On Christmas 2005, my boyfriend (now husband) Andy and I started something that has become a tradition: We stay home and do super-gay things, like create a new “frame cluster,” or alphabetize our gardening books. Trust me: This is not the sort of stuff we do any other day of the year, but because Christmastime is essentially one giant redecorating project in a style that leaves me cold, well, we had to make it our own. That year, as I recall, we rearranged all the furniture and watched four versions of the Nutcracker back to back on PBS. Eventually, Andy started cooking something beyond his ken from Julia & Jacques at Home while I tried to gain some control over the shameful piles of CDs cluttering up our stereo shelf. I came upon George Michael’s Listen Without Prejudice Vol. 1 and put it on the carousel.
At the time we were living in a loft on Great Jones Street in lower Manhattan, but when I bought that CD in the fall of 1990, I was living across the street in a different loft with a different boyfriend, Stefan. He’s a stylist, who then worked for a fashion-forecasting company, and I had just started writing for Vogue. (In fact, one of my first stories for Vogue was a piece about the best-friendship of Linda Evangelista and Christy Turlington—yes, that piece, the one that included the totally relatable quote about not getting out of bed for anything less than 10K.) That was, as they say, “a time.” And is there any song/video more emblematic of that time than “Freedom! ’90”? In retrospect, those steaming-hot supermodels and that exploding jukebox feels like the spark that lit the flame that brought the ’90s roaring to life: a more playful, less-self-conscious decade that everyone I know misses. While the sound of that song is joyful (and, in fact, gets people dancing at every party we’ve ever thrown), the lyrics, like the rest of the album, are rather sad—infused with a low-grade hum of self-loathing, a desire to become something different, someone else. (“All we have to do, now / is take these lies and make them true somehow.”)
That Christmas, 25 years ago, I went home to see my family. My younger sister Kate, a freshman in college at the time, was just beginning to struggle with feelings that she, too, might be gay. We found an out-of-the-way spot in the living room, and I told her that the new George Michael album included some songs about closeted gay longing that had given me some insight into my younger self, when I was in her shoes. My mother suddenly appeared, and said, “Jon, don’t take this stuff so seriously,” by which she probably meant pop music in general, but which I took deeply personally. Shaking with rage, I started hissing at her, so we took it outside, into the snow, where I unleashed years of pent-up anger over feeling misunderstood; or, more precisely, of not being taken seriously. When the shelling stopped, we hugged it out and shoved on, but that weird combination of George Michael and Christmas and feelings of alienation never left me.
An English friend of mine who worked in the music business and knew George Michael once told me that he was excessively vain, and sometimes paralyzed by fears that he was fat, or ugly, or both. It is often how the shame of being gay manifests: Deep feelings of unworthiness—and of not being taken seriously—lead to an obsession with looks, others’ and one’s own. George Michael’s self-presentation was always a bit mystifying: the brightly colored jackets, the too-tight jeans, the mirrored shades. He was a little tacky—like Christmas. George Michael and I were born just a month apart, and like so many gay men of our generation, he really knew how to party. One night, in the fall of 1991, I went to see him perform at Madison Square Garden and many hours later, I was at the Sound Factory, an enormous gay disco, everyone high on ecstasy, and there was George, dancing with his friends until sun-up. Every time he got busted—for having sex in a public bathroom in L.A.; with drugs on him after leaving a London nightclub—I thought: Of course. Most of the gay men I know had a hard time letting go of all that. Growing-older-while-gay is a particular disappointment, and I’d be willing to bet that’s one of the reasons he stopped performing several years ago, and why more recently he became a near recluse.
Those feelings of unworthiness course through so many of George Michael’s songs, the best of which are ballads—old-fashioned standards, really, as if he were covering songs written in the ’40s. “Cowboys and Angels” is the best one, and the saddest. And even though he still hadn’t come out when he wrote this, everyone I knew then felt it was the first true pop love song about a man who loves men:
“Cowboys and angels
They all have the time for you
Why should I imagine that I’d be a find for you
Why should I imagine
That I'd have something to say.”
In Notes on “Camp,” the seminal ’60s book about gay taste, Susan Sontag lovingly lays out 58 numbered theses: “41. The whole point of Camp is to dethrone the serious. Camp is playful, anti-serious. More precisely, Camp involves a new, more complex relation to ‘the serious.’ One can be serious about the frivolous, frivolous about the serious . . .” Somewhere along the way from Wham! to middle age, George Michael dropped the Campy remove and started taking himself seriously. He also finally got his look together. He started performing in an elegant suit, no tie, sitting on a stool, like a gay Frank Sinatra, letting the lyrics and his beautiful voice do all the work.
But back to that Christmas night in 2005, when Andy was cooking beef Bourguignon while the sad beautiful piano chords on Listen Without Prejudice wafted through our loft. I was able to hear that album, 15 years after it came out, with new ears. For the first time, I noticed how churchy it sounds, with heavy organ and gospel overtones and talk of preachers. You can practically hear the flickering red candles casting shadows on the altar. That night, Andy and I declared that this would be our “gay Christmas music,” and, indeed, we have been listening to it during Christmastime ever since. In keeping with tradition, this year, we did exactly that, while hanging a bunch of artwork we recently had framed.
Later that night we went to a friend’s party near where we now live, in Woodstock, NY; they live in groovy little bungalow about a mile from our house. It was a classic Woodstock party: a merry bunch of rock ’n’ roll besotted hippies and troublemakers hanging around a roaring fire. Scott Ian, the guitarist and lyricist from Anthrax, was there with his wife, Pearl Aday, the singer who is also the daughter of Meat Loaf. At one point, I heard the opening strains of the Spandau Ballet song, “True,” which always, for a second, sounds like the opening strains of a George Michael song. I said to Andy, “They’re playing our gay Christmas music.” Scott Ian asked me to explain, and he and his wife and I had a thoughtful conversation about how underrated and special George Michael’s music is. Moments later, someone was staring into their phone and said, “Oh my God. George Michael died.” At first, I thought it was a joke, as if someone were making fun of me (Don’t take this stuff so seriously . . .), and then I looked up and saw Andy across the room, his face buried in his hands, crying. And then someone did make a joke—at George Michael’s expense—and I knew I couldn’t spend another minute there, so I grabbed my coat and ran outside. A friend came out after me, and there I was, once again, on Christmas night, 25 years later, standing in the snow crying and yelling at someone I love, about . . . George Michael.
When we got home, Andy and I couldn’t bring ourselves to listen to his music, so we put on actual Christmas music, a mix that I had saved from a streaming service, and the first song that popped up was The Pretenders’ “2000 Miles,” with Chrissie Hynde’s plaintive voice singing: He’s gone. The next morning, I slept in much later than usual, and when I woke up, there was a voicemail from my mother. “Just checking in to see if you’re snowed in. I hope you guys are okay. We’re all feeling sad about George. I know you are. We’ve been playing his music. I don’t have any of it, but I can play it on the computer. And I can see his face. I love you.”
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