Every year starting around late November the memes start popping up in my social media feed. Because I have a lot of liberal and/or LGBTQ friends I see lots posts urging others to boycott the…

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At the end of their show, Burgerz, Travis Alabanza asks an audience member to throw a burger at them. The person, who volunteered to go on stage to hold Travis’s hands but was not expecting this, balls their own hands into fists and clutches them to their chest. Shaking their head, “no”, they return to…

Now that everyone know the real meaning of “Netflix and chill” it’s time to move on to the next booty call euphemism.

Introducing: “Disney+ and thrust.”

Sure, it might be a bit more on the nose, but you’ve got the plausibility of an overnight Mandalorian binge-watch working in your favor.

Related: Trailer for ‘Jungle Cruise’ offers the first glimpse of one of Disney’s first gay roles

And Twitter, reliably, is having a field day with the catchphrase. Here are some of our favorite tweets and Instagram posts on the subject:

Related: ‘Love, Simon’ spin-off series is coming to a TV near you

I’ve bottomed many times.

The first time I bottomed was when I was eighteen and in college and my friends had just thrown me into the snow rather than let campus security see me blacked out and swaying to each side, being pushed by invisible forces. Oblivious to the drama and suddenly in the snow, I began making snow angels. Someone wrote on a school-wide discussion board two years later that I was a “gay mess,” which was not helpful.

Oh, by the way, I’m not talking about bottoming in the sex way. I’m talking about bottoming out — like when you hit a low point in your life. Someone would have to be pretty trashy to state their preferred position on a site read by millions of people. Anyway, I’m vers.

But this essay isn’t about that. It’s about alcoholism.

I realized I was a heavy drinker at some point between that night I made snow angels and the night I landed in an ER for overdosing on sleeping pills. Most people would quit drinking after becoming so depressed that they O.D.’d on sleeping pills, but I’m not most people. My reaction instead was, “Gurl, I am so stressed from O.D.’ing. Gimme a drink! I need to get pounded tonight!” The nurse replied: “Sir, I’m a nurse.”

Thus, I continued to drink — harder, faster, stronger — until I convinced myself that I was happy and carefree and drinking for not-insane reasons. As a result, I kept bottoming.

Once, when I was twenty, I stumbled off the sidewalk of a busy New Zealand street and crawled into a homeless woman’s lap, recreating the Pietà. My friends dragged me away before I could projectile vomit into her face.

Another time, when I was twenty-two and blacked out, I decided to sleep under an awning in NYC instead of walking twenty feet to the subway. When I woke up the next morning, I told the crazy homeless guy who slept there to follow me on Instagram. He didn’t have a phone. He still grinned and said he’d follow me. I wonder if he’s going to kill me!

I know y’all are waiting for me to say when I hit my true rock bottom — like, when I realized I needed to quit drinking. But the truth is: I never hit rock bottom. I just kept digging until the dirt fell over my head.

If you want me to tell you a traditional story of regret and self destruction, I guess I could tell you that I once slept with a heroin addict named “Crazy Aaron” and shrugged it off as part of being 19, or that I burst into my mom’s hotel room at 4am one night and threw up in front of her, or that I O.D.’d my junior year of college. Oh, I already told you about that? Sorry, the years of heavy drinking have caused me to forget things. I graduated second in my class in high school.

It’s probably sufficient to tell you that I woke up one day without a job, without money, without real friends, and with an overwhelming desire to change. Then, two years ago, I threw up in a New York City subway car, causing passengers to actually leave the car. Then I quit for good.

Since that night two years ago, I have been offered booze by many, many people. Some of those people were frenemies or fellow alcoholics who were aware that I was sober. (I avoid them now.) But despite those tempting moments, I only recently confronted the greatest test to my sobriety.

In August, I was traveling through Europe solo — a privilege I could afford because I wasn’t spending my limited earnings on booze anymore. And without the vice grip of alcohol holding me hostage, I reveled in the continent’s beauty. In Barcelona, I glided past bars and visited La Sagrada Família, delighting in its undulating freakishness. On a hill overlooking the city, I deleted Grindr and read The Age of Innocence, then re-downloaded Grindr again. In Bilbao, I embarked upon a Transatlantic love affair with a recalcitrant Basque man who had just finished The Age of Innocence as well.

And while I heard the siren call of booze wherever I went, it only tempted me once.

I had just strolled into Barcelona’s Picasso Museum and engaged in athletic eye sex with a cute gay couple. Minutes later, we were talking and they were telling me that they were in town for Circuit Festival–Barcelona’s answer to World Pride. They invited me to pregame at their place that night.

