George Michael Part 1 with Marcus McCann

He turned a bright spark into a flame.

(Part 1 of 2!)

You can buy Marcus McCann's book, Park Cruising: What Happens When We Wander Off the Path, here.

Content warning: this episode briefly discusses suicide around minute 13.

An extended cut of this episode is available for Patreon and Apple Podcast subscribers.

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Transcript

Sarah: If you need to wake someone up before you go, where are you go going from, and why were you there?

Welcome to You're Wrong About, I'm Sarah Marshall and today we are bringing you the first part of a two-part episode on George Michael. In my personal opinion, You're Wrong About is often at its best talking about pop stars and proud sex havers, and I think this episode is no exception. 

Our guest today is Marcus McCann, author of Park Cruising - What Happens When We Wander Off the Path. You can find Park Cruising wherever fine books are sold. And if you want to hear a longer version of this episode, we have put one out on Patreon and Apple+ subscriptions. So head over there if you want a director's cut, a Carolyn's cut, if you will. 

Speaking of bonus content, we will be putting out part three of our series on Britney Spears’ memoir, which we're talking about with the irreplaceable Eve Lindley next week. So if you want to listen to part three of our four-part saga on Britney Spears, head over to Patreon or Apple+ subscriptions next week for that. And the week after that, for an extended cut of George Michael part two. 

Thank you so much for joining us. Thank you for being here. Happy April. I am excited. I feel like we're at the start of a fairly epic journey. My relationship to George Michael is similar to so many other people's, which is that I like to listen to Freedom when I'm feeling sad, and Faith when I'm feeling happy. And he's just knit into the fabric of our lives. 

Marcus: Oh, I love that.

Sarah: I don't know. George Michael is, I'll just give you my baggage and then he can give us his. The story is just someone who was born in the late 80s. So I think he was an absolutely ubiquitous pop star. The music was there. He was on the radio. His most shocking moment in rock, I'm pretty sure, was that he had started off in Wham!. Which had, of course, one of the most upbeat sounding songs ever recorded, Wake Me Up Before You Go.

Marcus: What a delight, yes. 

Sarah: He came out at some point as gay. His career continued, and yet everything he did was regarded as somehow potentially sinister because of that. I say that like it's a 90s thing, but we're still doing it. This is an incident that does not loom huge in my memory of the 90s to the point that I forgot it. I was very off in my memory of when it happened, but that he was arrested for solicitation, question mark? 

Marcus: Public lewdness, yeah. 

Sarah: Public lewdness. And basically for, would it be correct to say the man was merely cottaging? 

Marcus: Yeah, that's exactly what was happening. George, from the time he's young, is asked, “Are you gay?” in basically every interview, during his Wham! years and afterwards. And then after the arrest in the bathroom in Will Rogers Park in Beverly Hills, for the rest of his life now they're asking him about park cruising. They're asking him about cottaging. 

Sarah: We had a general belief, I think, for a long time that any sex more interesting than missionary with the intent to have a baby was somehow a mark of an antisocial personality. And the question of where public sex fits into community life feels important in this. 

Marcus: Yeah, I think that's right. So to start with, maybe, can I send you a photo to look at? Do you know what George Michael looked like when he was young? 

Sarah: Not really. 

Marcus: I would love for you to describe what you're looking at.

Sarah: Oh my god. I'm having a positive maternal response to this photo. He's just got this big, shaggy bowl cut. His head looks like a dandelion. Big glasses, big teeth, just big features in that way where you're going to be a pop star later, but for now you haven't grown into your face. 

Marcus: Yeah, that's exactly right. I also think he's got a bit of an air of androgyny, as so many of us did when we were kids.

Sarah: Oh, totally. With a few alterations, this could be a photo of me in the 7th grade. 

Marcus: And me, too. Maybe all of us, in a way. 

Sarah: Yeah. 

Marcus: So George Michael was born Georgios Kyriacos Panayiotou on June 25th, 1963. He's going to take the stage name “George Michael”. Actually, between the release of the first and second Wham! singles, which is a bit odd timing-wise. Let's call him “George”, because that's how he's known to all of us. 

But George's mother, Leslie Harrison, she's from a working-class North London family. His father Jack is actually born in Cyprus, and he migrates to the UK in the 1950s. The story that's told about Jack is that he couldn't afford even a second-class ticket to England, and so he ends up arranging to work on the boat in exchange for passage. And when he arrives, he's got nothing, basically no money in his pocket. Jack and Leslie meet in 1957 at, I think this is appropriate for our story, they meet at a dance. 

Sarah: You hear about dances and all these stories from this period. We need to have dances again. This is why the kids aren't meeting. We don't have dances. 

Marcus: I feel like, yeah, this would be a different, it would have a bit of a different tinge if it was like they met at the club.

The life of this family, from when George is born to when he ends his teenage years, is this trajectory of kind of middle class striving. When Jack and Leslie are first married, they live with another married couple in a rented apartment. Jack's working first as a busboy, and then he works as a waiter, and then the head of front of house. And by the time George is a teenager, Jack and Leslie have bought a restaurant and they're running a restaurant themselves. 

And you can also see this kind of with the musical instruments that George gets when he's a kid. So when he's really young, he's singing in choir, which requires no money. 

Sarah: He's playing the lungs.

Marcus: Yeah, exactly. By the time he's a teenager, like early teens, he has a violin. And the violin is just the archetypal instrument of middle-class longing, right? The migrant story told by thousands of kids forced to play the violin against their will. 

Sarah: Wow. Yeah. That makes me think of an American Tale, and how Papa Mousekiewicz has a violin. And how then when you think about it at the scale that a mouse's violin would be, it would make the most annoying sound in the world.

Marcus: Oh, this sort of high pitch screechy noise? 

Sarah: Yeah, but maybe to a mouse it sounds perfect. 

Marcus: At the same time, and as he gets older into his teen years, he gets a drum set. His living situation is also changing in the same sort of way over the course of his childhood. When he's born, his family's living in a rented apartment over a laundromat.

And then when he's 12 in 1975, the family buys a house northwest of London, and move into this kind of more affluent middle-class neighborhood. And I don't want to be too cute about it. That sounds pretty unidirectional, but I do think that this is a family that has come from kind of stark circumstances, and the parents are just working really hard.

So Leslie for example, is working at a fish and chip shop during the day. And at night, working in the family restaurant. And she hates it. She's describes her hair smelling like fried oil and fish, she doesn't have any time for herself. 

Sarah: She's in the chip mines. 

Marcus: She's in the chip mines. Yeah, exactly.

Sarah: And now, of course, we have to deal with the fact that everyone except the super-rich seem to be getting poorer. 

Marcus: That's it exactly. The idea that somebody who's a waiter could then buy their own restaurant and buy a house for their family, that seems naive, right? It seems hopeless today.

Sarah: Yeah. Good for the George Michaels. 

Marcus: George would later say of this period that he felt ugly and fat. He would also say that he never received praise from his father. And that he sensed his mother's discomfort with his sensitive side. 

