October 13, 2000
A tea party with the karma chameleon Boy George is happier than he has ever been
by Eric Resnick
The year was 1981. A strange, deadly new disease affecting gay men had appeared. MTV had just made its debut. I was a senior in high school trying to understand my attraction to other men, and a bold, gender-bending new superstar was poised to sweep Americans off their feet. He was another British star around whom was heard the word bisexual, secretly intriguing to many of us at the time.
Nineteen years later, AIDS is no longer considered a gay men's disease, I'm still looking for the man of my dreams, and with the help of MTV, openly gay Boy George and his band Culture Club can still rock a packed house off its feet as they did at Akron's Civic Theatre October 6.
The original Culture Club ensemble reunited for a 22-stop U.S. tour-in about as many days-that included a benefit for the Out in Akron queer cultural festival. For this performance, Out in Akron partnered with Belkin Productions of Cleveland, giving the
concert wide draw.
Fans from as far away as Atlanta, Georgia flocked to Akron to see the pop icon.
At 39, Boy George, born George Alan O'Dowd, gives the impression that he is happier than he has ever been, which also comes through in his music.
A very serious, disciplined performer, Boy George is comfortable and talkative off stage. He is witty, charming, endearing, and, like all cultural subversives, a keen observer of politics and society in the United States and Britain.
It quickly becomes clear why Boy George is among a relative few flashy pop artists of early MTV days whose work has endured this is a man of substance, on and off stage.
Early on, costumes were as much what Boy George was known for as his music. He began costuming at age 14 when he began studying with his mentor David Bowie.
"England is eccentric with its glam-rock gangs," said Boy George, inferring that to make it, one had to be on the edge.
"All my favorite performers have always had more going on than the music," he added. "Besides, I didn't like the way I looked, and I used the makeup to make myself more interesting."
Boy George is now candid about his sexual orientation. "I was out to my family at age 15," he said, "and I was out publicly by 1987." But he concedes that the timing for publicly coming out was calculated. "It was the climate of the time in the early '80s," he began, asserting that "people knew, even though they didn't want to know."
Yet he still says that coming out earlier would have negatively impacted his career.
When asked whether it is easier to be openly gay in the United States or Britain, he replies, "France."
In the early '80s, Boy George's androgynous appearance and gender-ambiguous music served to throw all but the keenest observers off the gay scent.
Boy George acknowledges that some of his earlier music would create different images for gay listeners than non-gay ones. "As I get older, the music is clearer and less cloudy," he said.
"Karma Chameleon," arguably his biggest hit, was written to describe Boy George's relationship with Culture Club drummer Jon Moss, who was a "straight" man.
MOET
"The song appears jolly," said Boy George, "but the under current is melancholy. It was a metaphor to describe how I felt about him coming and going without me."
Shortly after Boy George and Moss broke up and Culture Club was finished, George overdosed on heroin and nearly died. But unlike other celebrities, he does not credit the relief of being public about his sexual orientation with his ability to recover from heroin.
"I was actually out before I stopped using drugs,” he said, noting that he hasn't done drugs in 15 years.
Before his sexual orientation was widely known, Boy George teased the public with it. He fondly recalled a radio interview with Russel Harty in the early '80s. In that interview, George responded to a direct question about his sexual orientation by saying, “Sex? I rather have a nice cup of tea!” At that, the tabloids went crazy. "I knew [Harty] was going to do that to me," he said, “and I even took a teapot to the studio. He was a closet case himself and he wanted to out me, but when you are being playful and subversive, people don't get it at all."
UPWARDLY MOBILE
"Of course it's a ridiculous statement. No one would prefer tea to sex." He went on to explain that in England, teapot is a slang term for poof, meaning gay man. "It comes from the hand-on-hip image illustrated by the
handle."
Boy George has a very political side not often seen in the United States. In 1987, he wrote and recorded a song titled "No Clause 28" which British radio refused to play. That song was
a response to what Boy George calls "Thatcherism" and a growing sexual paranoia over AIDS.
Clause 28 is a British law enacted in the 1980s that forbids public institutions from "promoting" homosexuality. It has survived to this year.
"It wasn't a very good song," admits Boy George, "but it did serve to raise people's awareness of the harm done by this kind of law." Boy George was interviewed from Chicago for this piece, and he made it a point to talk about a radio show he had done earlier that day. "It was a Howard Sternlike show where the host spent half an hour using the word fag as comedy," said Boy George. "It was appalling."
"In England, no one would get away with that sort of thing on the radio."
"Being a famous gay man, I encounter everything," added Boy George. "My reputation goes before me."
But one of the areas where he says perception is not reality is in speculation about his sexual conquests. "People think I must be out shagging every night, and it isn't so."
Having just broken up from an 11-year relationship, Boy George said, "I'm really quite romantic. It is ironic that people expect to hear that I am like George Michael and going for the bathroom sex, but I'm not."
Boy George accepts that he has had an impact on pop culture, but somewhat reluctantly. "There have been people like Ru Paul, Oscar Wilde, Quentin Crisp, and Dorothy Parker, who through their camp, influenced the way people thought and I never thought of myself as one of them, but other people do, and people are always telling me how I influenced their lives."
Boy George wants gay youth to know that one of the worst places they can be is school. "School is rough for our kids," he said. "And it is all rooted in someone's sexual paranoia. They are probably queer themselves."
"I prefer to think that we are made up of equal parts Lucille Ball and Rambo," he added.
Culture Club broke up in 1986. Since then, Jon Moss, Mikey Craig, and Roy Hay have gone on to other things, but Boy George remains creative. He is performing as a solo artist and author. His first solo album Everything I Own went to the top of the charts and his autobiography Take It Like a Man was a best seller. He is a very popular European disc jockey and has developed his own recording label called "More Protein."
Because of his talent and his ability to connect with his audience, Boy George is a lasting phenomenon, like it or not. He performed by special invitation of the crown at the 1997 ceremony transferring Hong Kong from Britain to China.
After having been banned from the United States for years due to drug arrests in Britain, Boy George is now celebrated widely as
a superstar and artist by a diverse American audience.
Prior to his October 1 performance at Pittsburgh's Metropol, the city's mayor surprised him by proclaiming "Boy George Day" in Pittsburgh.
I made a standing offer to take Boy George to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, where I'm sure he will be inducted some day, whenever he's in town again.
And George, when we go, let's have tea.
GAY PEOPLE'S CHRONICLE
13