George Michael Part 2 with Marcus McCann

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 An extended cut of this episode is available for Patreon and Apple Plus subscribers.

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Transcript

Sarah: I mentioned being one of the helicopter pilots just hovering above George Michael. Are they hoping that they're going to get another Bronco chase out of this? 

Marcus: Is this why I went to helicopter school?

Sarah: Welcome to You're Wrong About. I'm Sarah Marshall and today we are talking about George Michael, part two of our two-part extravaganza with our friend Marcus McCann. Marcus is the author of Park Cruising: What Happens When We Wander Off the Path. I had such a lovely time making these episodes with him, and I'm so excited to get to share them with you.

We talked for a really long time when we made both of these episodes. Some of you might know we released an extended cut of Part 1 over on Apple+ and Patreon, and we're doing the same thing with Part 2 because we just had so much to talk about. So if you're curious, if you want to hear more of the context for the discussion or the little cul de sacs that I love to get into on this show, you can hear that on Patreon or Apple+.

And we also have part three of our four-part series on Britney Spears memoir, The Woman in Me over there. I recorded this four-part series with Eve Lindley. It has been again, such a joy. I love to be in a multi part pop star saga, and right now we are doing two of them. So it's a thrill. In part three, we were talking about the era of Brittany's marriage to Kevin Federline, and we have a lot to say about it and that time in her life, but I will just tell you that I think Eve puts it best when she says, “She's everything, and he's just Kevin”. 

That's it for me. Thank you so much for joining us. Happy tourist season. Happy barely over Aries season. Happy practically here summertime. I can't believe it. Listen to some pop music. Listen to this episode. Thank you again.

Welcome to You're Wrong About, I'm Sarah Marshall and today we're doing part two of the story of George Michael with our guest, Marcus McCann. If you haven't listened to part one, actually Marcus, what do you think? Should a person just jump in the middle like this? 

Marcus: I think it's probably best to start at the beginning, yeah.

Sarah: Listen, and I don't, if you don't like being told what to do, I don't know what to do. 

Marcus: We've got some pretty good cameos in the first half. We've got Freddie Mercury's got a cameo. We got lots of folks, right? Elton John was in there. 

Sarah: Liza Minnelli showed up.

Marcus: She sure did. She sure did. If that's not a reason to rewind and go back to the last episode, I don't know what is.

Sarah: Yeah, Liza Minnelli showed up in multiple ways. Where are we coming into the story in the second half? 

Marcus: We left George Michael at a gravesite in Brazil in 1993. I feel like before we really get into the second half, we should talk about cruising. It's going to be an important part of his story and it's going to be something that's going to follow him around a lot in the second half. Sarah, what do you know about cruising? 

Sarah: Oh boy. I know what I learned from the movie Cruising, which I feel like was inaccurate. Which is a movie that was famously homophobic even in its time being 1980, which is about Al Pacino learning that there's a leather bar murderer. And so he asked to go undercover cruising as a gay man having public sex.

My understanding is that it's just soliciting people for public, or maybe not even public, sex in the gay community. I honestly just think of it as I'm going out tonight and I'm going to have some sex. 

Marcus: Yeah, I think that's a good way of thinking about it. I would say at its most basic, it's just a way of making yourself open to meeting people.

Sarah: Wow. That really answers the question of our modern times, which is, how do adults meet each other? 

Marcus: So it's like really just a set of nonverbal cues, for example, like looking away and then looking back at someone or posture or like a kind of like strategic tug on your clothing as a way of indicating interest. So predominantly men will go to places that have a reputation for cruising, and they'll just hang out there. And it can be a park or a street corner or a bathroom.

Sarah: Do you know that when straight men approach women for sexual reasons they have no signs of interest or indications that they look for. Because unless you're running away or hitting them, they're like, this is going great. 

Marcus: That's the thing that sets cruising apart from other kinds of, is this circuit of mutual interest. Or you noticing them, them noticing you, you noticing them noticing you. That situation. 

There's an idea that cruising is something that only queer people do, and it's not true. Anyone can cruise, especially in cafe culture or in bar culture. 

