Madonna Covers ‘The Advocate’, Says She Never Left Gay Fans Behind

Madonna graces the cover of gay publication The Advocate via what appears to be a paparazzi shot that’s been Photoshopped to look like an old-school Peter Max rock gig poster. In the mag, the “Give Me All Your Luvin'” singer discusses her film W.E., as well as her longstanding status as a gay icon. “I saw how people treated them differently,” she says of her gay friends and fans. “I saw the prejudices, and I think probably I got that confused with, intertwined with, you know, maybe things that…ways that people treated me differently.” Madonna also recounts her own experience of living in New York City during the AIDS crisis in the 1980s to The Advocate: “I was extremely affected by it. I remember lying on a bed with a friend of mine who was a musician, and he had been diagnosed with this kind of cancer, but nobody knew what it was. He was this beautiful man, and I watched him kind of waste away, and then another gay friend, and then another gay friend, and then another gay friend. They were all artists and all truly special and dear to me.”

Interestingly, the magazine brings up the notion to The Material Girl that many of her gay fans “felt a twinge of abandonment” when she “moved on.” One guesses they mean as her career advanced, though she seems to interpret it as when she married Guy Ritchie:

“I never left them. When you’re single, you certainly have more time to socialize and hang out with your gay friends, but then you get married and you have a husband and you have children, and your husband wants you to spend time with him. I’m not married anymore, but I have four kids, and I don’t have a lot of time for socializing. I hope nobody’s taking that personally. It certainly was not a conscious decision. As it stands, most of my friends in England are gay. But I’m back. Never fear.”

“Give Me All Your Luvin'” will be released on iTunes tomorrow, the same day the single’s music video premieres in full.