before his sexuality was definitively known to the public In 1998, Michael, who turned 59 this month, chronicled the personal pain of gay men, making it legible in an era defined by virulent homophobia.
More than three decades after Michael began his solo career, with some parts of the world engaged in a new fight for LGBTQ equality, the pop megastar’s subtle, moving exploration of queer life seems no less impressive.
Part of what your book does is explore different sides of George Michael – Michael who was the “hypermacho sex god”, and Michael who was an insecure man. How did you approach that process?
Michael spent the first half of his life creating the character you were just describing (hypermacho sex god), and the second half of his life destroying that character.
He reached that incredible peak in 1988 during the Faith Tour for the album, which made him the biggest pop star in the world at the time. That’s what he had been dreaming of for the rest of his life, and it made him sad. It’s an old story in the world of pop: You get everything you thought you wanted but end up sad. However, what attracted me was the process after which Michael began to tear down that initial personality and then he continued to tear himself down.
I spoke to over 200 people for the job who knew them, sometimes very briefly, sometimes very well. The whole process was like rolling down a rock on a hill. When I started the book, almost everyone either ignored me or said no, and I think there are two reasons for this. One, it was very close to his death, and people were still raw. And two, people were immediately suspicious, and part of it was that Michael had lived his entire life in secret. Those around him knew that in order to remain in his grace, he would have to keep his secrets.
I see your biography as part of a recent work trying to redefine the mass abuse and psychological toll of celebrity from the stars we claim to love. Garrick Kennedy’s 2022 book, “Did Not We Almost Have It All: In Defense of Whitney Houston,” and Samantha Stark’s 2021 documentary, “Framing Britney Spears.”
You’re making a very good point, because pop music, on which Michael has focused his attention, is ephemeral. It changes all the time, and most people get left behind fairly quickly. And Michael — like the people you mentioned, like someone who’s achieved what they’re after — never thought it was going to go. And when he did, he crushed her.
This was certainly true of Houston as well, but I think Michael was in so much need of love and acceptance from everyone that when his second solo album sold more than half that of his first solo album – we hit 7.5 million copies. are talking about. about 20 million copies; 7.5 million copies is a phenomenal success – he was devastated. He took it as a terrible blow, and he almost regarded the album as a failure.
There is also the falsity of life in that stratosphere. You completely lose touch with the people below.
I also want to say that he had a very big heart. One of the best things about Michael was the fact that he donated millions of pounds to charity. From the mid-1990s at a time when things were really starting to settle down for him, he took his charitable contribution forward. And I think it was a self-healing gesture on his part. I think it was a way that he realized that he could influence people’s lives first hand, beyond a more abstract pop star way.
Michael went through so much pain early in his life and career: the loss of his lover from AIDS, the loss of his mother. Did he ever recover from those losses?
no he did not. He just got worse and worse and worse. He felt terribly victimized, as if the world was out to get him.
Part of my book talks about it. There is a passage about Equality Rocks (a 2000 benefit concert for the Human Rights Campaign, an LGBTQ advocacy group). In this celebration of emerging equality and the spirit of freedom and solidarity, Michael could only look at the crowd and see all the pain that being gay had caused him. And the monologue he gave at the concert is a long rant about all the things that had hurt him in his life. He was furious at all this, angry.
What would you say is lacking in our conversation about Michael?
I wrote an epilogue that I hope is more upbeat than it was before, because I don’t want to leave people on a really down note. I tried to focus on the fact that whenever I mention the name “George Michael” to people, they smile. Immediately, that name brings up a multitude of good associations, and they seem to perpetuate all gloomy and dark things.
Also, you have to do your best to try to be empathetic. I wouldn’t have told this story if I didn’t have sympathy for Michael. You need to be able to somehow put yourself in the place of the person you are writing about. If you can do that, you will not fall into the trap of justice. And it’s a bad thing for a biographer to judge. It’s easy to look at someone like Michael who had it all, and felt nothing for him. But I cannot overstate the importance of empathy.