Sarah: Yeah. Going out in public and expressing interest in men, my fear is like, if I look interested in you one time, you're never going to leave me alone. If we go home together, you might be unable to have sex with me and then kill me like in Looking for Mr. Goodbar. And if things go well, I might accidentally have a relationship with you and then get married, and I'm afraid of that also. My life is really ruled by fear, is what we're learning here. Sorry to drag this into George Michael.

Marcus: This is so basic. This is such a low bar to say one of the benefits of cruising is that it teaches participants to think about and value the signs of another person's sexual interest as a precondition to a sexual encounter. Right? That's a low bar. But here we are. 

Sarah: It is. But it's a low bar, but here we are. It's a folk song if anyone wants to write it. And that also leads us back to Cruising, the Al Pacino movie. Where the argument I think the movie makes implicitly is that, and this is my read of it, Al Pacino gets deeper and deeper into the undercover life. Oh, my God, he's gay. Oh, my God, he's also a murderer. And there's just this thing like in Basic Instinct where it's gay and murderer, they go together. You can't do one without the other. And you're like, what? 

I feel like there is some kind of idea deep down of like sex is really between a man and an object and if you have to like autonomous willing participants, then that's the thing we're scared of. And that's the thing we're equating with violence in that narrative.

Marcus: Cruising comes out in 1980. While it's being filmed, gay people are protesting, they're disrupting the shoot. They like, for example, will find out that they're shooting in a particular apartment building. And they're like, go to the next apartment over and play loud music so that they can't shoot that day. 

Sarah: That's so great. 

Marcus: Oh, 100%. We assume that cruising is just this two macho guys pushing each other up against a wall kind of thing, like it's portrayed in the movie Cruising. When the reality is the opposite. 

So for example, Samuel Delaney in his book, Times Square Red, Times Square Blue, which is about the history of cruising in porn theaters in New York, especially in the seventies. He would describe it as he would be sitting in a row in the cinema, and someone would come and sit at the end of the row. And they'd look over and if they were making eyes at each other, then the guy would move over so he's two seats away, and then one seat away, and then they were sitting next to each other. And a hand would graze the other person's knee. It feels almost Victorian in how shy sounding that ritual would, be as opposed to that this like kind of you know, “I'm doing this because I'm going to get my rocks off” kind of thing.

Sarah: In the sense of gradually easing a car forward, being idling in a position where either party can put the brakes on. 

Marcus: Yeah where either party can put the brakes on, right? So I think that's an important part of the kind of stop, stop and start rhythm of cruising is that. And it's also, I think, set up to avoid.

confrontation, accidental confrontation with non-participants. If you're giving people lots of outs, the places where it takes place tends to be in the kind of fringes, on the periphery of social situations, in a kind of disused corner of a park, or late at night, or behind the bushes.

Sarah: Is this something that has been a cause of alarmist straight rhetoric for a really long time? Was there a moment when this emerged as something people enjoyed freaking out about? What's the history there? 

Marcus: Cruising is a very old practice. For example, we have evidence of it in 15th century Florence and in 18th century London. And Walt Whitman was cruising in 19th century New York. So it's something that has quite a long history, and most of our records of it come from police interactions or other moments where there's a kind of social freak out. These are encounters that are fleeting and brief and leave no trace otherwise.

As for George, he would later say that he first started cruising in London while he was still a teenager. For example, he liked to sunbathe later in his life at Will Rogers Park, which is in West Hollywood. And if he got cruised there in the park, he would go with the guy either to the bathroom, or take the guy to his car, or go home with him, basically. He would also later say that he'd been picking up guys in gay bars since before the Wham!  days, and continued to do so while he's living in LA. And I would also say I'm not here to proselytize about park cruising. Some people do it. Other people, it would be too uncomfortable. They don't want to. That's okay, right? I think that it's part of the big tapestry of benign sexual human variation that we were talking about at the beginning of the last episode. 

Sarah: And I'm sure that certainly in the 90s, by which point we had perfected this, people were making the ‘think of the children’ argument here.

Marcus: Yeah. The police across the United States and in Canada and Western Europe too, take a periodic interest in park cruising. And the crackdowns are very often framed as we're concerned about the unsuspecting innocent. Usually framed as a child, but not always. 

