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George Michael's sense that he's let young gays down is misplaced: no apology is needed
So George Michael feels he's let gay kids down, and that his behaviour – including sexual encounters in public places and his espousal of promiscuity – "meant these kids suffered abuse and the homophobic language that is legal in this country". But what does George Michael now mean to young British gay men? Isn't he just that funny old man mum used to fancy that crashed his fancy car and sang with Joe McElderry in The X Factor final?
Gay teenagers coming of age today can learn the basics from all manner of mainstream media: watching Hollyoaks, The Only Way is Essex and Glee; or listening to Lady Gaga's hysterical positivity on Scott Mills' Floorfillers. This is a generation replete with "positive" role models. If anything, they are too positive, never quite scratching the surface of clandestine homophobia, still the only prejudice that operates within families.
So please spare yourself, George. You're of my generation of middle-aged gay men who are in some sense debutantes. We are the first generation to find ourselves with any real economic, social and political clout.
When he exploded publicly from the closet in an LA lavatory in 1998, he turned the exposé on its head with the full-throttle disco anthem to al fresco sex, Outside. Yet long before this, he had addressed the difficult specifics of living a full gay life in songs that became the soundtracks of wedding discos. In the 90s I would wonder how many of the aunties benignly shuffling to Fastlove knew that it was a song about cottaging? How many smooching to Spinning the Wheel knew that it was about the split-second Russian roulette decision of negotiating the physical and intellectual impulses of unsafe sex?
Michael, who forms a specific and unique branch of role-modelling in my mind at least, had fulfilled everything he ever needed to when he wrote Jesus To A Child, still probably the most poignant modern hymn to a lover's death from Aids. He was not like the other 80s gay pop stars, explaining his reluctance to come out. He was not in the lineage of the androgynous David Bowie model. He was an Elvis affiliate; hip-swinging, sexy, tantalising. He didn't blush at women throwing knickers at him in stadiums, he courted them. For a gay man with Princess Diana's hair, this was a tricky niche to straddle.
There are outside factors to consider in his 21st-century lawlessness. For fortysomething gay males in 2011, the prospect of an institutionalised, "real" relationship has existed for a tenth of their lifespans. Coming out at school was practically unthinkable, unless forcibly outed. Further problematic comings-out – at home, at work, to friends, to neighbours, in his case to the world – come replete with their own sideline theatrics.
It is unlikely that any fortysomething gay male would have been untouched by HIV, Aids, or some sort of moral censoriousness about their sexuality. Almost every government, pre-Blair, gained popularity on the nonsensical premise of excluding gay men and women from "family values" – as if we exist in a lone bubble outside of mothers, fathers, siblings and cousins. Gay fortysomethings have been labelled outsiders from infancy. When you have grown up outside the law it is sometimes easier to stay outside it. This is not a plea for preferential treatment. Michael has, after all, served a sentence for it. As Bret Easton Ellis, the visceral American author whose own complicated relationship with his sexuality works as a loose transatlantic counterpart to Michael's, recently tweeted in response to the "It Gets Better" campaign to encourage positive thinking in young American gay men: "Sometimes It Gets Worse." Michael has already taken more than enough hits for the team. No apology is needed.
