Since the first time I heard various songs from Madonna Louise Ciccone’s freshman album, “Madonna,” I fell in love. She was speaking my thoughts, language, and experiences. Boys, dancing, being unapologetically herself (that last one took me a couple more decades to understand that as a queer, I must do!).

In 1989, Madonna released her fourth studio album, “Like a Prayer,” and videos accompanying its songs that MTV played on what seemed like a continuous loop to me. I stood in my parents’ master bedroom, gazing at those videos on a 14-inch, cathode-ray tube television.

The following year, my sister, Zeenat, a bunch of her friends from high school, and one of my friends, Amaya Goldberg, got tickets to Madonna’s much-ballyhooed, Blond Ambition tour. It was replete with classics from her first three albums and new material from “Like a Prayer.” We were in the nosebleed section, dancing merrily to the opening act: Technotronic.

During intermission, a tall, white man with a modified mullet haircut approached us. He wore a lanyard and name tag around his neck.

We stopped dancing as he said, “How would you guys like to be in second-row center?” We spoke no words, just screamed with joy as he led us down to the pit. My uncle Abbas and I saw Madonna’s rockumentary, “Truth or Dare,” a year later.

A man approached us as our noses bled, but didn’t interfere with the ecstatic time we were having. In Madonna’s own words, in “Truth or Dare,” she says to another behind-the-scenes fellow, Jay Whitney: “Please…give…Keith a new asshole! Because he’s in charge of my show.” Then she yells at her manager, Freddy DeMann, for arguing with this estimation. My mother’s strong-willed nature began my love of “bitchy” women. So the more petulant, demanding, and shameless Madonna behaved in “Truth or Dare,” the more I loved her.

Years later, when I saw “Keith” in “Truth or Dare,” I wondered if he was the man who escorted us to second-row center.

“They [the people in the front rows] were really having fun in the front tonight! I mean, that crowd was up!” DeMann said.

“The crowd was TOUGH. There were three rows of ASSHOLES looking like..like they weren’t they weren’t there to have a good time.” she says to DeMann on camera. She adds that she wanted those rows filled with people who were there to have a good time.

“Blond Ambition” resembled a meticulously choreographed Broadway play, expressing truths Madonna was one of the few people to speak at the time…through dance, the language of the body. This was no meek performer standing in front of a mic warbling mealymouthed lyrics about vapid topics.

Post-show, Madonna and fellow celebrities from whatever city she performed in “came backstage” just to hang out: Olivia Newton-John, Kevin Costner, and Warren Beatty (her paramour at the time), to name a few.

So that day in the Capital Centre in Landover, Maryland, she and her crew opened the show with a song that Madonna released on the previous year’s “Like a Prayer” album: “Express Yourself.” Without warning, the arena went dark. Zeenat, our friends, and I went speechless. Slowly, a bass drum began pounding, and her back-up dancers trudged across the stage in a live version of the video for the same song, an homage to Fritz Lang’s “Metropolis”.

All the backup dancers were beautiful, beautiful men. And I knew because my crotch said so! Soon, the refrain from an early single of hers, “Everybody,” played over loudspeakers: “Dance and sing/Get up and do your thing.” Smoke filled the stage. Niki Haris and Donna DeLory, her backup singers, came out. Avant-garde French Haute Couture designer and Madonna’s close friend, Jean-Paul Gaultier, designed all the costumes.

When Madonna, my idol for so many years, rose from behind the stage in Gaultier’s famous “cone bra,” the entire arena erupted in joy—and I was in spitting distance from Madonna herself. I did, too.

But I’d never, ever, before or since, felt a rush like that—a mixture of joy and overstimulation. I cried. Sobbed. Couldn’t breathe. When I told this to people in the next few days and weeks, they’d meet this statement with condescending giggles.

“Oh, that Akbi! So silly and easily swept up in tacky emotion!” The whole production—from Madonna, her backup singers, her backup dancers, the costumes, and the sets—was anything but “silly.” And I can’t explain why, but I knew the moment she appeared on stage, it was something to be celebrated that men attracted me. Many gay men shared similar experiences with me in the years to come.

That surge of self-affirming, almost painful, emotion began in my core. It widened in concentric circles throughout my body, in my arteries, and in those salty tears. I knew, for the first time since my first inklings that I was, as so many queer people say as adults, “different.”

I couldn’t or wouldn’t know how to describe that rush until years later. I was home.

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