Sarah: It's a good band name. 

Marcus: In St. John's Newfoundland, there was this cruising sting that happened where they put video cameras in the men's bathroom, which is, that's just gross to start with. And the video cameras captured lots of men engaged in sexual activities in this bathroom in the Village Mall in St. John's, Newfoundland. But what they found was anytime the door creaked open, everyone would pull apart. 

And so the Canadian criminal law around this requires an offended non-participant. And when it goes up on appeal, the court says there's no offended non-participant, because they're pulling apart every time. And I would also say from a mens rea point of view, that they're demonstrating an intent not to be seen, by pulling apart when the door opens. 

Sarah: This is great. I feel like we're having a Legally Blonde class. 

Marcus: I wish that we were. That would be amazing. 

Sarah: Also, anyone who can manage public sex in that harsh of a climate, definitely deserves it. 

Marcus: Yeah. George himself is going to say later, “I definitely think that the kind of sex that I'm having is worth getting in the newspapers for.”

Sarah: Oh, George. God. But yeah, okay. So coming back to where George is. 

Marcus: After the death of Anselmo, he returns to London. He's very bitter about the weak sales of his album, Listen Without Prejudice. He blames the record company, and he says that's why he wants out of his record contract. It's the contract that he first signed when he was 18. It's been renegotiated a couple of times. He signed this contract initially for £500 in 1982. And he's now a global superstar who's committed to 10 albums under the Sony imprint. And is it fair to blame Sony for the weak sales of Listen Without Prejudice? I don't know that. Objectively, they were weak sales there. It's not the same level as Faith. 

But as we were talking about in the last episode it's probably would have been impossible to match what happened with faith. Faith was just such a cultural moment. And then also, okay, George, like you got a part to play in this. Which is he's refusing to do interviews and he won't put his face on the record and he won't appear in the music videos.

Sarah: My analysis is that this is somewhat charmingly petty and stupid behavior by someone who's 30 years, but who has had as many career phases as if they were 55. And I wonder if there's just also an element of exhaustion here. 

Marcus: Totally. I think that's right. I also, like the idea that we should support the artist in their disputes against the record label is something that now from 2024, we can see, for example, with Taylor Swift re-recording her albums or Beyonce releasing the title platform or whatever, right?

Now we say that's just good business sense. But if a musician isn't in control of their career progression, then I think we would recognize now that is potentially a problem. There was not that sense in 1993, and George is going to alienate a lot of fans by doing this. 

Sarah: Huh. Yeah, because it's so interesting to get back to that. But yeah, I feel like there was, in a general way, more mainstream trust of establishments in the 90s. 

Marcus: Yeah. Like when baseball players go on strike, the common refrain is that it's millionaires fighting billionaires. And so none of us have any skin in the game. We remove from the equation the kind of alienation of labor or the fact that the workers should be in control of the end product. And because some, and it's a minority, some musicians and some athletes make good money. It means that we can abdicate responsibility, or we don't have to care. We can tell them shut up and get back in the studio. 

Sarah: These power dynamics, I think, that exist throughout human behavior. They're all kind of fractals of each other. So if an artist is being mistreated by their record label, it's not the greatest injustice in the world. But the same dynamic continues down the line because it's showing how capitalism, as we know it today, is about what you can get away with. That really happened with Jive and with the record label that most boy bands had in the late 90s, which was absolutely bleeding them dry. 

Marcus: Right. The deals got worse and worse from the 70s to the 2000s, where even now more of the kind of expenses that come with producing a record are expected to be borne by the musician rather than the record label.

Sarah: Right, which is absolutely ridiculous. Because it's like, who has more resources, Capitol Records or this 20 year old from Eau Claire? 

Marcus: That's just it, right? And so that's what's being tested in this trial. In 1993, when the case begins, George shows up, he's going to testify at this hearing. And I got to tell you, he is such a smoke show. He's dressed in a black suit, black shirt, he's got the high shoulder pads, black sunglasses, his hair perfectly coiffed. He looks like he stepped out of an Armani ad in 1990. 

Sarah: So he's just, he's serving trial. 

