George Michael

Something I don’t think anyone was prepared for was the concept that you can be tired of fame on the level people are famous nowadays. Oh, there was a certain aspect of that to the royalty of the past, which is its own kind of trapped. Look at Audrey Hepburn’s character in Roman Holiday or Mark Twain’s The Prince and the Pauper. But the idea that someone can go from being just a working class kid from Middlesex to one of the biggest names in the world—even when you’ve changed your name—is something that’s really new to the last century or so. And it’s no surprise you’d then be trapped in an image that didn’t feel like you.

And so Georgios Kyriacos Panayiotou, Yog to his friends, became George Michael. Initially part of Wham!, a cheery pop duo, later a solo artist, Michael was one of the most familiar faces in popular music. A friend of my older sister’s had an intense crush on him in seventh grade. I think my sister owned Make It Big. I also vividly remember the “Freedom! ‘90” video (directed by David Fincher!), wherein he broke away from his previous image. I remember “I Want Your Sex,” but I don’t remember the detail that Casey Kasem wouldn’t say the name of the song even as it climbed the charts.

And, yes, I remember his arrest. If Michael is to be believed, the officer approached and solicited him. Honestly I wouldn’t be surprised; if the guy recognized him, and likely he did, his first thought might well have been, “Holy crap, I can arrest George Michael!” Michael was still closeted at the time. This appears to have been largely about his mother as much as anything else; he didn’t want to come out to her regardless of what he was doing in his private life.

As far as I’m concerned, he had a right to that. I would like him to have been able to live his life the way he wanted without worrying about the reaction anyone else had. Yes, young queer people have a need to have role models. But people have a right to a private life. We have seen just this week how hard it can be even in 2025 to be gay regardless of whether you’re a public or private figure. Being gay in the ‘80s and ‘90s was even harder than that.

He seems like a nice guy, the kind I like writing about. He cared about his family. He gave millions to charity, mostly anonymously. He didn’t understand why “Careless Whisper,” a song he wrote when he was seventeen, was as popular as it was. He was an enormous Beatles fan who got a letter from Paul McCartney while in jail on drug charges and treasured it. He’s one of this year’s “I Can’t Believe I Haven’t Gotten To Them Yet” people, and he deserves so much more than being remembered for Whamageddon.