“Why was she gay? Come on!”

Irked, Madonna twists her fingerless lace gloves, exposing a bejeweled skull on her ring finger. It’s a Friday night in the dead of winter, and we’re sitting in a windowless office in an anonymous skyscraper in Midtown Manhattan. The drab space has been enhanced at Madonna’s request with a few cultural cues: Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless streams in an adjoining room, while Carl Dreyer’s 1928 masterpiece, The Passion of Joan of Arc, streams in this one, as the Queen of Pop lashes me for my ignorance regarding the Maid of Orleans. The lashing is figurative, but Madonna’s impatience is real. I’m only stating the obvious, I think, in observing that the virgin warrior must have been gay, but what this lazy assumption tells Madonna is that I have completely missed the point of Joan of Arc.

By extension, I have also missed the point of Rebel Heart, Madonna’s 13th studio album, the eighth track of which is “Joan of Arc,” a hauntingly beautiful mash-up of country and pop. “Joan of Arc” is one of the strongest tracks on the record, which, in its full Super Deluxe edition, comprises a staggering 25 songs, a dozen genres, scores of collaborators (ranging from rodeo raver Avicii to boxer and convicted rapist Mike Tyson), and nearly 100 minutes, making it the most protracted album of her career. As a manically curated compendium of contemporary beats — grasping for relevance in virtually every musical sub-niche — it could also be called her most ambitious album. All of which helps to explain why it matters to Madonna that I bring some rigor to my assessment of Saint Joan’s sexuality. Rebel Heart is not a gay-club dance album, and Joan of Arc was not a gay saint.

“OK, she dressed like a boy and she cut off her hair,” Madonna says. “That’s what the church tried to say. Also that the dauphin who supported her, that he was gay.” She bristles at the stupidity of equating a hairdo and a suit of armor with sexual orientation, and I, evidently no better than an English cardinal, sag with shame.

Read the full article by OUT magazine here