It was such a simple request, and from two strangers unaware of my struggle. They weren’t frenemies trying to uproot my sobriety. They weren’t alcoholics inviting me back into hell. They were just two happy, well-adjusted people who had assumed I liked to drink for fun and not to dilute the poison in my brain.

I could have said “yes.” I could have transformed my Eurotrip into a series of blurry nights and grey mornings, with only my Insta posts to inform me I was ever there. I could have said goodbye to La Sagrada’s freakish curves, to the Age of Innocence, to my bank account, my life. I could have proven to these two men that I was normal.

Instead, I smiled, declined, and meditated in front of Picasso’s Las Meninas for a spell. When I did bottom again, it was three days later and in Bilbao. And it was in the sex way.

Evan Lambert is a Staff Writer for Topix.com. November 25, 2019 marked his two year sobriety anniversary. His Twitter handle is @evlams, and he’ll start tweeting again if, like, five people follow him after this. 

In the lead-up to the 2018 midterm elections, more than 10,000 automated Twitter accounts got caught conducting a coordinated campaign of tweets to discourage people from voting. These automated accounts may seem authentic to some, but a tool called Botometer was able to identify them while they pretentiously argued and agreed, for example, that “democratic men who vote drown out the voice of women.” We are part of the team that developed this tool that detects the bot accounts on social media.

Our next effort, called BotSlayer, is aimed at helping journalists and the general public spot these automated social media campaigns while they are happening.

It’s the latest step in our research laboratory’s work over the past few years. At Indiana University’s Observatory on Social Media, we are uncovering and analyzing how false and misleading information spreads online.

One focus of our work has been to devise ways to identify inauthentic accounts being run with the help of software, rather than by individual humans. We also develop maps of how online misinformation spreads among people and how it competes with reliable information sources across social media sites.

However, we have also noticed that journalists, political campaigns, small businesses and even the public at large may have a better sense than we do of what online discussions are most likely to attract the attention of those who control automated propaganda systems.

We receive many requests from individuals and organizations who need help collecting and analyzing social media data. That is why, as a public service, we combined many of the capabilities and software tools our observatory has built into a free, unified software package, letting more people join our efforts to identify and combat manipulation and misinformation campaigns.

Combining different tools

Many of our tools allow users to retrospectively query and examine our collection of a 10% random sample of all Twitter traffic over a long period of time. A user can specify keywords, hashtags, user mentions, locations or user accounts they’re interested in. Our software then collects the matching tweets and looks more deeply at their content by extracting links, hashtags, images, movies, phrases and usernames those tweets contain.

Our trend analysis app looks at how closely that suspicious content trends together. Our network analysis app shows how ideas spread from user to user. Our map app checks the geographical pattern of suspicious activities around important topics.

Our Botometer app then detects how likely it is that elements of the online discussion are being coordinated by a group of automated accounts. Rather than reflecting an authentic discourse of real people, these accounts may in fact be controlled by a person or an organization. These accounts usually act together, with some of them tweeting propaganda or disinformation, and others agreeing and retweeting, forming an inauthentic discourse around them to attract attention and draw real people into the online discussion.

BotSlayer brings all the pieces together, letting a person using it do all those analyses with the entire flow of Twitter traffic.

BotSlayer’s system collects all matching tweets – not just a sample – and saves them in a database for any retrospective investigation. Its web interface, in one screen, shows users in real time the terms and keywords that are part of suspicious activity around their interests. Users can click on icons to search for related information on various websites and social media platforms to look for related malicious efforts elsewhere online.

For example, during the 2018 U.S. midterm election, many bot accounts that were reported on Twitter were also found to be related to Facebook bot accounts with similar profiles.

BotSlayer also provides links to our Hoaxy system, which shows how Twitter accounts interact over time, identifying which accounts are the most influential, and most likely to be spreading disinformation.

Proving useful already

On July 10, 2019, one of our BotSlayer systems, focusing on Twitter activity about U.S. politics, flagged suspicious activity for us to investigate. The system noticed the appearance of a large group of tweets, mostly from brand-new Twitter accounts whose names ended with a string of numbers – like @MariaTu34743110. Those are clues that their activity may be generated by a bot.

They were posting and retweeting links to a single YouTube video attacking a financier named Bill Browder, who has been at the center of a dispute between the United States and the Russian Federation. That shared focus is a clue that all the accounts were part of an interconnected system.