He was close to his mother, Leslie, throughout her entire life. But in a candid moment he says this, “Sometimes I felt that my mom made me feel I wasn't man enough or boy enough when I was growing up.” 

Sarah: It makes me think about my understanding of sort of beliefs about parenting at this time, or that if you see gay qualities in your child, you must stifle them immediately so that he grows up normal and can have a normal life, and not be condemned to living on sex criminal island or whatever. Or collecting stamps.

Marcus: And the irony is that you behaving weirdly around this kid is going to generate the neuroses that's going to prevent them from feeling normal and accepted and loved, right? 

Sarah: And it feels, and especially like Americans are horrible too. And in many, in basically the same ways, right? The apple doesn't fall far from the British tree.

But I feel like learning, especially about English parenting in the 20th century, you're just like, wow, they really were afraid of loving their children, especially in the middle classes. 

Marcus: I don't want to give Leslie a short shrift here. Because also, she's growing up in a culture and she may have been thinking in the back of her mind about her brother, Colin Harrison.

So this is George's uncle, Colin Harrison, was gay. This is her brother, and he was locked in a mental institution in the 1950s and 60s. And when he gets out for a few days to visit his family in 1964, he overdoses on pills and kills himself. And so George isn't told about this story when he's a kid. He only learns about his gay uncle much later. Leslie didn't have any control over that, but she has seen really close in her immediate family, the effects of homophobia and how deadly they can be. 

Sarah: Are there things that you feel could have been within her reach in that time and place as ideas that you wish she'd thought of? 

Marcus: She is giving George the kind of material advantages that she thinks are important. The reason is that they can move from one neighborhood to a fancier neighborhood to a fancier neighborhood, and go to a middle-class school and have middle class friends, and George is going to have this middle-class life afterwards, right? There's nothing wrong with that impulse on its own, the desire to want to provide materially for your kid. But I think it is a demonstration of affection, but it is not affection on its own. 

Sarah: And I feel like it can also create this dynamic. Not necessarily in this family, but certainly in some families of, I have sacrificed everything and made 1 million chips so that you can have this life. And you're not going to cock it up by being gay.

Marcus: Totally. And the family, as George develops a love for music and he's trying to get a record contract, his dad is saying, “You need to think about what happens when your dream fails, because you're not going to be a pop star. You have a terrible voice. No one's going to listen to you.”

Sarah: Parents are almost always right about that, but some of them are wrong.

Marcus: But also, would you rather be right, or would you rather inspire your kids to follow their dreams? 

Sarah: And I feel like there's also this idea,, and maybe this is more an American idea that talent is this big lottery, and either you win big or you don't get anything. And it's no, ideally you love the thing you love, and you explore the dimensions of it. And you find a life for yourself within the wider world of it. Unless it's something where there's practically no paying jobs at all, which I realize has happened to some fields. But so this idea that you either succeed 100% in the exact dream you had when you were five, or you haven't made any progress. Is it we get to all or nothing about it.

Marcus: When you're a kid or when you're a tween, your parent’s attitudes toward you or views are just so important. There's this moment where George, he's a teenager, he has a demo and it's just snippets of songs. It's not even whole songs. And he slips it into his dad's car.

Sarah: Why does he do that?

Marcus: It's not like Jack has any influence over the music industry. He's not trying to get discovered by his dad. He's just trying to get a little bit of approval. 

Sarah: He is trying to get discovered by his dad. I feel like with a withholding parent, you're like, someday they're going to discover me. They're going to be like, Oh my God. I didn't realize this was my child. I love them now. 

Marcus: The top of a dish has been taken off. What's up with this thing? Ta da! It's a turkey dinner. Like when you make sauerkraut.

Sarah: Yeah, exactly. Oh my God. We were picturing a different dish. Yeah, exactly. It's emotional. 

Marcus: Often, the task of your adult life is to be like, actually, I don't need my parents approval. 

Sarah: Yeah. 

Marcus: Even if my parents don't understand this aspect of me, I'm succeeding on my own terms.

Sarah: Yeah, I'm really working on it. It's a whole thing. 

Marcus: It is a whole thing. It is a lifelong project. It's not surprising that George doesn't have those skills when he's 15 years old. 

Sarah: And is music something that's important to his parents, or is he just on his own in that? 

Marcus: Music was important to them, and they put it aside because they're working so hard.

Sarah: Yeah. 

Marcus: Like when he's a teenager, he finds this dusty record player in the garage that he rescues, and he finds his parents old records. And there's not a lot of them, but there's the Supremes, and there's Tom Jones, and there's Stevie Wonder. 

They met at a dance, right? At one point they were into pop music. They were into what music could make them feel. And it's just like such a metaphor that now the record player is in the garage getting dusty. 

Sarah: Yeah, they're too busy to feel. 

Marcus: As he gets older, he's like a musical omnivore. He likes ABBA. He likes the Bee Gees. He likes the Sex Pistols. He likes Queen. So he's taking it from all over the kind of pop spectrum. 

Sarah: He's finding his sound. 

Marcus: Totally right. By 1980, he's into the Sugar Hill Gang. He has to get these records imported from the U.S. 

Okay, wait, I feel like I've gotten ahead of myself a little bit. When he's 11, he moves to this school in the nice neighborhood in Radlett, and he enrolls at Bushy Meads School. Great name, very British sounding. And on his first day, he meets Andrew Ridgely. 

Sarah: Wow. 

Marcus: George is described as being shy and awkward. He has big glasses. He's developing a unibrow, which is very cool now, but was not cool at the time. And Andrew, on the other hand, is cool and confident and fashionable. And they're an odd couple, but they become instant friends. Andrew and George are going to be inseparable for 10 years. 

Sarah: Yeah, and it also feels, as an introverted kid, you need to find someone who's more extroverted and sure of themselves. And then you have a partner in crime for exploring the world, which you don't feel you have license to do on your own necessarily.

Marcus: Yeah. A hundred percent. Or somebody that you don't have to start at zero when you're having a conversation.

Sarah: 

Marcus: They form a band called, The Executive, in 1979. So George is 16 at the time, and they record a demo, which leads to nothing. There's five of them in the band. And as these boys start leaving The Executive, Andrew and George start to discuss a duo. And that duo will become Wham!, exclamation mark. 

George is writing some sort of proto songs, and they're trying to record a demo. In a way, this is my favorite time to think about George. We think of him as this wunderkind selling millions of records and touring the world. He's 19 and 20 years old.

But just before that, from 1979 to 1981, he's holding down a variety of jobs. He works at a car wash, he works at a construction site, a movie theater. His dad actually, in 1980, his dad gets him a job DJing at a restaurant. I do think there is something there where he is learning about how people react to music by DJing at this restaurant.

Sarah: Yeah. 

Marcus: He's also hanging out with Andrew and Andrew's girlfriend, Shirley Holliman. Shirley has a car, and in the summer the three of them are spending time at the swimming pool, they're going to McDonald's, they're going tanning, they're getting ice cream. They're cruising around in Shirley's car, and also hanging out at George's house listening to music,, and being stupid teenagers and making choreographed dances to the songs just to be fun. 

