Maxim (magazine)

Maxim is an international men's magazine based in the United Kingdom and known for its pictorials featuring popular actresses, singers, and female models, sometimes pictured scantily dressed but not fully nude.

July 2009[]

A dizzying, twisted, intoxicating encounter with the first lady of the dance floor. Lady GaGa

Morton’s Steak House is not the kind of place you expect to run into vamp-tastic Lady Gaga. It’s very business casual, the speakers pipe Sinatra into the johns, and the palette is all ambers and browns, like you’re eating in a cigar box. So when the foul-mouthed, pants-allergic, electro-loving pop princess behind “Just Dance” and “Poker Face” walks in for our Q & A, there’s hardly a person in the dining room who doesn’t do a double take. GaGa, born Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta 23 years ago in Yonkers, New York, is wearing giant gold sunglasses, a lavender leather jacket, and white vinyl capris. “I’m dressed conservatively today”, she says. “I should take off my pants just to freak them out!”

This interview was supposed to take place at your house. What happened?

My concerts are about me being very private in public, but I’m very protective. My apartment is my stage, and my bedroom is my stage —they’re just not stages you’re allowed to see—. When you let a bunch of people in there, they fuck with that energy and it becomes a circus. Put it another way: Everybody wants me to show my vagina to the world all the time. And the truth is, I don’t have to.

Speaking of vagina displays, what's up with your Britney Spears obsession?

I was 13 when Britney became a star. My friends and I used to go to TRL once a week just to stand outside. But even then I wasn't a superfan. I was amazed by the level of superfan Britney created. I liked to watch and be a part of the huh-huh-huh-huh! —the hyperventilating—. I want to bring back the feeling I used to feel.

The Lady GaGa experience is a tough one to wrap one's head around. Is it high art? Camp? Straight-up cheese?

Warhol said art should be meaningful in the most shallow way. He was able to make commercial art that was taken seriously as fine art, to use something simple and shallow to take you to another planet. That's what I'm doing, too. When you listen to a song like "LoveGame", is it communicating my soul to you? No. My music isn't me jerking my dick off all over a piano trying to feel something. I make soulless electronic pop. But when you're on Ecstasy in a nightclub grinding up against someone and my music comes on, you'll feel soul.

You spent a lot of time hanging out at downtown gay clubs. What do they have that other clubs don't?

There's an euphoria you don't get anywhere else. No pretensions, just a celebration of sexual freedom.

Do you prefer screw with men or women?

It depends on the guy or the girl. But I'm not discussing my sex life with you. I will say that I'd be a happy girl if I could make the whole world gay.

You're not going to turn a lot of guys gay with this photo shoot.

But that's the thing. I'm not trying to make your dick hard the way other girls are. I'm trying to teach your dick to get hard when it looks at other things. I love Grace Jones and David Bowie because they played with gender, with what "sexy" means.

Have you always been so GaGa-ish?

When I was 15, I would wear stonewashed jeans with very tight, midriff-showing tank tops. I had huge boobs, because I was 20 pounds heavier then. Big, frizzy, dark brown hair. Hot pink lipstick. My dad would be waiting for me to get home from a club, sweating on the couch, having a heart attack. I didn't like upsetting him. But I did like being myself.