George michael was gay
George Michael and lessons from the closet
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Hate is a synonyms you’ll rarely perceive me use. Not even in relation to brussels sprouts, Trump or the Australian Christian Lobby. Intense dislike is about the strongest you’d get from me. However, one thing I execute hate is the closet. I loathe the closet because of what it did to me for over two decades and the destruction I spot it reeking in others’ lives.
Harvey Milk also hated the closet. ‘If a bullet should step in my brain, permit that bullet obliterate every closet door in the country’ he said on a tape recording he’d made in 1978, (nine days before his assassination) to be played in the event of his assassination. Harvey hated the closet and what it was doing to gay and lesbian people and to the collective but mostly, recognising it was the biggest obstructer to change.
One of the most popular pop stars of our time, George Michael has gone. Much of George’s existence was spent in the closet. At least half of his career. As I began to read and monitor the various interviews (GQ, CNN, Oprah, ParkinsonUK Independent etc) that he’d done since his coming out/outing it wasn’t hard to spot
George Michael (courtesy georgemichael.com)
Heart failure killed George Michael, 53, on Christmas 2016. Wham’s 1985 hit “Last Christmas” will never sound the same.
Michael’s songs poeticized queer desire and charted hits. Although many ’80s stars embraced gender-bending and flamboyance, like Prince, David Bowie, Teen George, and even Michael Jackson, Michael pushed further, with lyrics that endure as thinly veiled expressions of queer love.
Wham’s breakout second album, Make It Big (1984), catapulted young Michael and Andrew Ridgeley to worldwide notoriety. From the start, their songs oozed with queer resonances, which haven’t been fully unpacked in most of the articles written in Michael’s wake.
The success of “Careless Whisper” (1984) surprised even Michael himself. As he explained to People, “I don’t know why it made such an impression… But it’s ironic that I wrote it when I was 17 and didn’t know much about anything. Certainly nothing much about relationships.”
Michael wrote the tune to be conspicuously ambiguous about the gender he desired. All the references to “you” and “we” leave us in the dark. That ambiguity allowed listeners acros
I grew up in a family where music always played in everyone’s homes. By the hour I was three-years-old, I could carol every lyric to the Beach Boys’ song “Barbara Ann” at the demand of any person who asked me to. Between my parents’ separate homes, my maternal grandparents’ house, and my paternal grandma’s dwelling, I was inundated by the sounds my guardians preferred. My grandparents, of course, tended to play a lot of old educational facility R&B, soul, Frank Sinatra, and Elvis Presley. My dad was a massive “guido” growing up in the 1970s, so his tastes were mostly confined to disco, later R&B and essence, funk, some blues-rock, and Billy Joel. My mom, on the other hand, was all over the place in terms of her musical tastes. She liked some of the same genres my dad did — especially disco and soul —- but she was also obsessed with the pop-rock of her youth, 1980s new wave, newer pop acts, some electronic Eurobass harmony that became accepted in the 1990s, and, especially, David Bowie, Elton John, and George Michael.
Before I hit double digits in age, George Michael’s voice significantly populated many a long machine drive, a Saturday morning at house, and an evening of watching my mom get ready to g
When George Michael came out as gay on stay TV and inspired a generation
11 October 2021, 16:00 | Updated: 26 October 2021, 10:16
George Michael appeared on television in 1998 revealing he was queer for the first period and inspiring the planet with the words: "I don’t feel any shame whatsoever."
George Michael had recently been arrested for propositioning an undercover policeman in a Beverley Hills park and, according to the journalist who interviewed him, wanted to bravely show the truth "in his own words and in his own way."
Before taking the courageous ruling to discuss his sexuality on TV, George said he calmed down by reassuring himself: "You’re a human being. Just move on TV and gain it sorted."
Read: George Michael secretly sang to dying "first love" in audience at Freddie Mercury tribute
The landmark interview with CNN starts with Jim Moret stating to George: "Your sexuality has been a focus of tremendous attention."
George responds: "Yeah, to some degree, with pop stars or film stars, we become the object of people’s self-definition, as adv as the object of sexual definition."
"I think people