Sarah: That's so great. 

Marcus: In a way, it's like this is the moment when George is at his most secure. He's with his closest people, this little trio, him and Andrew and Shirley. They're 18 and no one can tell them what to do.

Sarah: Yeah. God. And not to say that's what's happening here, but there are definitely relationships, maybe more in adolescence and young adulthood than later on, where you're like a third wheel in a relationship and nobody has the language to talk about it. But you're really having a three-way relationship in a lot of senses.

And you're just like, we're teenagers, we're not going to talk about it. But everyone's confused and we like it. And not that it's like a sexual relationship, but just where you're all intimate and supporting each other and you choreograph dances. 

Marcus: Yeah, it's going to be a part of his sort of social support network into his 20s. Shirley is going to become a backup dancer in Wham!, and you're going to see her in the Wham! videos. 

Sarah: Oh my god. What's his self-image like at this point, and what do we know about that? How does he feel about himself? 

Marcus: Yeah, he's insecure in his teen years. He's getting fashion advice from Andrew and also from his sister Melanie, to straighten his hair, to pluck his eyebrows, to get contact lenses so he doesn't have the glasses. 

Simon Napier Bell, who's going to become his first manager of Wham!, said George was so insecure and trying to emulate the cool and the aesthetic of his best friend. And that by the time you get to the end of the Wham! years, the power dynamic has completely swapped, and George is the international superstar. 

But at this moment, I think he's feeling pretty insecure. He's going to start going to gay bars and cruising pretty soon. He will say during this period that he's still dating women. He did have a high school girlfriend, but it seems that the most significant relationship in his life at this moment is the one with Andrew and Shirley. 

Wham! signs with Inner Vision in 1982 when George is 18 years old. Each of them receive £500 as a signing bonus. George is going to be reasonably good with money his whole life, so he doesn't blow it on partying or buying stuff for himself. But he does give himself one treat, which is he gets his ear pierced.

Sarah: Oh, it's going to be very important, I feel like.

Marcus: Iconic, the George Michael pierced ear. 

Sarah: We could see that £500 on him for the rest of his life. 

Marcus: Pretty much exactly that, yeah. The first two Wham! singles are not really big successes in Britain, and they're not even released in the U.S. They don't chart. 

Marcus: In order to promote their first song, which is called Wham! Rap. 

Sarah: No. 

Marcus: Yes. Yes it is called, Wham! Rap. As soon as rap is bridging into popular culture, it’s having its moment, there are white people doing it, too. 

Sarah: And that's how we make that happen.

Marcus: George is going to have an uneasy relationship to race over the course of his musical career. Because he's influenced by Stevie Wonder and by Prince and by the Supremes. And some of this music is going to sound, the echoes are certainly there. They're very strong. 

In the mid 80s, the American Music Awards renames the categories. It used to be ‘Hot Black Singles’ was the category. 

Sarah: Hot Black Singles? 

Marcus: Yes. Yes. Now only for adult websites. 

Sarah: I'm speechless. 

Marcus: It gets renamed R& B Soul Artist, right? Male R& B soul artist. 

Sarah: Which I guess is a bit of a dog whistle, when you think about it. 

Marcus: And George is going to get nominated and win that category. And when he does, Dionne Warwick and others say, “What are you doing nominating this guy in this category, when there's great music being put out by Black artists that are being ignored?” 

Sarah: And this is basically the one category where a Black artist can win something, and he's in their category now.

Marcus: That's just it, right? Just one more example of his relationship to race. The Executive, the first band that he was in, has this kind of reggae vibe. It's five white people from suburban London making this kind of reggae, two-tone music. 

Sarah: Who do they think they are, The Police? 

Marcus: Exactly, right. Sting wasn't affecting a fake Caribbean accent though. And that's part of what happens with The Executive. So it's good that this is like a bad idea that a group of teenagers have that goes nowhere. 

Sarah: I'm happy to hear that. It's great to throw away a first draft. 

Marcus: So Wham! Rap is the song that they're promoting in 1982.

Sarah: The phrase ‘Wham! Rap’ is really great. As distressing as the implications may be. 

Marcus: It's quite something. The message,, I think is pretty neat. In the first couple of songs, they have this kind of anti-authoritarian message. They're basically like, if you don't like your job, you should quit it and go on the dole.

Sarah: Why not? Very political. 

Marcus: It was very political. And that is the first two singles that they're doing. Anyway, no one is listening to Wham! Rap. And so what they decide to do is start making appearances at London dance clubs. And they basically go in and lip sync. Andrew would hold a guitar. They would do it for four minutes and then slip out the back door and go to the next engagement. They would do as many as five of these in one night. 

Sarah: That is a brilliantly insane idea that only teenagers could come up with. 

Marcus: It's great, right? And they're not just appearing at straight clubs. One of their first appearances is at Bolts, a gay night at Lazers. The boys decide they're going to change into these tiny little gym shorts to perform, basically like go-go boys. 

Sarah: That's beautiful. And it's so the kind of thing that you get in these teenage performance art movies, too. Where it's like, if only they hear us or see us perform, they'll know we're the real deal.

It's not egotism, exactly. It's just this beautiful, childlike confidence in something. Some kind of magic. 

Marcus: Or like a musical meritocracy. 

Sarah: Yeah, I love that. I'm happy for the people who got to see those performances. 

Marcus: Totally, right? And, also they're touring, as they're doing this around London, they have backup dancers as well.

Sarah: Wow. 

Marcus: So it's Shirley, Andrew's now ex-girlfriend, but still a close friend of the two of them. And DC Lee, who would later go on to be in the band Style Council. Contrary to this idea that if they only try hard enough, they're going to get noticed, it's only because of a last minute cancellation on Top of the Pops.

Sarah: And this was a show that just everybody saw, right? If you were on Top of the Pops, you would just be known. 

Marcus: 100%. So the second single, which is called Young Guns, had stalled out in the low forties at around 43 on the Billboard chart. And after the appearance, it rockets up to number three. They then re-released the first single, which hadn't done well, and it does better because now they've got a fan base. 

Sarah: Because now people know it's cute boys singing, and that changes everything. 

Marcus: 100%. Yeah. The album Fantastic is a number one album in the UK. 

Sarah: Wow. 

Marcus: It peaks at 83 in the U.S. So it doesn't have the same cultural reach.

Sarah: And I literally think that calling an album, Fantastic, is itself a bit gay coded. And I wondered if that affected American. 

Marcus: I love it. The next album is called, Make It Big, which is also maybe gay. There you go. 

Sarah: That's what she said. 

Marcus: During the filming of this music video, George comes out to Andrew and Shirley as gay.

Sarah: How does that go? 

Marcus: He apparently told Shirley first. And Shirley's like, we have to tell Andrew. Andrew and Shirley and George talk about it and they decide not to tell George's parents. Certainly Andrew's self-recollection and what he will say in later interviews is, I thought, I don't care. This is just one thing in the sort of great potpourri of his life, and he never expresses a homophobic attitude towards it. 

