, eager to spend my money the second her new release went on sale.

During a costume change, my friend Clay turned to me and said, 'The more she puts on, the better she looks.'

No longer. In another middle-aged role reversal, I’m looking at the party kids bopping out just like I did in the '80s, except now I’m the disapproving conservative uncle. It's quite a thing to go from being a stereotypical Gen X gay boy Madonna freak to a mid-lifer who thinks the woman is actually the Whore of Babylon.

Childish things

Thank God I finally grew up and got out of the "gay lifestyle" with its promiscuity, addiction, and its "die young and leave a good-looking corpse" motto.

Even if I hadn't, I'm not sure I could've kept up with today's new breed of fan. They have a taste for the raunchy, the narcissistic, and the materialistic that makes Madonna's once-notorious sexual button-pushing seem quaint by comparison. Today, there are no more boundaries to break — not that it has stopped the almost 68-year-old from trying.

When Madonna Ciccone came up in the 1980s, she made a big deal about being more brazenly sexual and aggressive than female stars were supposed to be. Back then, I bought her line about how she was helping women liberate themselves. But that line took us directly to “rap artists” like Cardi B “singing” about anatomical parts in a way that would have made the Material Girl blush in 1984.

Desperate to shock

The only thing Madonna could do to push the shock envelope today would be wearing her internal sexual organs on the outside (and I wouldn't put it past her). The on-the-go senior has been "performing" — we use the term generously — in Times Square dressed in what Baby Jane Hudson would have worn if her parents had started her in burlesque instead of vaudeville.

Butt implants bulging, Madonna squeezes herself into pink satin teddies cut so high a gynecologist could examine her from across a stadium. She spreads her legs (I repeat myself) to reveal a giant boom box speaker while rolling around on her back lip-syncing to her own processed voice.

Then, she brings on a 6-foot drag queen — I'm sorry, a "transgender woman" — so she can put her posterior in the dancer's face to suggest an act too lewd to describe.

This used to be my playground

It's a rehash of the shockingly incompetent, boring, and embarrassing concert I attended in 2024. She went on the road with a greatest hits tour at 65. My friends and I have been to half a dozen of her shows over the years, usually from the front row or close to it. At her best, like her or not, she is a mesmerizing live performer with a charisma that cannot be bought or sold.

Not that night. The arena in Denver was packed with aging "Madonna wannabes," late middle-aged women with their hair tied up in rags and crucifix necklaces. Superannuated gay men prancing about in makeup and the kind of shorts that used to get one arrested for public indecency.

Out came our lady of the pop charts singing along to an entirely prerecorded musical track. There was no band, and the sound was so poor I couldn't understand what she was singing or saying.

That turned out to be a mercy when she decided to break into a speech praising the child abuse that we call "transgender children." And like a modern Joan Crawford, Madonna brought two of her adopted African children onto the stage with her to gyrate while male dancers displayed portions of their physique not usually seen outside textbooks.

At 65, she was still stuffing herself into corsets and teddies that don't wear the same at the AARP stage of life. It was unflattering and embarrassing. During a costume change, my friend Clay turned to me and said, "The more she puts on, the better she looks."

For the first time, I stood at a Madonna concert and looked at my phone for the time to see when it ended. My back and feet were killing me.

Goo goo Gaga

With the release of her new dance album, I've peeked at the online "diva wars" between fans of Miss Ciccone and devotees of the later simulacrum known as Lady Gaga. I've been watching the younger fan reactions to senior citizen Madonna. They're insane.

The young have a name for what we might call "super fans," the obsessive types who make a singer, an actor, or a sports team into a religion. They call them "stans," because the word fan, shortened from "fanatic," wasn't fanatical enough.

They defend their divas to the digital death. If you dare to say you're not into their celebrity obsession, the stans will scream that you're old, stupid, a bigot, repressed, or that you just "hate people enjoying things." For them, it's not enough to praise Madonna for her music or her style; she has to be the biggest, best, baddest, b***h ever.

To watch these antics is to look into an unpleasantly clear mirror of the young man I used to be. When I attended the concert two years ago, I thought to myself, "What are you doing here?" I was 49 years old, and the magic was gone.

But it was more than that; it was more than just getting older and reaching maturity. It wasn't that I was no longer interested in Madonna; I was repulsed by her. She stands for everything I think is rotten and destructive in modern society: brazen promiscuity, pathological narcissism, out-of-control greed, and breaking every rule simply for the sake of breaking it.

What did I see in her decades ago when I fell under her spell?

Star struck

It was 1983 in Anaheim. I was over at Dinda's apartment for her eighth birthday party. The wood-grain console stereo was tuned to the top 40 station, and this enchanting melodic synthesizer run tinkled like electric glass out of the speakers. Then a booming bass line came in and some ethereal creature sang, "You must be my lucky star, cuz you make the darkness seem so far."

I was captivated. You couldn't not dance to it.

Less than a year later, I was sitting in front of MTV, and I watched this glamorous vixen in a pink dress (copied from Marilyn Monroe's "Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend" number) be pushed up onto a pedestal as handsome men showered her with cash and diamonds.

That was the beginning of my obsession with Madonna Ciccone. I bought every single record (45 singles and the 33 long-playing), every single poster, every single magazine, every fan newsletter. I begged the bus driver to turn up the radio when her songs came on.

For years, I spent money on her merchandise and her concerts, and I defended her singing, her dancing, and her "message" to anyone who would listen (and to those who just wanted me to shut the hell up). To kids like me, she was a liberated, self-made, modern girl who "took on the system."

No man was going to tell her what she could and couldn't do with her body. Stupid, stuffy, old religious conservatives only hated her, because, like, they're afraid of normal sexuality and bodies, OK?

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Missing persons

What was it that so attracted young girls and gays to this siren? Young people are vulnerable to unhealthy obsessions with unhealthy celebrities because they're missing something at home. I was missing a lot. My mother was deranged with a personality disorder. I was 10 years old before she finally put my violent stepfather out of the house the night after he tried to murder her in front of us three children. My teen years were spent in a home for juvenile delinquent boys, and my sister met the same fate when she approached adolescence.

Families like mine provided none of the normal, necessary nurturing that teaches children to value the good things in life and to value the good. No religious instruction, no unconditional love, only mood swings, temper tantrums, and violent punishment.

Like too many young people today, I became convinced that the idea of family was a sick joke. It was just something "fundagelicals" had cooked up and forced down our throats with "propaganda" like "Leave It to Beaver."

Siren song

When I called Madonna a siren above, I meant it literally. She sang a song, and kids like me foundered on her rocks because no one made sure we were tied to the mast. We couldn't resist.

I think she's even more than a siren; I’d call her a sorceress. She cast a "glamour" over youth in the original sense of the term, a spell that binds and blinds. Like all pathological narcissists, Madonna's moral values are inverted. The healthy is recast as sickness. Temperance, chastity, charity, and loyalty are for suckers. Greed is good.

Like my unstable mother, Madonna created herself god in her own image and then demanded that others worship her. We can ask how a woman pushing 70 can stand to do what she does without dying of embarrassment, but the answer is obvious.

We are a society that pays for pathology. Madonna sells the lost exactly what they want to buy. Far from fading into the past, her brand of self-destructive self-worship has been culturally normalized in the 21st century.

For years, I complied with my mother's idolatrous demands, and I gave in to Madonna's as well. Now I'm free, but an even greater percentage of young people today are in moral and spiritual bondage than they were in my youth.

Tie your children to the mast. Give them what they need at home, or they'll pay dearly for a poison substitute.