Marcus: Yes, serving trial, realness. One other piece of background information that I think is relevant here, is that in the disclosure, as they're preparing for trial, it's revealed that the Sony executives in the United States have been referring to George Michael, when they're talking to George Michael's agent, they've been referring to George , that F bomb client of yours. So George knows that at the time of the trial, he can't say that's why he doesn't have trust in Sony or the Sony executives, because it would involve drawing unwanted attention to something. But you got to think that's their operating as well as everything else.

Sarah: Oh, God. Yeah. It reminds me of the way Judy Garland was treated by whatever studio she worked for as a teenager. Where it's like, they wanted her to be so different, she needed to lose weight, she needed to take all this speed, obviously. And not that she was alone in this, but just that they were so invested in whittling her away into something different from what she was that I remember watching this as a fairly naive teenager and being , “God, if they don't like her, then they shouldn't hire her.”

Of course, what I was missing is that no, they want to make money and they want to whittle her into the best version to make money with, according to them. But just, it's depressing kind of comparing your dreams of stardom as a child with the reality that you may find yourself working for a label that openly disrespects you, or even hates you, but is using you as an asset because you're like a forest they're logging. 

Marcus: Yeah, exactly. Will not let go of you, but also does not want to respect you. 

Sarah: And also is ten albums. There are artists who have an entire quite long career and never record ten albums.

Marcus: Right. And this man has been massively successful with Wham!, two albums. And as George Michael, the solo artist, two albums. He's still got a long way to go. 

Also, the trial takes six months, goes on and on. George is going to, in the end, spend three to four million pounds on this litigation. And at the end of it, he loses. There's an appeal, but eventually the parties agree not to pursue the appeal, and in exchange, Sony's going to sell the contract to this new label, DreamWorks, for $40 million. The idea being that even if the contract is valid, the relationship is too damaged to continue. 

And in 1995, he releases his first studio album in five years. It's an album called, Older. And I will say that five years is a long time in the music industry. That's several cycles of cool, even in the 90s. 

Sarah: When you think about the early 90s versus the late 90s, yeah, we were starting to move very quickly. We had gone from Paul Reiser to Christina Aguilera. That's a weird comparison. I'm sticking with it, though. I'm sticking. 

Marcus: Maybe this is it. There's a recognition that you need to really cash in while somebody is at the height of their fame. And so it leads to this kind of manic version of their fame that burns really bright and really quickly. 

Sarah: And I'm sure too, because of the sense of abundance and the record companies, that because you have so much money maybe it seems easier to just get a new star than to continue putting money into someone who did something two years ago. 

Marcus: I think that's absolutely true, and that's what's happening here. And it makes the decision to punish George Michael in this way a little bit difficult to process from the perspective of that model.

But I also think it's, I, Sony want to show every artist that if you mess with this behemoth, we are going to destroy you. 

Sarah: Wow. Okay. Yeah. So he's like the head on a spike. 

Marcus: Sony must have realized at some level and a kind of cost benefit analysis, that even if Sony's able to keep him as an artist, that if George wants out, he's not going to produce the kind of product for you that you need in order to be able to sell it and make a ton of money.

Sarah: I was going to do one of those Neil Young albums. 

Marcus: Yeah. Like the sort of classic to get out of a contract, people will very rapidly do a compilation album and a Christmas album. 

Sarah: I wonder how many Christmas albums that's the reason for. 

Marcus: I think, honestly a lot of these deals are five album deals. And if you count, that fifth album is often just garbage. And I won't say that about Older. 

So Older, he pours his heart into it. It is not going to be received very well. The first single that they release off of it is, Jesus to a Child, which is another very slow, dirge-y ballad. It's about Anselmo. He also releases a song called Fast Love, which is about the pleasures of fleeting sexual connection. Fast love meaning casual sex. And both of these songs are going to be number one hits in the UK and barely break the top 10 in the US. 

In the end, Older's only going to sell about 700, 000 copies in the US in the first six months. And it's considered a massive disappointment. Now, for a lot of artists, if you sold 700,000 records, that would be a huge smash for you. You'd be so happy. But for someone who is selling 15 million records before this, and also for whom there had been so much invested, if I could put it that way. It is, it's just considered a failure, essentially. And it's the only record he does for DreamWorks. As a result of it, he gets released from the contract.