Sarah: I feel like it's part of the kind of upward trajectory that we like to imagine history is expressing as it moves forward. We like to assume that there's a straight line of things getting better. And I feel like throughout history, there have always been friends who have ended friendships because of homophobia. And there have always been friends who don't care. I don't know. They deserve to be celebrated, too. 

Marcus: Yeah. I just think of what a risk for George in that moment. 

Sarah: Yeah. 

Marcus: Is he afraid he's rolling the dice? Which kind of a friend is he going to get? 

Sarah: And this is his family. 

Marcus: Totally. And it's also like they're recording the video that's going to accompany the release of the full-length album. There's a lot riding on them continuing to work together and to have chemistry. 

Sarah: It's amazing. And also it feels like that's the point where you're like, we can't go any farther forward without me telling you, potentially. 

Marcus: Yeah. He feels like he needs to be honest in that moment. Rumors about George's sexuality are already brewing. When he signs with his first agent, the agent gets calls from people being like, “I've seen him in the gay clubs. The guy that you just signed is gay.”

In part, as a result of that, the record label starts producing content that shows him dating women. So there's a manufactured story about him dating Brooke Shields, a woman who is romantically linked to a number of gay men. 

Sarah: Yeah, why was that her job? 

Marcus: It's not her job. She's doing it for free. Maybe the worst version of it is that the music journal Number One Record, sets George up with Karen Woodward from Bananarama. And they go on a date, and it's a date with Karen and George and the reporter. 

Sarah: Oh, wow. 

Marcus: Later on, Karen will meet and fall in love with Andrew Ridgely and get married. And they stayed together till 2017.

Sarah: My god, I really thought the punchline was going to be that Karen is a lesbian and that's why it's especially egregious. I was like, Bananarama does sound gay. 

Marcus: True. 

Sarah: Cruel Summer, very lesbian song. 

Marcus: I love that. It's interesting because everyone is participating, right? Like the music. The reporters are, on the one hand, reporting rumors that he's gay. And also, setting him up with Karen Woodward on this fake date. 

Sarah: Yeah, because I guess both stories are profitable. 

Marcus: I guess that's the moral of it. 

Sarah: That's how reality is generated. 

Marcus: He will later say that he wishes that he had been more honest earlier. He's getting asked though constantly, every time he does media, “Are you gay?” And at first he's trying to be cute about it. He says like things like, “I don't think anyone should have to answer that question.” Or, “David Bowie and Mick Jagger were allowed to live in a kind of ambiguous space. Why am I not allowed to?” 

Later on, he's going to say he starts saying to reporters who ask, “It doesn't matter what I tell you, because you're not going to believe me anyway.” And all of that sounds very defensive to me, right? 

Sarah: You may think so, but I couldn't possibly comment. 

Marcus: Yeah, exactly. Around this time, they go on tour. So this is just in the UK. For a relatively young band with only nine songs to their name, it is a massive event. 

Sarah: It must be a short concert. 

Marcus: They do some covers, and they spice it up a little bit. But in order to finance it, they get an endorsement deal from Fila, the athletic athleisure clothing company. And they wear these tiny matching tennis shorts on the tour. I just sent you a photo if you want to have a look. 

Sarah: Oh, shit. I think many people believe this as well, I think basketball really needs to return to having men wear hot pants. 

Marcus: Oh, yeah. Yeah, those are good days. I don't know why we stopped.

Sarah: So yeah, so George Michael is wearing a lemon yellow Fila athleisure suit, with the short shorts. It's just great. It's just how I think everyone should dress if they feel like it. 

Marcus: It's so adorable, right? We think of Wham!’s music as being cheerfully neutered. That it's not sexual. And these photos, they are in basically male lingerie.

Sarah: If you need to wake someone up before you go, if you're with them in the morning and you're go going, where are you go going from and why were you there? 

Marcus: The music press responds with a kind of bafflement to Wham! and Wham!'s success. Like they can't see these girls who are just losing their mind for Andrew and George.

Sarah: For as long as there's been pop culture, teenage girls have loved a segment of it that everyone else has then acted confused about. But I don't think it's ever that confusing. I think we like to act like we can't see the value in something because we like to performatively revile what teenage girls care about, because as a culture, we think they're stupid. 

Marcus: Yeah. There's something… like our culture says it's okay to sexualize teen girls, but when they're the ones doing the desiring, when it's their desire, that's the moment when we're like, nope, shut it down. Whatever it is that they're desiring isn't serious, isn't worthy of our attention. We can only react with surprise or incomprehension. 

Sarah: Yeah, it's so frustrating that it's like the only really socially suspect thing you can do with a teenage girl is care about her feelings. 

Marcus: Whoa, yeah. Or listen to what she has to say. 

Sarah: Yeah, we have a lot to do. I'm a grown up, I like Wham!. I never stopped liking them. I don't know why it's hard for people. 

Marcus: Totally. Maybe it's easier now that teen girls are into Euphoria and this sort of extremely dark. 

Sarah: Yeah. We're like, no, do Wham! again. 

Marcus: Yeah. It's funny that we're having this conversation about George at 20, because his relationship to aging is going to be very public as he gets older in the 90s. But for now, you mentioned make it big. So that's the next thing that happens. 

They release this album that is going to be massive in the UK and in the US. It's going to go six times platinum in the US, and sell 10 million records worldwide. It's going to spawn four massive singles. We were talking about Wake Me Up Before You Go. There's also Careless Whisper is on there, and Freedom, and Everything She Wants. 

Sarah: Yeah, I can't believe Careless Whisper was on that early. 

Marcus: The mythology of Careless Whisper is that he writes it when he's 17, taking the bus out to that DJ gig.

Sarah: That's insane. 

Marcus: Yeah. 

Sarah: I find that disheartening. I'm sure many people disagree, but I think Careless Whisper is incredible. 

Marcus: It's a great, it's a bop, right? There's a reason that we're still singing it. It's also, so it is on this album. But when they release it as a single, they're going to call it a George Michael single, they're not going to call it a Wham! single. And in some parts of the world they release it as, “Wham! featuring George Michael”. 

Sarah: Oh, okay. And is this like a record company idea or what is happening? 

Marcus: Yeah, he's stepping out from behind the shadows. He's taking center stage. 

Sarah: Wow. 

Marcus: He also, he records it twice. He records it first in a very famous studio in Alabama, and he doesn't like the results. 

Sarah: Is that Muscle Shoals? 

Marcus: It sure is! Yes, Cameo, Musicals. That's crazy! Amazing. He does it when he's 19, records it, and he doesn't like it, so he re-records it. They even shot a music video for it, and they have to take apart the music video and use what little pieces they can, because his voice is no longer synced to it. 

Sarah: That's amazing that he was able to do that. Honestly. 

Marcus: Totally. Are we going to talk about the saxophone on it?

Sarah: I feel like we have to, it's like the elephant in the room. What's going on with that? How'd the saxophone get in there? 

