Where were you when the video for “Bad Romance” dropped? For many, the Francis Lawrence-directed clip, with its twisted depiction of then-rising pop star Lady Gaga as a woman who is kidnapped, drugged, and subsequently sold off to the highest bidder in an underground Russian Mafia sex slavery ring, carried the seismic weight of an earth-shattering event.

Here was a video that looked and felt unlike anything else at the time, espousing lofty ideas about power, sex, and control while catering to the masses with instantly memorable choreography and an Alexander McQueen-designed wardrobe (the song premiered at the designer’s final runway show before his untimely death in February 2010). Its ending, which finds Gaga calmly laying down next to the incinerated skeletal corpse of the man who ultimately bought her, stood out as a bold feminist statement about overcoming patriarchal constraint. Though she had been steadily carving out space for herself on the charts, with four top 10 singles in a little over a year, the “Bad Romance” video seemed to mark the true arrival of a pop star whose vision was miles ahead of the competition.

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This week, The Fame Monster, the album that housed this near chart-topping single, turned ten. And over the past decade, it has not only changed the face of pop music by expanding our conception of what the genre can be, but it’s changed me, too.

I remember where I was when “Bad Romance” dropped: I was less than two months into my sophomore year of high school, and I was at home, taking a procrastination break from my algebra homework. More importantly, I remember who I was at the time — just an outspoken 15-year-old with a severe internet addiction because, in many ways, it was the only place I felt like I could truly be myself. I was still in the closet and mostly afraid of anything that would betray my secret, including an obsession with female pop stars. But something about Gaga made me feel safe. She was the reason I first created a Twitter account, and the video for “Bad Romance” — along with the album it emerged from — served as one of my earliest escapes.

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Before Gaga entered into her “Fame Monster” era, she had already enraptured audiences around the globe with her debut album, The Fame. From the carefree reverie of debut single “Just Dance” to the bisexual-hinting hedonism of “Poker Face” to the psycho-sexual stalker vibes of “Paparazzi” (and a jaw-dropping performance of the song at the 2009 MTV Video Music Awards), Gaga had proven herself to be a new kind of pop star — one completely willing to defy industry norms and expectations. She was unapologetic about her outré aesthetic while also being painfully astute about her place in life. She never minced words. She just didn’t give a fuck. It’s no wonder she so quickly became such an inspiration to queer people everywhere.

But it was The Fame Monster that launched her into the stratosphere. As a continuation of the celebrity-worshipping ethos of The Fame, The Fame Monster explored the darker side of that mentality, examining complex questions about the unfortunate aftermath of becoming famous. Gaga had gone from being “Beautiful, Dirty, Rich” to a “Monster,” now unable to pull herself away from the allure she had spent so much of her life chasing. Fame had come fast — she had gone from performing in sweaty dive bars on New York City’s Lower East Side to selling out arenas and stadiums — but at what cost?

The Fame Monster’s music was uniformly great, even when she was “borrowing” from other pop stars, like in the name-calling outro of “Dance In the Dark,” which was directly inspired by Madonna’s “Vogue.” But its music videos elevated the album to high art. In addition to “Bad Romance,” there was the near ten-minute short film for “Telephone,” which found Beyoncé temporarily letting her guard down to seductively feed Gaga a honeybun, as well as the Steven Klein-directed clip for “Alejandro,” which, for me, served as an acceptable form of softcore gay porn. (It toed the line of salaciousness just enough that it could still be played regularly on TV.) The Fame Monster wasn’t just a pop album; it was a pop album with a true 360-degree vision. Even the accompanying imagery played a part: Who else was using high-fashion photos lensed by famed designer Hedi Slimane to cover their album? Gaga was something special.

And people thought so across the board. The Fame Monster turned naysayers into passionate believers. Emily Mackay opens her review for NME by dismissing “99 percent of pop” as “drudging twuntery assembled by blank-eyed robots who are unjustly awarded with mountains of cash,” right before admitting that Gaga “is that remaining one percent.” Similarly, in his review for Pitchfork, Scott Plagenhoef criticizes the then-current slate of pop stars as “empty famewhores,” only to conclude that Gaga is “the only real pop star around.” (“Bad Romance,” in his opinion, was “arguably the best pop single and best pop video of 2009.”)

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“The Fame Monster proved her global takeover wasn't a fluke and that she really was a once-in-a-generation talent,” Hugh McIntyre, a music journalist and chart analyst for sites like Forbes, tells them. “Many felt the second installment was even better than the first, and it certified her as a true star, not just a lucky pop singer.” McIntyre maintains that Gaga’s dark electronic sound wholly impacted the charts, pointing to songs like Rihanna’s “S&M” and Britney Spears’ “Hold It Against Me” as evidence that, in the wake of The Fame Monster, artists now felt comfortable writing “about themes that were more intense and serious than in the past.” As he says, “Electronic music went from simple four-on-the-floor to proper electro bangers.”

In the years since the universally-beloved The Fame Monster, Lady Gaga’s popularity in the public consciousness has waxed and waned. The response to the singer’s followup album, the suspiciously-titled Born This Way, was decidedly more mixed, while her big plans for 2013’s ARTPOP seemed to implode upon release. Joanne, the first “pop” album she released after taking a brief detour to record an album of jazz standards alongside Tony Bennett, was decidedly un-pop with its borderline country-leanings. And last year’s soundtrack for A Star Is Born, which included the Oscar-winning “Shallow” (her first Billboard chart-topper since 2011’s “Born This Way”), took her in an even different direction — as a movie star first, pop star second.

Yet throughout the many ups and downs, I’ve found it impossible to ever not love Gaga. I live my life now as an out and proud gay man, and I know that I will always owe a major part of that to the confidence she instilled in me during those early years when I was still considering a life lived in the closet. I remember who I was way back in November 2009, and that boy was nothing like the man I am today. Who knows where I would be if I didn’t have The Fame Monster to play on a loop out of the blue boombox that I kept on my headboard?

Since then, I’ve been caught in bad romances of my own. I’ve found my own Alejandros and my own Monsters. I’ve been so happy I could die and I’ve been rendered speechless. I’ve danced in the dark and I’ve had to tell men to stop blowing up my telephone. It’s been a journey, with its own ups and downs, but it’s one that I wouldn’t trade for anything else in the world.

And for that, I can only say: Happy 10th birthday to The Fame Monster. You made me gay.

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