Sarah: Oh, nice. How does he feel about all that? 

Marcus: It gives him a sense of independence with the records that he's going to release following that. And what he'll do is one album deals from then on. And in fact, he's going to end up back where he was, with Sony making records on these one album deals. 

Sarah: But it's like he's more of a contractor at that point.

Marcus: Totally. He can negotiate the terms for each album as he's preparing it, as he's done his little vision board for what this album is going to be. 

I should also say during this period, his reputation as a philanthropist is continuing. So he's giving, for example, to Project Angel Food, which is delivering meals to HIV positive people. In June 1996, he meets Kenny Goss. Kenny Goss is going to become his long-term partner in his life. They're going to have a very grown up and adult relationship. They meet at Beverly Hot Springs, which is a day spa in Koreatown in L.A. I don't know if it's sex on premises. His biographer, James Gavin, describes it as ostensibly straight, but with a substantial gay clientele. And also that it was known for attracting celebrities and people who wanted to get with celebrities. 

Sarah: You just never know where you're going to meet a celebrity. 

Marcus: 100%, right? Kenny is a Texas small business owner. Like Anselmo, he's a little bit older than George. There's a five-year age difference. And by the following summer, they move in together. 

There are actually not a ton of photos of the two of them together, but they actually appear in public regularly through the 90s and early 2000s as a couple, as demonstrably as a gay couple. I know that for a lot of gay activists in the 80s, AIDS activists during that time, they really would have preferred to see George Michael come out in the early 1980s and be an out and proud gay man at that time. It didn't feel to George like it was available to him. And so when he gets the second act and he can be a little bit more outspoken, he grabs it and runs with it. 

Anyway, the two of them exchange rings, but they're never going to get married. Of course, in 1997, they couldn't get married. But by all accounts, it's a healthy, supportive, loving relationship.

According to George, the relationship is never monogamous, but it is honest. Kenny and George have sex together, and also apart with other men. This is fairly common among gay couples. For example, there's one study in San Francisco where half the participants in a long-term relationship same sex relationship were non monogamous.

I was just going to give a little George quote here. He said, “Anyone who didn't like it could stick it up their [expletive]. It's time that we accepted gay men for what they are as opposed to the tea and biscuit version.” 

Sarah: Aww. Yeah, I also feel like monogamy as a social value is very deeply rooted in the patriarchy.

And there's this great, completely bonkers Samuel Johnson quote about how, “If you steal a man's pig, that sucks. But if a woman is unfaithful, then she'll corrupt a man's entire hereditary line and steal everything from him.” And the idea of monogamy is a virtue is very inevitably rooted in the idea of marriage as a transfer of capital and a way to merge and protect assets.

The lack of historic neutrality about that is interesting. Because it seems like the more reasonable way to look at it is that monogamy works for some people, and non-monogamy works for some people, and it's just like anything else.

Marcus: Right. Or it could work for a person for one period of their life, and might not work for them at a different period in their life.

Sarah: Right. Yeah. 

Marcus: In a way, that's the George Michael story. In 1984, he's singing, “I don't want your freedom, part time love will just bring me down.” And then in the video for I Want Your Sex, he's writing, “explore monogamy”. And by the time we get to the Older album, he's singing more openly about the pleasures of these kinds of fleeting encounters.

Sarah: Yeah, and it feels like forbidden knowledge, but very true and very reassuringly true that people are different from each other, to quote Eve Sedgewick. And also that people are different from themselves. Like we will want different things at different times in our lives, in our relationships and sexually, as well as every other way. And that's great. I think it's very exciting. 

Marcus: That year, the same year that Kenny moves in with him, George's mother dies after a short battle with cancer. George will remember the deaths of Anselmo and Leslie as really defining this period, and will later report that he was depressed, sad, grieving, not producing new work. He's also smoking a lot of weed, like you do. 

Sarah: Especially in times of grief. 

Marcus: This is also the same year that Princess Diana dies, 1997. George and Diana were friends, but they weren't super close. George actually will later say that Diana had reached out to him and tried to be more of an active friend, and George hadn't fully reciprocated, and that he regretted it. He will say, “I didn't realize how isolated and lonely she was.”