Marcus: Apparently in the first rendition, there's a session musician who plays the sax on it, and George doesn't like it. They fly in someone else from New York. George doesn't really like it either. And then when they're re-recording it, he just auditions people all day. And the version of it that gets recorded is recorded on an older saxophone that doesn't have the high note. There's just… you can't play it.

And so they transpose the whole thing down a half tone. He plays it, they love it, and they speed it up a half tone. And that's the version that's on the record. There's a feeling of uncanniness. It feels a little artificial or plasticky. And maybe that is the recording technique, but also it's literally been sped up. It's been put into a different key. 

Sarah: Yeah. It's a ghost saxophone. God, I really love that. I don't know, pop music is so hard to understand from the outside, because some of it is so manufactured. And the artist is just moved through it as if by peristalsis. And sometimes you're really looking at an auteur. And I love that, he was like, “I will find the correct saxophone for this. And I'm going to be at a saxophone audition day.” 

And I don't know, we've talked about recently the Carpenters and Fleetwood Mac on the show, and Sinead O'Connor I think fits less into this, but I think George Michael too. These are artists that are important, to me anyway, because they made pop music that is pretty deathless because it just somehow coheres into a perfect whole that you then can listen to for the rest of your life. I'll always have a nice few minutes ahead of me in my life whenever Careless Whisper comes on the radio.

Marcus: It's so hard to make something that doesn't feel heavy and plodding when you're a perfectionist. And he does it on this album. 

Sarah: I love it. I love that there's artistic triumph in this story, and that he has a feeling of agency within all this. 

Marcus: Totally. So, these singles are massive singles. There's one more single in 1984, which is the Last Christmas song. 

Sarah: Oh my God. A truly deathless song. 

Marcus: George Michael is going to have an evolving relationship with monogamy. By the time we get into the 90s, he's talking about casual encounters, and has a relationship to sex and sexuality which goes well beyond monogamy.

I think that's actually common that people have an evolving understanding of their sexuality. And what you want when you're 20 might not be the same thing that you want when you're 40. 

Sarah: Oh, yeah. I feel like, in a way, young people are a lot more wired for monogamy than older people. Because when you're 20 you can't imagine loving the same person forever and only wanting to have sex with them forever. And then you're 21 and you're like, Oh my God. 

Marcus: Totally. I also think because the world is just serving these pro-monogamy tropes over and over again, that there's only one way to love. 

Sarah: Where's the great polyamorous love romance movie? The polyamorous approach to polyamory on the Titanic. 

Marcus: The problem is that it would just be like one endless house meeting. It would be like three hours of one conversation. 1984 and 1985 are a whirlwind. They're making music videos for the singles. They're touring the album. The U.S. tour is called Wham!-erica.

Sarah: I really love that. 

Marcus: Yeah. So delightful. And it's like a stadium tour, and the music industry is surprised that it's such a big hit. And it's the same thing as back in England. Thousands and thousands of teen girls and young women screaming at the top of their lungs, every word of every song. 

Sarah: So the teen girl vote is suddenly elevating Wham! and making us all Wham!-ericans, it sounds. 

Marcus: Totally, yeah. It's their Wham!-erica, and we just live here. 

Sarah: Yeah, exactly. I've always said that. 

Marcus: But that's it. At the height of their fame, George tells Andrew he wants out. And early in 1986, they announce Wham! is splitting up. 

Sarah: Wow. That is a very, so they were only on the scene for four years.

Marcus: Yeah, and really less than that. And they were barely making a blip in the United States until 1984. So really just two or two and a half years of extreme celebrity though, right? He cannot go out in public. Everywhere he goes, he's mobbed by women and girls. 

Sarah: Listen, girls, I get it. Just look at him. But you got to let people go about their day.

Marcus: He wanted to be the biggest act in the world. And now he is. 

Sarah: That's the thing too, right? What do we do with that? And I feel like fame is fundamentally something that the human brain isn't designed to compute. 

Marcus: What George says at the time is that the kind of clean cut, cheerful image of Wham! was Andrew's idea, and it doesn't suit him anymore. He says some pretty nasty things offhandedly about Andrew. 

Basically, he tells reporters that Andrew didn't contribute anything to make it big, and it's not good for his ego. It feels bad for Andrew to get dragged around like this. And so it's time to split up the band.

Sarah: What do you think about those statements? 

Marcus: I do think that there is this kind of power reversal that has happened over the course of the years of Wham!, where now George is the main guy and Andrew's the sidekick, whereas it had never been that way. Andrew is also going to release a solo record. It's not going to do anything, but they're both going to continue making music, obviously. 

I will also say, because he announces that they're going to split months before it's over, they have an opportunity to do something, which I think is nice. They release a final single, which is the Edge of Heaven. They release a compilation album. And they do a big final concert at Wembley Stadium.

Sarah: Wow. 

Marcus: And that's it, right? The lights come up. Wham! is over. 

Sarah: Wow. 

Marcus: George is 23 years old. 

Sarah: Oh my god. 

Marcus: I think there is something nice about George being honest with Andrew and then giving a lead time, letting everybody have their last interactions, doing a final concert and a final single like that. I think that's nice.

Sarah: Okay, so we're having an ethical, we're consciously uncoupling Wham!. 

Marcus: That's right. That's right. He's saying some pretty nasty things about Andrew at this time, but I do think that there's a kind of honesty to it that I appreciate. 

After he leaves, he goes to a recording studio in Denmark. He spends two months there, and he comes out with the Faith album basically in hand.

Sarah: It's a lot of talent for one person to have. I'm shocked by how much he's producing in such a short period. 

Marcus: 100%. And this album is going to have six big singles on it. It's going to sell 15 million copies at the time. By now it's sold more than 25 million copies. 

Sarah: Yeah. 

Marcus: The first single is actually not a number one hit. The first single is, I Want Your Sex. 

Sarah: It's kind of like Zac Efron being in that Ted Bundy movie. He's like, “I'm a grown up.” 

Marcus: Totally. I think there is this deliberate, he's shifting his image by releasing I Want Your Sex as a single. As you can imagine, US radio refuses to play it. A lot of radio stations won't.

This is very Tipper Gore 1988. On the BBC, they won't play it before 9pm. And in the US, a lot of radio stations bleep out the word ‘sex’ or overdub it with the word ‘’love or something else. 

Sarah: Wow, that's really good. 

Marcus: So this is the thing. The themes of it are also at odds with each other, with the cultural moment. You're at the height of the AIDS panic. There are gay folks who are recommending the abandonment of casual sex altogether, either through abstinence or through partnering up. And there's this kind of mainstream, I don't know, fear of contagion. 

And so in that kind of soup, George has to respond to allegations that he is promoting sex like he invented it. And he leans into one of the lyrics which is, “sex is better when it's one on one.” And in the video he writes on Kathy's body, “explore monogamy”. That is not what that song is about, but he is hedging his bets. He would later say he regretted not having the courage of his convictions to promote his song in an unapologetic way.

Sarah: So George Michael is upsetting the moral majority, which is always ideal for a pop star. 

