The singer's Blond Ambition World Tour Madonna, turns 30 this week – and has generated several conversations and memories. One of them, as we have already recorded here in The Cape For you, it's the “other side” of the famous dinner that Pedro Almodóvar gave to the singer when he went on his scandalous tour of Madrid and shown in the documentary In Bed with Madonna (1991)
Now it's the turn of the Belgian-Moroccan dancer known as “Slam”, Salim Gauwloos, who accompanied the diva at Blond Ambition and danced for her in the “Vogue” music video, among other performances.
In case you haven't seen the documentary, Gauwloos and another dancer, Gabriel Trupin (1969-1995), star in one of its most memorable scenes: they kiss each other on the mouth, and with tongue, during a game of truth or dare. The kiss became iconic – shown naturally in that environment, it was an important step for LGBT representation in cinema and for gays around the world to feel more comfortable with their sexual orientation.
In interview with the magazine Attitude, Gauwloos said that to this day he receives letters with thanks. “Now everyone is kissing, but back then people didn’t think it was cool. We were just being ourselves. But it inspired a lot of people to just be yourself and express yourself,” he said. “But we kissed without being aware of the impact it would have around the world.”
In another scene from In Bed with Madonna, the dancer, accompanied by other tourmates, goes to a gay pride parade; The fight against hysteria amid the AIDS/HIV epidemic is also addressed in the feature film.
The interview was originally published in 2016, when the documentary was released strike a pose, about the lives of dancers after the hurricane that was Blond Ambition, and republished on the occasion of the tour's 30th anniversary.
Em strike a pose, he once again stars in a remarkable moment: during a reunion with the other dancers, he tells, in tears, that he has known he has HIV since 1985 – and, until that moment during filming, he kept the diagnosis a secret. He is embraced by all his colleagues. Trupin died as a result of health complications caused by AIDS. Carlton Wilborn is another dancer on the tour who has kept an HIV diagnosis secret.
Gauwloos, today, works as a choreographer, dance teacher and model, in addition to being a dancer.