When we dug deeper, we identified more than 80 likely bots coordinating with each other to try to boost widespread attention to Browder’s alleged wrongdoing using the video on YouTube.

Plenty of other uses

Other coordinated campaigns have promoted financial scams, often seeking to sell questionable investments in cryptocurrencies. Scammers have impersonated internet celebrities like entrepreneur Elon Musk or software magnate John McAfee.

These accounts are a bit more sophisticated than political-attack bots, with one lead account typically announcing that users can multiply their riches by transferring some of their cryptocurrency into the scammer’s digital wallet. Then other accounts retweet that announcement, in an effort to make the scheme seem legitimate. At times they reply with doctored screenshots claiming to show that the scheme works.

So far, several news, political and civic organizations have tested BotSlayer. They have been able to identify large numbers of accounts that publish hyperpolitical content at a superhuman pace.

The feedback from testers has helped us make the system more robust, powerful and user-friendly.

As our research advances, we will continue to improve on the system, fixing software bugs and adding new features. In the end, we hope that BotSlayer will become a sort of do-it-yourself toolkit enabling journalists and citizens worldwide to expose and combat inauthentic campaigns in social media.

[ Deep knowledge, daily. Sign up for The Conversation’s newsletter. ]

Pik-Mai Hui, Ph.D. Student in Informatics and Network Science, Indiana University and Christopher Torres-Lugo, Ph.D. Student in Computer Science, Indiana University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The post You Can Join the Effort to Expose Twitter Bots appeared first on Towleroad Gay News.

CCTV footage shows one teenager making “scissoring” gestures at Melania Ramirez and Christine Hannigan.

At least once a week, I get asked, “Whatever happened to that Joey Stefano biopic you were going to do?”

Every time, I sigh and reply, “Still trying to find the financing. Got a million bucks?” This for nearly eighteen years.

The 1994 overdose death of Joey Stefano (born Nicholas Iacona) began haunting me a week after the tragedy of Sept 11, 2001.

I was at A Different Light Bookstore on Santa Monica Boulevard in West Hollywood and Charles Isherwood’s 1996 biography of the doomed porn star, Wonder Bread and Ecstasy, literally fell off a shelf in front of me.

I had met many “Joeys” while living in LA and working as a director at Central Casting so I knew the type: Young wannabes, who moved to Hollywood to be famous. They knew they were beautiful. Their looks got them behind the ropes and into celebrity parties in the hills. Wide-eyed and naïve, they eventually got hooked on drugs and alcohol and a few months later, began escorting or doing porn for fast money.

I bought the book, read it in one sitting, and immediately contacted legendary porn auteur, Chi Chi LaRue. The drag porn impresario discovered Stefano after being introduced by porn star Tony Davis in 1989 and shortly thereafter, their careers exploded. Stefano became one of the biggest stars in the industry and LaRue one of the biggest producers/directors. Rounding out the legendary Porn Brat Pack of the heyday of gay porn was Geoff Gann (aka “Karen Dior”), Sharon Kane, Chris Green, Fred Bagey (aka “Gender”), and writer Mickey Skee. Other members would come and go, but they were the originals. This, I thought, would be a great cast of characters to revolve a plot around.

Joey’s rise in the porn industry also included an appearance in Madonna’s Sex book, after she spotted him dancing at the Gaiety Theatre, a porn palace in New York City. Drug use was common in those days, but his addiction was on a whole different level. Joey overdosed several times before the final time in that now-infamous motel room at the corner of Hollywood Boulevard and La Brea.

Chi Chi was the ringleader of this group and no one would be able to tell this story properly without him. However, my plans were squashed when he emailed me back, “I have ZERO interest in ever talking to you about this as a movie.”

I spent the next nine years in LA in and out of casting, working for the showrunners on Crossing Jordan, battling cancer, and working as an assistant to an actress. Like a lot of aspiring behind-the-screen types in Hollywood, I spent most of my time writing screenplays for producers who didn’t have the money they claimed in order to produce my scripts, which had been optioned for one dollar.

Related: Christian Slater Felt Competitive With James Franco Over Those King Cobra Sex Scenes

On a summer night in 2010, I was done with LA and ready to move back to Atlanta, where I grew up. Sitting at St. Felix with some friends, my buddy Adam Cuculich tried to convince me to write, produce and direct my own film. I had no interest in directing. “The only story I’ve ever wanted to direct is the Stefano biopic and Chi Chi 86’d that years ago.” After explaining my fated email in 2001, Adam felt enough time had passed. We paid our tab, we rounded the corner and ran smack into one Chi Chi LaRue. It had to be a sign, right?

