What Makes a Gay Icon?
In life, we hide the parts of ourselves we dont want the world to see, Lil Nas X proclaims in the video for his chart-topping single Montero (Call Me By Your Name). For the openly gay rapper/singer, Montero  inspired by his birth name  is a place where one is free to be who they are. The unabashedly queer video caused a minor media frenzy when it was released earlier this year, but the controversy revolved less around Lil Nas Xs sexual orientation  hed already come out at the end of LGBTQ Pride month in 2019  than the profane religious imagery of the clip itself, which depicts the 22-year-old riding a stripper pole to hell, performing a lap dance for the devil, and sprouting demons wings. Rock musicians like David Bowie and Elton John flirted with androgyny, and both spoke publicly about their bisexuality as early as the 1970s. But the idea of an out-and-proud male pop star being embraced by the mainstream, and before his debut album has even dropped (Montero is due this summer), would have been unthinkable just 20 years ago. Ricky Martin  who announced he was a proud homosexual in 2010 after years of speculation, including an infamous interview with Barbara Walters that Martin recently said still haunts him  rode a wave of success driven largely by a loyal female fanbase eager to watch him shake is bon-bon.  Martin had reason for concern. A year prior to the release of the Puerto Rican singers English-language debut, which launched his career into the stratosphere, British pop star George Michael had been publicly outted when he was arrested for soliciting an undercover cop in a public restroom in Beverly Hills. While his music continued to perform well in the U.K., he never scored another hit in the U.S. again. For American audiences, the first glimpse we got of Michael was in the video for Wham!s 1984 hit Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go, in which he pranced around in blue and white hotpants, a magenta top, and fluorescent yellow gloves, vamping in close-ups for the camera. The 80s were nothing if not a playground for the flamboyant, so a male entertainer  especially one from across the pond  wearing eyeliner and earrings divulged very little about who he was fucking. Just a few years later, that iconic image was eclipsed by one of a stubbled Michael in the video for the title track from his first solo album, Faith, donning a black leather jacket, steel-toed cowboy boots, gold aviators, and blue jeans that were practically painted on, and shaking his ass to the delight of millions. Michaels appropriation of these totems of hyper-masculinity may have assuaged doubts about his sexuality among straight audiences, but, in hindsight, it scans as an obvious, if subconscious, attempt at misdirection. The singer was in a relationship with model and make-up artist Kathy Jeung at the time, but, privately, he identified as bisexual. As recently as 2004, Michael seemed to subscribe to antiquated notions about environmental factors  including an absent father and doting mother  being the primary cause of his queerness. Which makes one of Faiths biggest hits, Father Figure, a curiosity worthy of analysis in its own right. Putting aside the songs association of love with a crime being juxtaposed with a lyric like Greet me with the eyes of a child, Father Figure sees Michael casting himself in the role of a proxy parent, an intriguing but perhaps predictable development given the prevalence of daddy culture in the gay community. In his 2018 song Seventeen, Troye Sivan recounts a sexual encounter with an older man he met on Grindr. The Australian singer-songwriter is part of a new generation of LGBTQ performers who have come of age in an era where increased connectivity and visibility has arguably saved them countless lost years. Seventeen is clearly about sex, but its also about the kind of self-discovery that gay men of Michaels generation were frequently deprived of in their formative years. It wouldnt be until the release of 1990s under-appreciated Listen Without Prejudice Vol. 1 that Michaels ambivalence about his identity became more evident in his work. The swapping of pronouns in Cowboys and Angels results in an ambiguity that served to both obfuscate and authenticate his sexual fluidity. Freedom 90, in particular, conflated Michaels personal and professional struggles, not simply because they were happening simultaneously, but because they were inextricably bound. When he declares, Theres someone else Ive got to be, its both a bald-faced rejection of the pinup image hed cultivated and a desperate plea for self-actualization. Ultimately, Michaels vow of loyalty in Freedom  I wont let you down/So please dont give me up/Cause I would really, really love to stick around  wasnt fully reciprocated by the American public or his record label, with whom he famously tried to break ties. The dispute put Michaels career in a legal purgatory that led to several years of only sporadic musical output, including the AIDS awareness compilation Red Hot + Dance. One of the songs he contributed to the project, Do You Really Want to Know is a deceptively buoyant pop-house anthem about safe sex that boasts more of Michaels wooly wordplay: If you knew every woman and I knew every man, we never would have made it past holding hands, he sings, before later reversing man and woman.  