It’s approaching 1.00am on a Monday morning and I am watching American football. This is not something I should ever even be thinking about, let alone saying or actually doing. But I am compelled to sit here, slack-jawed, watching a motley bunch of beefcakes in shoulder-pads jumping and barging and galloping and crouching and throwing themselves to the ground in endless repetition. It’s all completely baffling and yawn-inducing. It’s so unfathomably tiresome that after seven minutes my eyes can no longer even discern what is happening as they have started turning into soup and seeping backwards into my brain.

And yet, all this agony will be worth it. Because soon, the players will leave the pitch, the crowd will fall silent and Beyoncé will take to the stage to provide the half-time entertainment. She has had a rough few weeks. It all began when she made some fairly grand proclamations to a men’s magazine inferring that she was some sort of feminist role-model whilst simultaneously supplying them with a handful of skipping-around-in-my-knickers photographs to accompany the article. Neither a smart or an empowering thing to do. Then followed the inauguration debacle, after which she was pilloried and responded by holding a pre-Super Bowl press conference during which she attempted to hush the naysayers with a gut-busting a cappella rendition of The Star-Spangled Banner. She atoned, but the sin was only partly washed away, and she left with her reputation bolstered as opposed to wholly repaired. For “Mrs Carter” (I can’t imagine Jay-Z ever deigning to re-brand himself “Mr Knowles”, but hey-ho, I’m sure it’s all just semantics…), there’s a lot riding on her halftime show. Her upcoming performance has been hotly debated and anticipated, and a cursory scan of my twitter-feed reveals that #Superbowl is largely playing second fiddle to #BeyonceBowl. The pressure is decidedly on.

Collectively, the world (aka girls and gays) holds its breath.

What unfolds over the next twelve minutes can only be described as a masterclass in live entertainment, a performance so epic that the clack of a million homosexual jaws can simultaneously be heard hitting the floor. Dressed somewhere between Cat Woman and Paris Hilton’s evil twin, the lights come up on Beyoncé who struts forth in all her pneumatic glory before stripping down from not-very-much-to-begin-with to what is basically an elaborate one-piece swimming costume made of leather and fingerless, elbow length gloves. It sounds terrible and worn by pretty much anyone else, it would look terrible too, but as per, Beyoncé pulls it off.

As the show begins, the Earth shifts on its axis under the weight of her thighs which have temporarily harnessed the power of the entire universe and propel her through some of the fiercest dance routines ever conceived. Yes, they mostly re-interpret what she has done before, but does this make them any less spectacular? In a word, no. As the minutes fall away, she proceeds to grind and writhe and lunge and stamp and hurl herself through a self-imposed invisible obstacle course so rigorous that it makes Total Wipeout look like the middle-of-the-night shuffle between your bed and the toilet. And in the midst of this frenetic display she somehow musters the lung-power to belt out a medley of her biggest hits, including Crazy in Love, Baby Boy & Halo. You have to hand it to her, she knows how to shut it down.

At the midway point, she is joined by her old bandmates to whip hastily through a few Destiny’s Child numbers. I particularly enjoy the moment when Kelly Rowland and Michelle Williams are violently catapulted from the netherworld to join her up on stage. The whole thing seems to have been orchestrated to make them look slightly unsteady on their feet, as though they have just polished off a bottle of Jack Daniels in the dressing room. Kelly comes off better as her haunches are made of stern stuff and she uses them to plant herself firmly on solid ground, whereas Michelle is launched into the air like a jack-in-the-box cut free from its moorings, her spindly legs barely providing her with the traction she needs to stay upright. It’s not an entirely seemless or dignified entrance and only serves to reinforce her position in the Destiny’s Child pecking order.

Beyoncé remains every inch the Child Princess to Kelly’s Child Labourer and Michelle’s Child Orphan. Still, they all harmonise nicely together and the two lesser ‘Children’ dance gamely through Single Ladies knowing full-well that they could break into Gangnam Style and start lassoing imaginary horses and no-one would notice, for the ‘Chief’ Child not only steals focus, she steals everything, so that nothing remains of the world except for her snarling mouth, glinting eyes and gyrating hips.

The unquestionable highlight of the show comes when Beyoncé pulls potentially the best face ever pulled during her rendition of Independent Ladies Part 1 at the very moment she shouts “Question!” If you haven’t YouTubed it, I suggest you do that now. It is simultaneously terrifying and hilarious and constitutes the one point in the performance where she doesn’t so much over-egg the pudding as drop a battery farm on top of it. Still, being Beyoncé, she somehow manages to get away with even that and the laughter is soon transmuted into incredulity at her mastery of the stage, for she so perfectly embodies that raw grace and expressiveness and sexuality and ferocity so particular to the African-American female. It’s hard to describe the visceral impact of watching her perform, other than to say that it feels sort of like poetry, if poetry could grind so low that its butt-cheeks skimmed the floor.

Gay men have always lapped up major female pop stars and there are probably no two more pertinent examples of this than Madonna and Lady Gaga. What these two have in common is their penchant for the outrageous, the shocking, the sexual. They create headlines more for what they do off the stage than anything else. And to a large extent, they are invariably more interesting off stage than they are on it. Beyoncé has the opposite appeal. She may form one-half of the world’s most famous power-couple but she still very much gives the impression that off-stage she is someone who places reserve and etiquette before flamboyancy and attention-seeking. Beyoncé the woman, the mother, the wife appears to be something of a demure creature. But put her in costume and focus the spotlight on her and she becomes, to my mind, the most implacably charismatic entertainer on the planet.

She is an intensely feminine performer, in spite of all those aggressive lunges and thrusts and snarls. And yet, there’s a ruthlessness about her, something unequivocal and animalistic which makes her mesmerising to watch. There is the palpable sense with Beyoncé that if you got under her feet during her show, she wouldn’t so much trample you as decimate you. You may even be immolated by the heat coming off of those thighs. Apply any superlative you like to her, they all fit. She’s a force of nature; a tornado, a hurricane, a tsunami. Under the guise of Sasha Fierce (her self-proclaimed stage persona) she’s a woman possessed, an Amazon, a Goddess. And for that, I love her…