The next morning, I sat down with LaRue himself and convinced him to let me write the script. But I would need him to help me get in touch with the others. He had rightfully circled the wagons after Stefano’s death. They were family and families don’t spill secrets.

I had drinks with Sharon Kane at the Abbey and lunch with Chris Green at Aroma Cafe. I flew to New York and interviewed Robert Prion, Michael Musto, and Jerry Douglas. I flew to Las Vegas and interviewed Chi Chi competitor Brian Maley, who found Joey’s lifeless body at that Hollywood La Brea Motel in November 1994.

The reporter, “Mickey Skee,” eluded me for months, until I randomly discovered by accident that I actually already knew him as Mike Szymanski and he sang in the choir at my church. I would discover this information when Mike called me while I was standing in a hallway at Cedars Sinai, where Stefano was pronounced “expired.”

Geoff Gann (aka “Karen Dior”) died in 2004, Fred Bagey (aka “Gender”) vanished off the face of the Earth, and I couldn’t locate Tony Davis to save my life. Stefano’s family declined all interview requests.

I interviewed close to a hundred people. It was important for me to interview everyone personally and only use the research, interviews and archives that Mike provided to me. Mike’s apartment is a vault of history, containing clippings, photos, tapes, and notes going back nearly thirty years. My research took about a year before I had the first draft.

I wanted the “realies” (what I called “the real people”) to sign-off on the script. Even in places where action might be a composite of events, I wanted them to feel I portrayed them accurately and authentically. Read: I didn’t want to stand up in a Q&A next to Chi Chi and have him scream, “That never happened!”

I was also obsessed with finding the infamous red shirt everyone spoke of in their interviews. The story of the “red sweatshirt” first appeared in an article Mike wrote for Manshots about the night of Joey’s death. The shirt was passed around the mourning friends, just hours after he died, still damp from his sweat. Sharon didn’t have it. Chi Chi didn’t have it. No one could remember who had it. Chris thought Geoff had it or one of Geoff’s lovers had it, but most of them were dead.

With the script completed, I attached Missi Pyle as “Sharon Kane,” Willam Belli as “Geoff Gann/ Karen Dior,” and Ryan O’Connor as “Chi Chi LaRue.” Years later, I attached Michelle Visage as a talk show host (a composite character from the 90s) and Alaska as “Gender.”

Related: Queerty Query: Chi Chi LaRue

In 2010, agents and managers would laugh when I sent the script and an offer for “Joey.” “He’s not going to play a gay character.” “We’re not going to LET my client play a gay character.” “He’s not going to do nudity.” (Months later the same actor leaked his own sex tape.) Even out actors’ agents turned it down because the money wasn’t enough or “he’s not going to play a porn star!” “What’s the budget? It’s only a million? Ha!”

At least six of those actors have since come out publicly over the last nine years. At one point, the team for one of the biggest names in Hollywood said, “It’s perfect for him! We love this script and it’s a great role!” and two days later, “Can we stick a pin in this? He’s going into rehab.”

At one point in 2018, we had a “Joey” lead officially on the hook. I was ecstatic. His agents were ecstatic because he hadn’t taken any film roles since he started his successful series. The day we were going to make the announcement, they emailed he had cold feet and was scared about getting the role wrong.

Each time a cast announcement was released, it was picked up by nearly every gay news site all over the world. On Good Friday 2012, we released character photos of Ryan, Missi, and Willam through The Advocate and I received a phone call saying we temporarily crashed their servers from the traffic.

The budget hovered at around a million dollars. That’s not a lot of money, but it’s also A LOT of money. That’s all actors making favored nations at about two thousand a week at SAG-AFTRA low scale. It probably wouldn’t afford the nineties soundtrack we want. And it would be a lot of the time-honored Hollywood indie tradition: beg, borrow, steal. It would mean asking friends to work as extras for free on big days. It would be good food (which is the most important thing on any set) and no trailers. The reason is financial: You want the investors to make their money back and a small profit, but investing in an LGBTQ centric film about an adult star in 2010 was a huge risk.

I really liked “King Cobra,” which was inspired by the life of porn star, Brent Corrigan. However, Corrigan came out against the filmmakers, saying they “bastardized” his life to present an inaccurate portrayal of the murder and of his time in porn.

