MAD AT MADONNA: Is Madonna on the...

MAD AT MADONNA: Is Madonna on the outs with the gay community?

The Advocate, the nation’s leading gay magazine, has named the singer-actress as the top “winner” in its annual Sissy Awards. This is a bit of a shock considering Madonna’s long relationship with the journal, including a frank, two-issue interview series in 1991.

“For the last 10 years she has traded on a sexual mystique and in her ‘Sex’ book wrote about lesbian experiences had by her ‘alter ego’ Dita,” says Advocate Editor-in-Chief Jeff Yarbrough. “But in an interview with [English magazine] the Face last September, she said she was firmly heterosexual.”

Yarbrough acknowledged that her statement was not a “catastrophic event” for gay rights, but said that being so insistent about her orientation was “certainly a stupid, silly move.” “This is not a deadly look at homophobia,” he says of the annual, lighthearted feature. “We do that 23 issues a year and this is the one we don’t take 100% seriously. Knowing Madonna and [her publicist] Liz Rosenberg, I’m sure they understand the joke of it.”

He shouldn’t be so sure. Rosenberg says she can’t understand why the Advocate picked on Madonna for merely telling the truth and said that the star herself “has nothing to say about it.”