feature image photo by Jim Steinfeldt / Contributor via Getty Images
I grew up in a family where music always played in everyone’s homes. By the time I was three-years-old, I could sing every lyric to the Beach Boys’ song “Barbara Ann” at the request of any person who asked me to. Between my parents’ separate homes, my maternal grandparents’ house, and my paternal grandma’s house, I was inundated by the sounds my guardians preferred. My grandparents, of course, tended to play a lot of old school R&B, soul, Frank Sinatra, and Elvis Presley. My dad was a huge “guido” growing up in the 1970s, so his tastes were mostly confined to disco, later R&B and soul, 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 music that became popular 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 car drive, a Saturday morning at home, and an evening of watching my mom get ready to go out with her friends. I knew Wham!, Michael’s previous band with Andrew Ridgeley, songs, too, because my mom’s youngest sister who I spent a lot of time with loved them. I could recognize a George Michael song from the first few chords almost instantly, and I was enamored by how easy it was to remember the words to and sing along to “Faith,” the biggest hit off his 1987 solo debut of the same name. I had zero idea what the songs were actually trying to say, but whenever the music videos for “Father Figure” or “I Want Your Sex” came on VH-1’s Pop Up Video reruns, I watched as if seeing them for the first time. There could’ve been some recognition on my part — whether it was in regards to sexuality or my own early friction with gender — but I’m not entirely sure because it’s hard to access those memories fully. Mostly, I just thought he was one of the coolest guys on the planet (after my dad but before all of the members of the Backstreet Boys).
In the spring of 1998, the news was on at my mom’s house just like it always was and, in an unexpected twist, Michael’s name was all over the broadcast. A man in an ugly suit was explaining that “George Michaels” (sic) was arrested the day before for committing a “lewd act” — something the man in the ugly suit would not elaborate on — in the public restroom of Will Rogers Memorial Park in Beverly Hills. Immediately confused, I ran to the kitchen to see if my mom had heard the news.
“Mom, George Michael is in jail.”
“He’s in jail or he was arrested?”
“I don’t know but the police have him.”
“For what?”
“They said he did something ‘lewd.’ He did a ‘lewd’ thing in a park. What does that mean?”
“With another person?”
“I don’t know. What does it mean? Do you only do ‘lewd’ things with other people?”
The following conversation wasn’t very satisfactory. She explained that “lewd” could be anything interpreted as inappropriate, but she didn’t explain that what was deemed inappropriate was often dictated by a set of laws. I didn’t ask any follow-up questions, because I didn’t know what to ask. I can’t say my mind immediately went to “lewd” being connected to anything sexual. I remained confused as the news spread everywhere over the next few days: They talked about it on the morning show of the pop radio station that was often on in the car; they kept playing clips relating to his arrest on different news channels; it appeared on the cover of the tabloids at the grocery store.
The Los Angeles Times / Thu, Apr 9, 1998 / Page 30
Then, the story shifted. It wasn’t just about Michael’s arrest anymore because, later that week, he did an interview where he came out publicly as a gay man for the first time, which I learned secondhand from staring at the magazine rack at Publix. The media and mainstream reception to his coming out was extremely confusing to me. I didn’t really know then whether being gay was “good” or “bad” so I couldn’t make a fair judgment on that, but something felt off to me about the way people seemed to be relishing in the fact that this “secret” was now unleashed.
Michael’s arrest and his subsequent public coming out shook pop culture for months in ways that I can only now fully understand. The combination of his international super stardom and the residual gay panic leftover from the homophobic reaction to the AIDS epidemic came together in a way that made this story especially explosive. The gorgeous, charming pop star who was previously seen schmoozing with supermodels and actresses was not only soliciting sex in public restrooms but he was “secretly” gay, which meant he’d been “fooling” everyone for his entire career.
Photo by Michael Putland/Getty Images
If you weren’t around or just don’t know, Michael was one of the biggest pop stars ever by the time he was 23-years-old. With Andrew Ridgeley in Wham!, he produced three number one hits and seven top 10 hits, and, as a solo act, he produced eight number one hits and 15 top ten hits as documented by the Billboard Hot 100. Their popularity in Europe and the U.S. was akin to the “Beatle-mania” of the 1960s, with young women obsessing over them and their music, showing up to their recording studios to get a look at them, and following them around London and any other place they happened to be living or staying during the height of their fame. When Michael went solo in 1986, he quickly became one of the best-selling musicians of all time, outpacing even Michael Jackson and Madonna in album sales and radio play at the end of the 1980s. After the release of Faith, the album stayed at number one on the Billboard 200 for 12 weeks and sold just as well (or better!) internationally. Over the course of his career, he won two Grammy Awards, three Brit Awards, three American Music Awards, and four MTV Video Music Awards. Before the year 2000, Michael already sold over 60 million albums. And aside from his career achievements, Michael was also heavily involved in AIDS fundraising initiatives, progressive and socialist politics in the UK, and outwardly critical of conservatism in our society.
