George Michael by Emily Herbert

Author:Emily Herbert
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lesser Gods
Published: 2017-03-17T06:07:56+00:00

Love and Tragedy

At the beginning of the 1990s, George Michael’s life

changed completely and it was now that the problems that were to overwhelm him in the years to come began to make their presence felt. He was never to have the sex-symbol image again that he had right up until the end of the Faith tour: that might have come as something of a relief to him, but equally it could have been a cause of some regret, because however conflicted he might have felt about public perception via private reality, very few people really object to being termed one of the most attractive people in the world. It has also been speculated upon in some quarters that it was that dichotomy that produced the work that it did. Great artists tend to be conflicted souls; inner peace is not generally the ideal creative breeding ground. All these inner torments would eventually destroy George but there may well also have been the impetus to create the work he did. There was to be more of course, but he was nearing the end of the glory years.

All of which makes it doubly tragic that in 1991 the potential for great happiness opened up before him and was quickly snatched away. Just when George had the opportunity to find the happiness he had been looking for with another man, the plague of the 1980s and 1990s reared its ugly head—AIDS. George had certainly been aware of the AIDS virus—everyone was in the 1980s, especially the gay community, which was suffering mightily from the disease.

George always maintained publicly that he had had straight relationships as well as gay ones and of course contracting HIV would have been a danger to the women involved, too, if the relationships had been fully sexual ones. But if Brooke Shields’ account is anything to go by, this strongly suggests his girlfriends were close friends—maybe not much more. The other women involved have all maintained a discrete silence about the exact nature of what went on between them, but it speaks volumes that after George died in December 2016, Kathy Jeung posted an affectionate tweet about him that sounded very much as if she was talking about a friend: “Like my childhood with my dad and family, I spent some of the best times of my life with George—I can barely encompass in words what George means to me, I treasured our #specialfriendship—to just scratch the surface with no exaggeration, he was the most generous, hilarious, brilliant, talented, #truefriend.”

Who knows? George did have female lovers but he was entering a stage of his life where women were friends, mothers, sisters and so on, but no more. His own version of events was as follows in conversation with the Mirror (June 2007): “Basically, I had three girlfriends [Brooke Shields, Pat Fernandes and Kathy Jeung] and all through that time I cruised as well. It only really used to happen when I was beating myself up about something else. I played around with the idea that I was bisexual—mostly by getting drunk.

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