Because our industry loves to oversimplify projects, people would say, “Oh, it’s a gay ‘Boogie Nights’” and I always correct them, “It’s Gia with a dude.” For me, it’s not a movie about the porn industry. It’s a movie about addiction and the family you create. And it is entirely sympathetic to Joey’s difficult journey, from losing his father as a teen to coming out in a small town Chester, Pennsylvania, to falling into big-town addiction, a not uncommon trajectory for young gay men who, thank god, mostly survive.

We did four investor readings and every time, the script was praised. But every time I was asked, “Do you have a horror script? You know horror sells. I mean, who is going to pay to see a movie about a dead gay porn star?”

Potential investors appeared and disappeared (one, committing suicide after a major fraud investigation). One producer claimed to have an in with a major studio and months later, fired for embezzlement. One was a pathological liar and had to be legally removed.

For years, I would call the attached actors, “so there’s been some new interest” only to have the trail go cold months later. It was soul-crushing. God knows Chi Chi grew tired of seeing my name pop up on his phone with news of another interested investor, only to have him disappear.

In 2012, my short film “Groom’s Cake” (and the feature film sequel, “Birthday Cake”) hit the festival circuits and we won awards all over the world. I tried to travel to as many cities as possible, hoping I would meet a millionaire/s who would invest in the new film. Lots of leads, which all went cold. I’ll be the first to admit “Cake” isn’t “Schindler’s List.” It’s a mockumentary made for $15,000. And to date, thanks to a terrible distribution deal, we still haven’t made half of that back.

I learned from Ava DuVernay while working on “Selma”: “It’s all in self-distribution now. You have to distribute it on your own.”

Related: Biopic about legendary adult star Joey Stefano announced and guess who’s set to star?

Burned and heartbroken, I put “Joey” away, hoping it might find the right timing in a few years.

In 2017, everything changed: “Moonlight” won Best Picture. “Call Me By Your Name” was an awards darling.

Everyone in Hollywood was suddenly clamoring for “their Moonlight.” The phone started ringing again. “Do you still have that Stefano script?” Another set of producers materialized and once again, empty promises all around.

But the landscape had officially changed. Hollywood was seeking and distributing LGBTQ centric films in theaters and on television now more than ever before. To name just a few: “Love, Simon,” “Killing Eve,” and, most recently, “Batwoman.” Even “Queer Eye” and “Will & Grace” were back.

And of course, “Pose” changed representation for trans actors forever. Steven Canals blew the door off the hinges.

Two years ago, I got a phone call from Tony Davis’ husband, Wayne. He had found my Facebook page for the film. Tony was diagnosed with AIDS in 1993 and hit hard with meningitis in 2013 and again in 2014. He’s 75% disabled and the brain lesions left him verbally and mobility compromised, according to Wayne, who was able to help me understand Tony. They both read the script and loved it. I made a trip to LA and met them.

While sitting with them at the Renaissance Hotel with Wayne and Tony, who I’d finally found, Mike called me and said he’d found something he had to show me. He had recently come across a box of Karen Dior’s clothing and each of the pieces had little notes pinned inside them. Dresses. Shirts. Jeans.

He pulled out a red poplin shirt with a note that read: “Nicky died in this.” Mike realized when he wrote the story the night of his death, his note, “a red, sweaty shirt” was rewritten by Manshots as “a red sweatshirt.”

I still have no explanation as to why I felt the need to find this shirt for nearly eighteen years, but here it was. I felt like I had finally caught this ghost I had been chasing for nearly two decades.

I’ve probably sent the script to over 500 actors, agents, investors and producers.

In my telling of the story, it’s about a group of friends who loved each other, worked together, celebrated their angels and battled their own demons together. Joey Stefano was one of the most beloved porn stars of his generation because, in a time when we were just starting to understand HIV, he provided an escape. He was the Italian everyman turned to sex fantasy. He had a charisma you just couldn’t describe. The Porn Brat Pack was royalty in West Hollywood in the early nineties. When they walked into a club, people stopped and stared. They parted crowds.

Today, anyone with an iPhone can be a “porn star.”

And even more, it’s a story about addiction. It makes no judgments on its players. Addiction is the villain in this story. Addiction is a disease that wants you dead.

This November marks the 25th anniversary of Nick Iacona’s death. Today, he’s buried in an unmarked grave in a small cemetery, not far from his childhood home in Chester.

I really hope I get to share his story soon.

(And if you have a million dollars, call me.)

A mother who stabbed her teenage son to death for being gay has been sentenced by a jury in Brazil to 25 years and eight months in prison. Tatiana Ferreira Lozano Pereira never accepted that her 17-year-old son Itaberli Lozano was gay, and tensions between the two worsened over Christmas 2016. According to Out, Lozano…

Cyndi Lauper will receive the inaugural High Note Global Prize from the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights and the High Note Global Initiative.

