“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!” “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. 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 ’ …” As long as you are sanitised and, preferably, sexless in appearance, you can gain acceptance – or so the unspoken pact goes. 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.īeing gay and out is one thing, but often it is on the terms of a disapproving society. Michael was among those who watched his lover, Anselmo Feleppa, tortured and killed by the illness.
Much of society alternated between pity, disgust and a sense of “they’ve brought it on themselves” as they perished. In the 1980s and much of the 1990s, gay men were dying in their thousands from HIV/AIDS. 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. But haters gonna hate, as the expression goes – homophobes will latch on to anything to confirm their bigoted narrative.
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 here was a household name: the girls at school – and their mums – fancied him.
It is difficult to describe how lonely this experience is. 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. Some are saying: why wait until he was 35 to come out, and only under duress?Ĭoming out should not be some sort of duty for public figures: it is a highly personal experience, and life is complicated. 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. He was a gay man, a gay icon, and being gay was central to his identity and his music. No sanitising or erasing who Michael was. Sex was natural, the song said it was the attitudes to it that were not: “There’s nothing here but flesh and bone.” 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. 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. M ore 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.