Sivan, whos 26, has said he couldnt relate to Michael growing up, and the unapologetic, joyous portraits of queer desire that he and Lil Nas X convey in their music feel far removed from the scarce, thinly veiled songs about the gay experience that existed around the time they were born. Michaels long-awaited third album, 1996s Older  the release of which coincided with my own sexual awakening at the height of the AIDS epidemic  reinforced the myopic vision of gay life as one of danger, sadness, and misery that my generation was taught in school and by the media. Michaels lover, a Brazilian fashion designer named Anselmo Feleppa, had succumbed to the disease in 1993, and the singers grief seeps into nearly every grim note of dirges like Jesus to a Child and You Have Been Loved, which contrasts Anselmos mothers loss with Michaels own mortality: Well, Ive no daughters, Ive no sons/Guess Im the only one living in my life.  Many of the gay men who survived the plague have invariably suffered a form of PTSD, triggered by the nagging suspicion that they unjustly escaped death while their lovers and friends perished. Two highlights from Older, Fastlove and Spinning the Wheel, depict starkly different responses to that collective trauma. An ode to one-night stands nostalgically dressed up in the sultry disco stylings of a period when such behavior couldnt yet kill you, the former song pushes back against the oppressiveness of heteronormativity  My friends got their ladies, they all have babies/But I just wanna have some fun  but ultimately exposes Michaels pursuit of pleasure as an attempt to mask his pain: In the absence of security, I made my way into the night/Stupid Cupid keeps on callin me, but I see nothin in his eyes.  In Spinning the Wheel, wherein every act of sex is a game of Russian roulette, Michael puts himself in the position of the lover left at home, waiting and wondering: You say, Give me time, and Ill do better, I swear/Give me time and Ill lead you back to despair/And I dont wanna go back there. On the next track, It Doesnt Really Matter, Michael  born Georgios Kyriacos Panayiotou  circles back to his rejection of so-called traditional family values, acknowledging the irony of his desire for stability when he confesses, I changed my name to be rid of the things that I want from you.  Openly gay singer Adam Lambert has called coming out an act of defiance, and while Michael was given little choice in the timing and manner of his own, he was far from contrite in the music video for Outside, released just a few months later to promote his first greatest hits album. The tongue-in-cheek clip, which features Michael dolled up in a police uniform, attempts to destigmatize cottaging  cruising for anonymous sex in a restroom  and public sex more broadly. His 2004 song Freeek! similarly embraces fringe elements of the queer community with a virtual-reality tour through cybersex fantasy and webcam exhibitionism. After coming out, Michael instantly became a gay icon, but he was a reluctant one, tormented by the death of his first love and struggling to reconcile the fact that the massive success hed achieved was sustained by pretending to be someone else. George Michael was a fictional avatar hed created, one to which hed become imprisoned. Theres no question when I look back it really would have hurt me [if I had come out sooner]. I didnt realized how much I was protecting my career, he told Huffington Post in 2011. Ironically, it was just three years later that fellow Brit Sam Smith came out as queer in order to avoid the appearance of trying to protect their own career. Michaels final studio album, 2004s Patience, included a ballad, My Mother Had a Brother, about his allegedly closeted uncle, who took his own life on the day the singer was born. Michael seemed determined, at the time, to carve out a different fate for himself: I swear now that freedom is here/Im gonna taste it all for you, he sings. But his struggle with depression led to an appetite for drugs and a string of arrests in the 2000s. During an interview on Good Morning America in 2008, Michael said he felt cursed, and its tempting to characterize the artists life and death, at the age of 53, as a tragedy. (Michael died on Christmas Day in 2016, reportedly of heart failure.) In his final years, though, he managed to find a sliver of hope: Im alive, and Ive got so much more that I want to do, he sings on his 2012 single White Light, a vow to make up for lost time. Ultimately, Georgios Kyriacos Panayiotou may not have ever found the gay Shangri-la that Lil Nas X describes in his video, but Montero might not have ever existed without him.