Writes the High Note Global Initiative: “In 2008, Lauper co-founded True Colors United after learning that while 10% of American youth identify themselves as LGBTQ, up to 40% of American youth experiencing homelessness do so. The organization works to prevent and end youth homelessness, focusing on the unique experiences of LGBTQ youth. In 2008, Cyndi Lauper co-founded True Colors United, a nonprofit organization that implements innovative solutions to youth homelessness that focus on the unique experiences of LGBTQ young people, who make up to 40% of the youth homelessness population in America.”

They add: “True Colors United recognized that communities and youth homelessness service providers want to be safe and welcoming for LGBTQ youth, but often don’t have the knowledge or resources to do so – creating barriers for these young people to get the support they need. True Colors United fills that space by offering free training and resources on how to meet the needs of LGBTQ youth experiencing homelessness. They also advocate in government and media to help ensure critical funding and services for all youth, and create opportunities for youth who have experienced homelessness to be key leaders in the effort to end the problem.”

The 2019 High Note Global Prize will be presented during the High Note Honors segment of Cyndi Lauper & Friends: Home for the Holidays at the Novo Theater at LA Live on December 10th.

Via press release: In addition to Kesha, additional celebrities supporting Cyndi at the Novo Theater on UN Human Rights Day include, Billy Porter, Brandi Carlile, Belinda Carlisle, King Princess, Charlie Musselwhite, Henry Rollins, Perry Farrell with Etty Lau Farrell, Justin Tranter, K. Flay, Emily Estefan, Shawn Wasabi, comics Carol Leifer and Lily Tomlin, U.K. comedian Gina Yashere, Margaret Cho, and Carson Kressley. Taylor Swift, Billie Eilish, Mariah Carey, Dolly Parton, Lady Gaga, Kelly Clarkson, Dua Lipa, Kacey Musgraves, RuPaul, and Tegan and Sara are among the artists who have donated items and experiences for a charity auction with 100% proceeds supporting True Colors.

The post Cyndi Lauper to Be Honored with Inaugural UN Human Rights Award for Work Helping LGBTQ Youth appeared first on Towleroad Gay News.

 

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A post shared by Madonna (@madonna) on Nov 27, 2019 at 12:28pm PST

X-ray for Madame X!

Madonna has been forced to cancel three dates of her Madame X tour on the recommendation of her doctors.

She took to Instagram yesterday to announce she had to cancel the shows – all in Boston, MA – due to suffering pain she described as “overwhelming.”

The dates were due to take place at the Wang Theatre on November, 30, and December, 1-2.

“Please forgive this unexpected turn of events. Doing my show every night brings me so much joy and to cancel is a kind of punishment for me but the pain I’m in right now is overwhelming and I must rest and follow doctors orders so i can come back stronger and better and continue the Madame journey with all of you.”

Madonna, 61, has been posting frequent tour updates to her Instagram feed and stories. She has shown herself having ‘ice baths’ several times to ease muscle pain and aid her body’s recovery.

She previously told fans during a San Francisco performance that she had a “torn ligament” and “bad knee.”

 

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with my usual Ice Bath for multiple injuries. and THANKS to my gang-gang for being my hype squad! #madamextheatre #icebath #ganggang #estere #stella #merci @ahla_malik @nicolas_huchard @gaspar_varela @ritamelssen_ @jeanmichelete @ricardogomesinst @danielesibilli

A post shared by Madonna (@madonna) on Nov 26, 2019 at 10:58pm PST

Her critically-acclaimed Madame X shows – her eleventh concert tour – find Madonna playing more intimate theatre venues rather than arenas and stadiums. The tour kicked off with a three-week residency at the Howard Gilman Theatre in Brooklyn.

Related: A Madonna fan is suing her for starting her concerts late

Although she has rescheduled a couple of the shows previously on the tour, the BBC reports that the Boston dates will not be rescheduled. A spokesperson for promoters Live Nation said “tight scheduling through the balance of the year”, meant it would not be possible to re-arrange the dates, offering refunds to all those who had tickets.

The tour is due to re-commence December, 7, with four nights at the Metropolitan Opera House in Philadelphia, followed by seven dates at The Fillmore Miami Beach in Miami. After a break over the holidays, it moves on to Europe in January.

Get well soon, Madonna!

Related: Madonna, notorious for texting at other people’s shows, bans all cellphones from her own