Sarah: And they were about the same age, right? 

Marcus: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. 

Sarah: And how far back did they know each other? 

Marcus: Oh, from the Wham! Days. And Diana is doing early AIDS activism in the 80s.

Sarah: They actually looked pretty similar to each other. 

Marcus: the same feathered blonde haircut.

Is that we mean? Yes, absolutely. 

Sarah: Beautiful jaw. Yeah 

Marcus: Apparently she quite fancied him from seeing him on TV in 1990. Maybe that's the beginning of their relationship. Okay, so that's 1997. And then the next time that George is in the news is when he's caught in the public park in Los Angeles.

On April 7th, 1998, George and Kenny are having lunch together at a restaurant in Los Angeles. George has a couple of glasses of wine, which is not unusual for him. It seems like it's a nice, quiet lunch. There's not a big fight, there's no altercation. But afterwards, the pair go their separate ways for the afternoon.

At about 4 p.m., George arrives at Will Rogers Park. He's wearing casual clothes, baseball cap, t-shirt, sweatpants. And he's hanging out there when he catches the eye of what he will later describe as, “a six foot two hunk”. 

The accounts vary a bit, but they agree on the key points. They made eyes at each other in the park, and then they go into this public bathroom together. It's the park bathroom. It sounds like George goes over to the urinal, and the other guy goes into a stall, and he leaves the stall door open as a kind of invitation. George says that when he looked over, the guy is jerking off in the stall, and he goes over and he joins him. He enters the stall together.

Sarah: So it's a nice size stall. 

Marcus: Yeah, that's right. In the other guy's account, George is in the stall, and he pulls down his own sweatpants and begins to jerk himself off in the stall, and the guy leaves. There is later some sensationalistic reporting that there were other people or even children in the bathroom. There's nothing to support that at all. It's just these two guys. 

And so I think it's worth thinking about, how public or private is that situation if you're in an empty bathroom and in an empty stall? When you're in a bathroom stall, you do things that you would not do on the lawn of Will Rogers Park, right? And why? Because you think of them as more private or more intimate or more personal. So they're using the stall as a way to have a bit of privacy, to do whatever it is that they do. When George leaves the bathroom, he's arrested. And it turns out that the man was a plainclothes police officer.

Sarah: Which, at what point does that become entrapment? The title of my favorite Catherine Zeta Jones movie. Great movie. 

Marcus: Yeah, the legal standard for entrapment is very high. It has to be such that if it weren't for the police officer, the person would not have been in a position to do the thing that they did. Wouldn't have been able to. And so I think the argument would be in the entrapment side of things that he was there cruising, so whether he ended up cruising with officer Marcelo Rodriguez, or whether he ended up cruising with somebody else, it was something that the opportunity was there for him to have engaged in it.

Sarah: It must be really awkward when they're casting the officers who run these sting operations. 

Marcus: Like they do some kind of beauty pageant? 

Sarah: Yeah. And then you're like, what if they don't pick you? It'd be really sad. 

Marcus: The LA police will later say that this isn't the first cruising arrest that day. This is a sting operation. They're catching more than one guy. Why? What, like Officer Rodriguez is spending his day flirting with men. 

Sarah: It's a big city. Surely they have better things to do than make arrests in the victimless crime department. 

Marcus: That said, the LAPD is not exactly covering themselves in glory in the 1990s.

Sarah: It's been a tough decade. A lot of dirt has been revealed. They got to cure themselves up by arresting a bunch of gays. 

Marcus: Totally, right? They will later say, and I think this is true, that they weren't targeting George Michael. That they were just there doing this undercover sting. 

Sarah: I'm sure they weren't targeting George Michael. That's actually not my primary concern about their behavior. 

Marcus: That's right because They're like, 

Sarah: don't worry everyone! We are not biased against celebrities. It's yeah, nobody thought that. 

Marcus: No, that's right. You're biased against queer people. It's the queer people vote. After the arrest, by all accounts, George is polite and cooperative.

He's allowed to make a phone call. He phones Kenny. And Kenny gets some cash together and he goes to the, it's like only about $500 for him to be released. By five minutes after 8pm that afternoon, George is released and goes home. Not a fun day, but okay, fine. 