Marcus: And he's also got this kind of quasi-religious imagery that he's using on the album cover. And the album is called, Faith. The second single is called, Faith. He's got an earring that has a cross on it, right? So there is some sort of religious iconography going on as well. 

Sarah: Just like in the Like a Prayer controversy. 

Marcus: It's also, on first blush, you might think that when he's singing Faith, it's like faith in a romantic partner, right? But he's not saying that at all. He's saying, I'm going to leave my romantic partner who I feel is insufficiently invested in me. And because I have faith that I will find something bigger and better out there. 

Sarah: Yeah. 

Marcus: So the faith he has is in himself. 

Sarah: Yeah. You feel it is one of those songs that it's hard to be in a bad mood for as long as it's playing. 

Marcus: In 1988, he begins the global tour of Faith. And he later says that he thought he would have a more sophisticated, grown-up audience. That back in the Wham! days, he had been overwhelmed by the hormonal teens. But he goes on the Faith tour and it is the same or worse.

Sarah: Understandably, they're just a few years older. 

Marcus: It's hard to understand George's surprise in a way. He's producing the kind of perfect firestorm. He's doing it on purpose. And I think you can have both of those feelings at the same time. That I wanted this, and gosh, this is hard. 

He's got a personal chef and a personal trainer. He's working out for four hours a day, some days. And he wanted to go solo, but now he's really genuinely alone. His best friends aren't there with him anymore. 

Sarah: And confronting that as a solo artist rather than part of a unit seems, in many ways, much harder. 

Marcus: He said, here's a quote from him. He says, “The more people you employ, the more people you have in your life who can't be honest with you. And that's what I find most distressing about touring.” 

Sarah: Yeah. 

Marcus: On the one hand, we don't have to have limitless sympathy for him. He's doing something that he loves. He's making bank. But his feelings about this tour are going to influence how he behaves over the next ten years. 

In 1990, he begins recording the follow up album, which is what would become Listen Without Prejudice Vol.1. The songs come very slowly, fragment by fragment, sometimes only four bars at a time. And this is going to be how he records music for the rest of his life. 

Basically session musicians will be called to the studio and wait around all day. And then he'll be like, okay, bass player, come in. And then he'll hum something for him. And the bass player will play that. And he's like, okay, now go back and wait out in the lobby. It's quite a kind of slow tortured method. I appreciate also that he's doing this over the course of months. He's got the kind of studio time that, as you were talking to Carolyn Kendrick about with respect to Rumours, we don't have that today. Like musicians don't have that luxury today. But that's how Listen Without Prejudice gets made. The record does fairly well, but it's not the same massive success as Faith. 

Sarah: If something is that giant, then culture pivots, and if you dominate a moment, it makes sense that you would be less likely to dominate the next moment.

Marcus: 100%. Yeah. And George isn't going to help himself with this. When it comes to the artwork and the promotion of the album, he has a complete meltdown. He refuses to use his name or image on the cover of the album. 

Sarah: How are they going to sell it, George? 

Marcus: The compromise is that they're allowed to put a sticker that has his name on it on the record as the only acknowledgement that it's him.

Sarah: It's very funny to think about this period when artists had this kind of control. Because I don't even know how much you could misbehave these days with a record label. 

Marcus: Yeah, I wonder. I don't think that Sony in this period is behaving well either. He's about to sue to try to get released from his record contract. But this part of it, the fact that he's not talking to journalists, he refuses to go on tour with the album. He doesn't appear in any of the music videos. He was overwhelmed by what happened both in the Wham! days with his first studio album. 

Sarah: And it's like there hasn't been a time to metabolize the last thing, right? It just keeps being a new thing. I don't have to think it's a good response in order to think it makes sense as a response given what's been going on for the past decade. 

Marcus: 100%, 100%. I will say, in hindsight, you could say this is the moment that his fame plateaus, right? He's a massive star. But after this period, it's the beginning of the kind of waning of his popularity, especially in the US. In the UK, he's going to sell a bajillion more records for decades. But in the US, this is the last we're going to see of him as a major cultural force. 

We don't need to make this distinction so stark, but there is something about this idea. Americans love celebrities who are very young and very pretty. And it's cheaper for the industry, for Hollywood or the recording industry, to dispose of those people and find new, broke 20-year old’s. 

Sarah: Yeah. Of which there are 100 million to choose from. 

Marcus: Yeah, but he's still a big pop star. He's still at the top of his game in January of 1991 when he plays Rock in Rio. So Rock in Rio is this sprawling outdoor concert. Peak audiences are 120,000 people, so it's huge. It goes over nine days. He's scheduled actually to perform twice. And he has… I was going to tell you about his diva rider, but… 

Sarah: Yeah, no, please do. 

Marcus: In his rider it says that they are required to source and put in his dressing room palm trees, which are to be painted white and baby blue.

Sarah: Come on. What are you going to do with those? 

Marcus: He also negotiates that after his performances, the organizers are going to pay for him and his friends to stay in Brazil and party in this resort town of Búzios. 

Sarah: Yeah, more understandable as a demand. The palm trees there just seem like a waste. 

Marcus: At this concert is Anselmo Feleppa. George would later say that he first laid eyes on Anselmo from the stage, that he looks out into this sea of people and sees Anselmo. I don't know if that's true. In other accounts, Anselmo is sitting so far away from the stage that he has to use binoculars to see George.

Sarah: He saw with his heart's eye I believe that he believes it.

I tell myself the same stories. I love that. 

Marcus: Totally. At any rate, by the morning after the last concert, Anselmo has dragged his friend to have breakfast in the lobby of the hotel that he believes that George is staying in. And George comes down into the lobby and they lock eyes. But George is being whisked off to a car on his way out of town to go to Búzios.

And Anselmo isn't having any of it. He figures out where George is going, and by nightfall he's at the same nightclub, he's on the same dance floor, and they're dancing together and flirting. And they are going to become inseparable, Anselmo and George. 

Anselmo has a kind of sunny, upbeat way of being in the world, and George is just smitten. So Anselmo's Brazilian. He's 35, so he's six or seven years older than George. Prior to meeting, Anselmo has a career in fashion. He's lived in Paris. He's lived in New York. He's a worldly man, in addition to being just this sunny and bright personality.

Sarah: Yeah, I love that. I feel like so often you hear these love stories where you're like, and he locked eyes with her in the crowd and she was 18. And you're like, oh, that's…nice. 

Marcus: George is only going to date age appropriate. 

Sarah: Thank you, George. 

Marcus: Anselmo and George are going to stay together for the rest of the Búzios holiday. And George leaves, he flies to L.A. And within a few days, he's sent for Anselmo. Anselmo comes to Georgia to live with him in California, and they're basically together for the rest of Anselmo's life. 

Sarah: And what has George’s love life been like to this point? 

Marcus: George has had infatuations. He's certainly had sex. He's had various types of sexual and romantic relationships, but he's never been in love like this. The kind of love where you wake up every morning with the man that you love in bed with you. He's experiencing that for the first time with Anselmo. And it's hard to overestimate that feeling. 