For all intents and purposes, Michael was a “people’s pop star,” but throughout the course of his career in the 1980s and early 1990s, his image was also carefully packaged to appear straight despite constant and consistent rumors that he wasn’t. As is shown in the 2024 documentary, George Michael: Outed, Michael’s managers and the executives at the record labels where he was contracted curated an image of a heterosexual, womanizing party boy to counter the gay rumors and ensure that Michael’s success would continue blasting into orbit. This became even more important to them as the British tabloid media stoked the public’s fears of the AIDS epidemic by providing disgusting, one-sided coverage of what was happening to the men who contracted the disease and also by publicly outing many gay men — well known, famous, or not famous at all — in the pages of their publications. The team supporting Michael and Michael himself did everything they could to prevent the possibility of this happening, but by the end of the 1980s, Michael had mostly had enough of it. In his personal life, he didn’t hide his queerness from anyone except his parents for a time, and there’s even significant photographic documentation by paparazzos of the mid-1990s of Michael out with men who were his partners at the time. He existed in a weird liminal space for a moment: No one could fully shake the methodical construct of his image from early in his career, but he was living his life without worrying about it at all.
Obviously, I didn’t know any of this as a 10-year-old kid trying to figure out why one of the coolest guys I knew was now being shit on by the media, but when October of that year rolled around, I finally began to understand what “lewd conduct” meant. In October, Michael released a new single and a new music video almost simultaneously. The song “Outside” and its accompanying video directly satirize the events of April 7 through not only the lyrics — which come from the perspective of someone who’s bored of having sex in the “normal” places where people have sex — but also the imagery of the video. I understood almost instantly that the video was connected to what happened in that park restroom: He was arrested for doing something sexual in the bathroom. Although I was a little disturbed by the idea of doing anything like that in a public bathroom because I hated public bathrooms at the time, I didn’t think it was against the law, and I didn’t understand how it could be. It wouldn’t be until late high school and early college when I finally understood the historical build-up to this moment and the carceral anti-queerness that caused it.
a May 2011 tweet by George Michael
In a November 1998 appearance on The Late Show with David Letterman, Michael was very clear that he wasn’t just arrested for “lewd conduct”; he was “entrapped” by the arresting officer. According to Michael’s telling, it’s true he was not a stranger to having sex in public places, but on this day, that wasn’t necessarily his plan. He went on a walk through the park after having a few drinks at lunch and, when he went into the restroom, a somewhat attractive man followed Michael in and “coaxed” Michael into revealing himself before arresting Michael for soliciting sex. I’m sure a lot of people heard this and believed it was complete bullshit and Michael was just trying to cover his ass. Some people reading this might even be thinking it now as they’re reading this, but a quick dip in the Los Angeles Times archives proves this was actually common practice in the Beverly Hills and Los Angeles Police Departments at the time. In an attempt to “curb” cruising — or “cottaging” as the Brits call it — among gay men in county parks, the Los Angeles Parks & Recreation Department and the LAPD combined forces to over-police the parks and “catch” gay men in the act. In the year before Michael’s arrest, the Beverly Hills Police Department alone had made 21 arrests for “soliciting or engaging in lewd conduct” in county parks, two of which were made in the same park where Michaels was arrested.
As is always the case with institutional anti-queerness and legal restrictions about what people can and can’t do with their bodies, there’s absolutely no mention of similar initiatives being put in place to stop straight people from doing the same thing in these public spaces. Historical precedent and the violent history of queer and trans repression in the U.S. repeatedly shows us how the police are used as a weapon through bar and club raids, especially, but this kind of illegal entrapment is less spoken about. Michael’s arrest should’ve brought these kinds of misappropriations of the law into much bigger view in the public consciousness, but it was overshadowed by Michael’s queerness instead and our inability to truly reckon with it has helped fuel the fire for the backlash to the winning of LGBTQ+ rights over the last 20 years and more legal anti-queerness.
Moreover, Michael’s arrest for cruising in April 1998 appeared to both confirm long-held beliefs about Michael and also totally incense the public who loved him. I think that because social media is helping to destroy the fabric of our society, we tend to look back at moments like this one and believe they were somehow handled better and with less public fanaticism. But really, the “West’s” relationship with celebrity has always been deeply flawed and volatile as hell, and when Michael’s arrest happened, people in the U.S. and the UK seemed to believe he deserved whatever was coming for him because he hid himself for so long, because he lied, because he “betrayed” them. Despite the media frenzy, the constant criticism, and the public shaming of the incredible, once-in-a-century talent that is George Michael, he handled it in what is possibly the best way anyone could: By just saying publicly “Yes, I’m gay” and “Yes, I like to cruise” and going on with his life as best he could. I don’t think even now, in 2024, our most beloved gay superstars would ever admit to the latter, but I think it’s probably the most significant aspect of this entire situation. He never said it was a “mistake” per se. He said in recordings in the documentary that some people might perceive it as “self-destructive,” but he never agreed with that or apologized for it.
For many people, this arrest was the end of George Michael, which is both incredibly sad and an absolute shame on our part. When we’re thinking and talking publicly about the greatest musicians of the late 20th century, Michael’s name rarely comes up in conjunction with Michael Jackson, Madonna, Bruce Springsteen, and Prince. We want so badly to believe we moved forward as a society as the millennium began, and yet, no one ever really treated Michael’s fame, contributions, and talents the same again. Even the news of his death in 2016 felt like a short blip in the media circus compared to the deaths of other musicians who died that same year, like David Bowie and Prince. What happened in 1998 and what’s happened in the 26 years following constantly remind me how our inability to truly reckon with anything important — as both queer and trans people and people living in this society — continues to dictate how far we haven’t gone yet.
Both 10-year-old me and 36-year-old me want justice for George Michael, the man, and George Michael, the pop star. I hope someday we can give it to him.
This is lovely. Thank you!