They will later report that Kenny's reaction initially was, I was concerned that he was getting busted for drugs, and the fact that it was park cruising, I was relieved. By the end of that night, that first night, the tabloids had been tipped off by police officers. And on the next day, on April 8th, 1998, the LAPD puts out a press release identifying George Michael and saying that he was engaged in a lewd act in a public park.

Sarah: Oh boy. Oh god. Which makes you immediately think that he was exposing himself to minors. When you hear the phrase, “lewd act”. 

Marcus: Yeah, right? And that's the legal category that he's arrested under, but it's such a broad and vague category, it could mean almost anything. In George's words, “It's a complete circus.”

The television stations send helicopters to circle his house. There are reporters and paparazzi, and also wishers and gawkers, outside of his house day and night. Crowds. Crowds. Hundreds of people outside his house. 

Sarah: I imagine being one of the helicopter pilots, just hovering above George Michael. Are they hoping that they're going to get another Bronco chase out of this?

Marcus: Is this why I went to helicopter school?

Sarah: You're up there with someone from the local news. You're like, yeah, I lost a lot of buddies in Vietnam. And they're like, yeah, that's great. Got to see if George Michael takes his trash out. 

Marcus: Maybe it's a waste of helicopter pilot training. It's also a waste of the journalist’s skills as well.

The next day, April 9, 1998, the headline in the Sun reads, “Zip me up before you go.” The New York Post headline is, “Down and Outed in Beverly Hills”. In the coming days, one tabloid's just going to run the headline, “Fat and Gay”, with his picture. You'll recall that George thought that he had come out of the closet.

Sarah: He's like, we did this before. 

Marcus: And putting aside whatever George's self-perception of that is, the international press treats this as his outing. 

Sarah: Which is a much less fun way to do it than dedicating an album to your dead partner who you loved. 

Marcus: A hundred percent. So I don't think it's an accident that the press is connecting he's gay and he's sleazy. That's inextricably linked in the mind of the media. And you would think, I can't imagine how this would be more than a one day news story. 

Sarah: Especially these days when someone in Congress doing this would be frankly a nice break from the kind of shit they get up to.

Marcus: But it's not. It's the 90s. And so this is going to become a multi-day circus. 

Sarah: We're like, we're tired of talking about Titanic. We're going to spend two weeks on this thing. 

Marcus: Absolutely they do. Later in the week, George Michael goes out to a restaurant. He just goes out to an Italian restaurant called Spago. The paparazzi have been camped outside of his house for more than one night. He's basically doing it just to show, I'm not ashamed. I'm not hiding in my house. 

Sarah: Like why Molly Ringwald goes to prom at the end of Pretty in Pink. 

Marcus: Yes! But the result is if Molly Ringwald at the end of Pretty in Pink is mobbed by reporters, and a caravan of cars follows her, which is what happens to George.

There is reporters and photographers in a long line of cars following him to this restaurant, where he goes and just eats a meal and goes home. Like nothing happens. 

Sarah: So it's like a funeral procession, but just for a man eating some rigatoni. 

Marcus: Totally. Like the reporters will then scope out who else is in this fancy restaurant. And it turns , not just Lionel Richie, but also Tony Curtis are there that night.

Sarah: Wow. 

Marcus: Not to have dinner with George Michael, they're just there on their own having dinner. 

Sarah: Yeah. 

Marcus: And they're interviewed about what are their thoughts on George Michael. And both of them say they support him.

Sarah: Aww. Yeah. Tony Curtis is like, “What? That's illegal?”

Marcus: Yeah. You ask Tony Curtis where the bodies are hidden.

Sarah: We have just this basic belief at this period in American life that public sex is antisocial. I love that examining this story is a way of getting to the heart of taking that apart as a concept that's held us back. 

Marcus: Yeah, I completely agree. Later that week, it is the Help a London Child Telethon, and he asks his sister to phone in his donation of £50,000, rather than do it himself. Because he wants to avoid turning the Help a London Child Telethon into a spectacle about him and public sex.

He does quickly move to go on the news. He appears on CNN that Saturday, and he gives his first public statements about it. And I'm going to send you a quote from what he had to say, if you could maybe read that. 