Sarah: Yeah. And I guess then it feels like he's had this period of adding up these kind of mountains of career success, but he hasn't had this before. And maybe he did have to get to a point where things slowed down a little in order to have this. 

Marcus: Yeah. And he's going to say that it changes his relationship to being gay entirely. I'm going to send you a quote from George. 

Sarah: He says, “It's very hard to be proud of your own sexuality when it hasn't brought you any joy. But once it's associated with joy and love, it's easy to be proud of who you are.” 

It's so simple when you put it that way. But I don't know, that's what's brilliant about it is that it makes sense once you hear it, but you wouldn't have necessarily ever realized it on your own. 

Marcus: Maybe we have a problem, or maybe we don't always recognize that in order to be loving actors outwardly, we need to be receiving that love as well.

Sarah: Yeah, totally. And again, this feels like maybe an American thing, because that's the culture I know. But where we have this idea of if you don't love yourself, how the hell are you going to love anyone else? And it's like, you can't simply ask me to learn how to love myself all at once and be done and then move on to the next thing. You got to start some stuff simultaneously. 

Marcus: And it's also this idea that it is it's okay for it to be an unfinished project. That it's not a matter of like you tick the box at some point, you just, you're like, you're done. I have accepted myself. Everything's great now. 

Sarah: Which I feel is one of the themes of Faith 90. Where it's that feels like a song being sung by someone who knows what it's like to be accepted by an entire stadium of people, and knows that's that is fundamentally a different feeling than having a meaningful connection with just one of them.

Marcus: Yeah, that's so well put. 

Sarah: I'm really happy for him. 

Marcus: Me too. And it's going to get complicated really fast for him. Within a few months, the pair learns that Anselmo is HIV positive, and they both take it really hard. This is a very different situation in 1991 than a diagnosis today in 2024. 

But so just to set the scene, there are AIDS drugs in 1991. AZT was approved by the FDA in March of 1987. But the real breakthrough isn't going to come until the beginning of 1996 with the introduction of HART, which is an acronym for highly active antiretroviral therapy. And a year after HART, they get combination therapies. And we're still using a version of combination therapies today. But of course, Anselmo and George, they don't know that. It's 1991. It feels very scary and very bleak. 

Sarah: My brain does this very simple thing, which I think probably a lot of ours do where if I'm reading something about people in World War II and the end of 1944, I'm like, “Oh, you got to hang on. It's just a few months to go.” But they don't know that. Nobody in history knows where they are in history, generally. 

Marcus: We think of the real, the tragedy, the highest number of deaths in the U.S. as happening in the 1980s. But it's not true. It's happening in this period, in the early 1990s. And those peak years are higher than everything else combined. This is the era where people are going to more than one funeral a week. A hundred thousand people are going to die in New York City. 

I think there's still a lot of HIV stigma today. It persists. The kind of long tail of the memory of HIV as this boogeyman continues. But the reality today is, of course, very different. Now people are having basically a normal life expectancy with HIV. It's like a diagnosis like diabetes. We also know that if someone's HIV positive but receiving treatment, the odds are we can get their viral load down to basically zero, so that they can't transmit the untransmittable.

And at the same time, we also have the introduction of PrEP, right? In the last ten years, a drug that HIV negative people take. Which makes it very unlikely to transmit, to become HIV positive. So in the global north now, we have a very different relationship to HIV than George and Anselmo had toward AIDS in 1991. Maybe I'm saying the obvious point, but it's just, I think it's worth remarking on because this diagnosis is going to dominate their next two years together. 

Sarah: I think the seemingly obvious is often the thing we need to talk about the most, because if you think you understand something, it can become, you can grow a kind of callous that allows you to not think about it.

But it's a different mentality than it's easy to access without being asked to, to remember, to learn what it felt like a little bit. 

Marcus: Yeah. And of course it's not all misery. So during this period, George and Anselmo are living together in a house in Santa Barbara. And then George buys this house in Beverly Hills, tears it down, and replaces it with this modern glass mansion, balconies, beautiful garden. And he fills it with orchids. 

Anselmo, on the phone calling his friends back in Brazil, he tells them how happy he is, how much he loves George, and how much he loves the house. They get a dog, a golden retriever named Hippie.

Sarah: That's really cute. 

Marcus: So around this time, so we're now in the fall of 2020. On the 24th of November 1991, Freddie Mercury announces that he has AIDS. He's bedridden, he's going blind, and he dies the next day. 

Sarah: Oh my god. 

Marcus: And they call George Michael for a quote. And here's what he says, this is his later recollection, he says…

Sarah: “I remember my publicist phoning me to tell me that Freddie Mercury had died and they wanted a quote from me. I remember I was trying to give her the quote and I was crying. I mean, bless him, I was really sad that Freddie had passed away. But of course I was crying about somebody else entirely. I imagine it's like there's this rising tide and you're stuck on the beach.”

Marcus: And it's also, if it can get Freddie, it can get anybody. 

Sarah: Yeah. 

Marcus: So that's November 1991, Queen’s surviving members decide they're going to have a giant concert and it's going to be a fundraiser to raise money for HIV. And that happens in April of 1992. So about six months later. So Queen performs as essentially the backing band, and it's a parade of vocalists taking Freddie's parts.

He ends up performing three songs. He sings These Are the Days of Our Lives. He sings Somebody to Love. The concert ends with Liza Minnelli singing completely, it's wonderful, but so strange version of We Are the Champions.

Sarah: I love Liza Minnelli to death, and I think she knows exactly how funny she is, or she wouldn't have been so good on Arrested Development. And that's so funny to imagine. 

Marcus: As the concert is ending, she's singing, We Are the Champions. George comes out and grabs her around the shoulders, and the two are rocking and swaying and singing. It's very sweet. 

Sarah: I love it. 

Marcus: Okay. I'm of two minds here about whether to show you the quote about what he was thinking when he was singing first. 

Sarah: Let's do the quote first. 

Marcus: If you think you're, like dipping your toe in the shallow end, I think you're wrong, but here you go. 

Sarah: He says, “For many months, I was sworn to secrecy by Anselmo. I went out there knowing I had to do two things. I had to honor Freddie Mercury, and I had to pray for Anselmo. So it meant so much to me, all in that one performance. I'm so proud of the fact that I held onto that feeling, because I wanted to die inside. It was just overwhelming for me, and I think what I did was turn in one of the best performances of my career.”

Wow. 

Marcus: And I agree with him. I do think it is one of the best performances of his career. 

Sarah: It's interesting to think about being this vessel for public mourning, right? And for a band mourning. And for the community, the whole music community, everybody mourning this person who took so many lives. And at the same time, he's singing about how he found somebody to love, and he doesn't know what's going to happen now.

Marcus: This is the experience of mourning. How does one? In a way, this is perfectly what stadium rock is about. It is about a shared experience, a communal experience. To have the sort of Freddie Mercury tribute concert be this thing where there's a hundred thousand people singing the songs that he sang back at the band. 

