Boy George has never been one to play by the rules. The queer icon born George Alan O’Dowd who blazed trails in the early 1980s as the androgynous, heavily made-up lead singer of Culture Club is still bucking against the system.
In an interview with The Times on Friday (July 11), George, 64, pushed back against the “identity politics” of the modern queer community. “I don’t think it’s helped anyone. We’re not a thing,” he told the publication. “It’s like, ‘This is what black people are, this is what Jewish people are, this is what trans people are.’ No! Everybody is diverse because nobody is like anybody else, so you’re starting from the wrong perspective.”
At a time when increased acceptance and visibility — amidst the current U.S. administration’s efforts to roll back transgender rights — have put the LGBTQ+ community in the spotlight, the “Karma Chameleon” singer said he thinks reality and what we experience online are very different things. “Trans people are the new people to hate, but I always say: How many trans people have you met today?” he said. “There’s the world on the internet, which is hideous and full of anger. Then there’s the real world, which is entirely different so in reality people have nothing to be nervous about.”
In his trademark biting wit, he added, “If I’m really lucky my own sexuality takes up about three hours a month. We’ve all got cats to feed, families to visit, jobs to do. I said in an interview when I was 17, ‘Being gay is like eating a bag of crisps. It’s so not important.’ I still think that now. What do you care about someone’s sexuality unless you’re going to have sex with them?”
While George was hit with accusations of transphobia in 2020 when he tweeted “Leave your pronouns at the door,” he’s recently defended trans rights in a social media dust-up with Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling. The billionaire author has denied being transphobic despite sharing a number of anti-transgender views online, including actively participating in campaigns to bar trans women from sports and from using public restrooms that align with their gender. Last month, he responded to Rowling’s question, “which rights have been taken away from trans people?” and her follow-up comment about her feelings that her speech is being curtailed by writing, “The right to be left alone by a rich bored bully!“
The subject of trans lives came up in a discussion about George’s drive to revive his Tony-nominated 2002 musical Taboo, which chronicled the hedonistic 1980s nightclub of the same name founded by Leigh Bowery, the Melbourne-born performance artist/club promoter whose outrageous performances inspired a young George.
“What I want to explore in the show is the odd relationship between Leigh and his wife, Nicola Bowery,” he said. “Long before non-binary, here’s a gay guy who married a straight woman and there was real tenderness and love between them. Yes, part of the reason he married Nicola was to piss everyone off, but I do think he really loved her.”
According to the writer’s reckoning, for George, outliers like himself and Bowery were birthed from a period when the idea was to present your true self, without trying to “represent a wider community who identify as queer, non-binary” or any other label. ““Oh totally. Someone said the other day, ‘Leigh Bowery was the blueprint for gay identity. He would have hated that. Hated it!,’” said George.
