27 Dec George Michael was a defiant gay icon. His life must not be sanitised
by Owen Jones
More than 18 years ago, George Michael was famously outed for a “lewd act” in a Beverly Hills toilet – and promptly humiliated by institutionally homophobic newspapers. Some might have been consumed with shame and grovelled before a tabloid press that had assumed the position of hypocritical moralisers once occupied by the medieval church. Instead, Michael penned the biggest “fuck you” in musical history: Outside, a song that unapologetically flaunted his human sexual appetite, and declared war on the hypocrisy of others. Sex was natural, the song said; it was the attitudes to it that were not: “There’s nothing here but flesh and bone.”
No sanitising or erasing who Michael was. He was a gay man, a gay icon, and being gay was central to his identity and his music. Like many gay men, coming to terms with his sexuality was a fraught process: he thought he loved women and only accepted he was gay in his mid-20s, still years before he told his parents. Some are saying: why wait until he was 35 to come out, and only under duress?
Coming out wildly differs from person to person: it is an experience imposed upon gay men – and all LGBT people – by a society still far from entirely accepting us. For a superstar back in the 1990s, it was considerably harder than it was today. According to the British Social Attitudes survey, in the year Michael came out half of all Britons thought same-sex relations were always or mostly wrong (nearly four in 10 said “always”), while only 23% opted for “not wrong at all”. From section 28 (only a decade old) to a different age of consent, the anti-gay laws were still in place.
Coming out should not be some sort of duty for public figures: it is a highly personal experience, and life is complicated. But, undoubtedly, Michael coming out offered a liferaft to so many LGBT people – not just gay men – struggling in a society that judged them and made them internalise shame. It is difficult to describe how lonely this experience is. But here was a household name: the girls at school – and their mums – fancied him.
Yes, it’s true that the manner in which he was outed became a standard playground homophobic trope, a means for bigots to express their revulsion at how sordid and morally corrupt they deemed gay men to be. But haters gonna hate, as the expression goes – homophobes will latch on to anything to confirm their bigoted narrative. For LGBT people consumed with terror at the realisation of who they were, to see the man who sang Last Christmas telling his tormentors where to stick it was liberating.
In the 1980s and much of the 1990s, gay men were dying in their thousands from HIV/AIDS. Much of society alternated between pity, disgust and a sense of “they’ve brought it on themselves” as they perished. Michael was among those who watched his lover, Anselmo Feleppa, tortured and killed by the illness. His No 1 1996 hit, Jesus to a Child, was about this terrible loss, underlining how his sexuality and his music cannot, and must not, be divorced.
Being gay and out is one thing, but often it is on the terms of a disapproving society. As long as you are sanitised and, preferably, sexless in appearance, you can gain acceptance – or so the unspoken pact goes. While once bigots persecuted gays, as Matthew Parris noted, now “they haven’t stopped hating, and their new cry is this: ‘Why don’t you just shut up about it? Who asked what you get up to in bed, anyway? Your private life is your affair but please stop ramming it down our throat [snigger, snigger]’ …”
Michael rejected the unspoken pact. He had an open relationship. He loved anonymous sex. “You only have to turn on the television to see the whole of British society being comforted by gay men who are so clearly gay and so obviously sexually unthreatening,” he told the Guardian’s Simon Hattenstone in 2005. “Gay people in the media are doing what makes straight people comfortable, and automatically my response to that is to say I’m a dirty filthy fucker and if you can’t deal with it, you can’t deal with it.” Or as he put it rather enthusiastically on Twitter: “I have never and will never apologise for my sex life! Gay sex is natural, gay sex is good! Not everybody does it, but … ha ha!”
Here was a man who proudly campaigned for LGBT rights, becoming a high-profile supporter of HIV charity the Terrence Higgins Trust. He was profoundly political in many other ways, too, backing Labour through the trauma of Thatcherism and backing Britain’s striking miners. He put on a free concert for NHS nurses to say thank you for looking after his dying mum. In 2003, he reworked Faith alongside Ms Dynamite into an anti-Iraq war track, and even released a single – Shoot the Dog – that castigated Tony Blair’s alliance with George W Bush and the neocons.
I can already here the cries: “Stop politicising him!” It is the cry of people who want to erase the aspects of those they admire that contradict their own worldview. But when people die, we have a responsibility to remember who they actually were, not a sanitised and false version that is palatable to some.
We live in an age where bigots are newly emboldened. They treat supporters of anti-racism, feminism and LGBT rights like this: “You’ve had your party, now it’s over, and it’s our turn.” It is tempting to turn and retreat. But, as a closeted teenager back in 1998, it is impossible not to recall the courage and defiance of George Michael. A talented and much adored musician, yes. But also a gay man, and a gay icon, who made the lives of so many LGBT people that little bit easier.