Sarah: Sometimes I just look at humans and I'm like, I love us. We have to really savor those moments. 

Marcus: We got one of them, and it was in April of 1992. Listen, I don't know what happens when you die. We know that in the long run, our molecules get broken up and go back into the universe. And what happens to our voice is, as far as we know, our voice goes silent. But in this moment, it's almost like Freddie Mercury's voice has been broken up. It's in the throat of George Michael, and Annie Lennox, and lord help her, Liza Minnelli as well. 

Sarah: Yeah. 

Marcus: And also in the throats of a hundred thousand people enjoying this kind of communal experience of mourning. 

Sarah: Yeah. You can feel people coming together to create something, that just in terms of the musical power in the room, feels bigger than what it ever could have been otherwise.

Marcus: It's also this moment of honesty. Freddie Mercury comes out right before he dies, and the band has this enormous concert as an AIDS fundraiser. It's like turning to the camera and saying what has been going on. 

Sarah: And not to bring Reagan into all of this, but as I always like to mention, 1987 was a time when in America, when the White House had done nothing to acknowledge AIDS, and so a sitcom had to do it. And you were getting potentially public health information from Delta Burke, and she might have been the best source available to you. And it does fall to artists in times of a moral vacuum. 

Marcus: It's hard to overestimate the failure of American politicians in this moment. $800 million package is passed by Congress, and it never gets implemented and never get spent. People were fundraising for research. Research that should have been funded by governments, and for hospice care and for treatment things that should have been paid for by the institutions, the institutions that we should rightly be able to depend on. And we were unable to depend on them.

In that concert footage you've got George, and he's wearing a big ol’ AIDS pin. The red ribbon. And it's not just him, it's also, it's like the biggest stars in the world. It's Elton John and David Bowie, and they're all saying the same thing. They don't have to preach. They don't have to evangelize in that moment. Their presence is saying, “Hey, we've got to get it together on this.” And it is profoundly moving for George as well. 

After this concert, he basically cannibalizes the record he's working on, what would have been Listen Without Prejudice Volume 2, and he gives the best tracks of it to an AIDS fundraiser compilation album. His peers are giving remixes or previously recorded tracks, and he's giving his best work, including the song Too Funky, which was going to turn out to be a big hit for him. And as a result of this, Listen Without Prejudice Volume 2 basically dies on the paper.

Instead, he releases An EP called Five Live, which includes this live version of somebody to love. And these are the days of our lives and is a fundraiser for the Phoenix Mercury Trust and is a number one record in England. 

Sarah: I love that. 

Marcus: And he's going to be doing work fundraising around HIV and AIDS for the, for most of the rest of his life.

In the year that followed, Anselmo got sicker and sicker. He thinned. He became frail. He lost mobility. On March 26, 1993, Anselmo has a brain hemorrhage, and he dies. 

Sarah: Were they aware that they were in his last days, or did he seem to be holding steady? 

Marcus: There's no doubt he was quite sick in February and March of 1993. And he's getting treatment in Rio. He's in Brazil, and George is living mostly in Los Angeles. And they're talking on the phone, but George doesn't fly down to Rio to be with him in his last days. And he's not there when he dies, and he doesn't attend the funeral. He's later going to say he was worried about turning Anselmo's medical care and last days into a tabloid spectacle. And what he really wanted was for Anselmo to have peace. 

Sarah: I find that awful to think about having to make that decision based on that. I don't know. I guess whatever it would add to the grief to have not been able to be there, it's a lot to reckon with. 

Marcus: A few days after the funeral, George does fly down and he goes privately with Anselmo's mother to the grave. The day after he goes to the grave, he writes a letter to Leslie, his mother, and comes out as gay. 

Sarah: Wow. 

Marcus: Maybe there's something about time is precious, but I also think there's something about I'm hurting so much right now, and the only way that you can understand why I'm in so much pain is by telling you this thing that I have been keeping a secret for so long.

Sarah: Yeah. 

Marcus: I think he's doing it in part to get it off his chest, and in part because he needs support in that moment. 

Sarah: What happens? 

Marcus: Jack and Leslie love and support him throughout his entire life. They're not estranged. They continue to have a relationship. Especially Jack had been telling him he was going to be such a failure when he was a teenager.

And when Wham! is on Wham!-erica, when he's on tour, Jack finally says, “I was wrong. You are a big success.” 

Sarah: It would be really weird to try and keep claiming he wasn't.

Marcus: For all the rest of us, all it takes is a sold-out stadium tour for your parents to finally be like, okay. 

Sarah: Yeah. But he's like, when are you going to be on a stamp? 

Marcus: After Anselmo's death, Tony Parsons, who's a former friend and ally of George Michael, sells the story to the British press. It's published as a three-part special over three days, boasting exclusive access to the pop star's personal life. 

Anselmo is described as a good looking Brazilian and the great love of his life. Okay, accurate. Parsons stops just short of saying that George is gay, but it's all there on the page. Heartbreaking, maybe a bit fuzzy, sadness, despair, reduced to a splashy headline. 

Sarah: Yeah. How long after Anselmo's death is this coming? 

Marcus: There's a break. It's not immediately in the months, in the weeks afterwards, but still. On the one hand, did anyone need to hear that? And on the other hand, yes, we needed to hear that, but we needed to hear it from George.

Sarah: And what's his reaction to it? 

Marcus: George is going to dedicate his next album in 1995 to Anselmo. And he says that the Parsons tabloid special, plus his dedication to Anselmo in the record sleeve, is the equivalent of his coming out. That he understands that to be he is now an out gay celebrity. I think most of us don't see it that way, but he does. He feels like he has been outed, like basically that the veil has been pulled back. 

Sarah: Does his record label freak out about this? What happens in that respect? 

Marcus: Stay tuned for the second part. Stay tuned because in 1993, he's going to go to court with Sony to try to get out of his record deal. And one of the things that's going to come to light as part of that lawsuit, is that the senior executives at Sony in America have been referring to George Michael as “that F bomb client of yours” to George's agent. 

Sarah: So it might be time for new management. 

Marcus: For a new record label. Yeah, he's going to try to get out of it. And you know what? He looks so hot when he has to testify.

Sarah: There should be a courtroom looks compilation book. Because it's a whole genre. It's really hard to succeed within. And the lighting, terrible. 

Marcus: Put him on the cover. He really knew what he was doing with that. And that's where we'll leave George today. He's in a Catholic cemetery on a hill, standing at the grave of his dead lover with his lover's mother in Anselmo’s hometown of Petropolis in Brazil.

Sarah: And that was our episode. Thank you so much for listening. Thank you for being with us here today. Thank you to Marcus McCann, author of Park Cruising - What Happens When We Wander Off the Path, for being our wonderful guest. Thank you to Colin Fleming for editing help. And thank you so much as always to Carolyn Kendrick for producing.

Thank you so much for being here. We'll have part two for you in a couple of weeks. Now get out there and plant something. And if you're in the Southern Hemisphere, you can plant garlic.