Sarah: He said, “I don't feel any shame. I feel stupid and I feel reckless and weak for having allowed my sexuality to be exposed in this way, but I do not feel any shame whatsoever. And neither do I think I should.” 

I love it. I also feel like it's the kind of thing that you would be told not to say, right? Because before we had YouTuber apologies, we had, 90s PR types who would tell you to get out there, eat a big slice of humble pie on the largest late night show you can find or whatever the most appropriate venue is, and then just hope people accept your show of contrition to your audience. It feels like the dynamics, the unspoken dynamics are like, people want you to be a certain way, and you've stepped out of line. And you need to say that you're never going to do it again. And I love that he's being like, No. It feels like he's essentially saying, I'm sorry I got caught, but no, I'm going to keep doing it. 

Marcus: Yeah. I'm sorry this has ended up in the newspaper. I feel foolish. 

Sarah: I'm sorry you made such a big deal out of this. 

Marcus: So he's going to plead ‘no contest’. 

Sarah: I love ‘no contest’ as a plea that exists. Oh God, it's so American. 

Marcus: Yeah, 

Sarah: No, 100%. 

Marcus: The punishment's going to be a $910 fine. 

Sarah: Not terrible. 

Marcus: Two years of probation. He's banned from Will Rogers Park for two years. And he has to do 80 hours of community service. 

Sarah: And I feel like we don't like to punish our celebrities with jail nearly so much as we like to punish them with attention. 

Marcus: And he's getting that just heaped on him. He's the butt of late night jokes for weeks and weeks. He continues to be in the paper. Any little scrap of new information that someone can sell about George Michael becomes newsworthy in this cycle. 

So for example, there's a photographer that photographed him in Will Rogers Park a year earlier, like in 1997. And suddenly this photo that, who cares, is now this valuable photo commodity that he can sell.

Sarah: What scares me most now is not these situations where you get a media convoy following you around, which seems rarer as a phenomenon. Because in the 90s, it was like the media was the eye of Sauron, and it can only be on one thing at a time. And now we're living in this individual surveillance state where everybody has phones, everybody can take video whenever they want.

And in a way, we're actually in greater jeopardy because we've outsourced the sort of public eye to individuals rather than a profession. Although, of course we still have plenty of tabloid media to go around.

But I always think of The Birdcage as a great example of just distilling what this looked like in action. Because we have the scandal that Gene Hackman's colleague on the Ways and Means Committee was in, where he died while visiting an underage sex worker. Then they're driving down to Florida with this convoy of tabloid reporters following them. And it's serious when it turns up on Jay Leno. I feel like that was a litmus test of if this is something that we are obsessed with and can't shut up about as a nation, then it'll be on Leno. You got to get Leno. That's how if you have frogs or owls or whatever, you have a healthy forest. 

Marcus: That's it exactly. And I think that SNL, also, would be another example of it. 

Sarah: Yeah, totally. Oh my God. 

Marcus: And those outlets would just recycle those jokes over and over again for days or even weeks.

There's these little codas that come afterwards. So for example, the police officer, Marcela Rodriguez sues George Michael. He sues him for defamation and claims emotional distress damages. 

Sarah: Yeah. What the hell is that about? 

Marcus: I think that's pretty rich that a police officer who was doing an activity that's likely to detonate a shame bomb in most people who get caught, tangoing with George Michael. But to turn around and say, George Michael was causing me emotional distress. George Michael, to his credit, doesn't pay him off, and instead defends himself and wins. A court will later rule that George Michael's comments were nonactionable, non-defamatory expressions of opinion.

Sarah: And I love that he got to have a win in there. 

Marcus: A hundred percent, right? A couple of years later, the West Hollywood City Council is going to Pass a motion to end the practice of undercover sting operations like this in WeHo. It passes. It passes in 2001. Yeah. 

Sarah: Thank God. 

Marcus: And then the other thing that happens in the fall of 1998 is that George is working on a Best Of record, and so he quickly writes a new song about cruising. It's called, Outside, and it's going to be a number two hit in the UK. It doesn't go to number one because Cher’s Believe is unmovable. 

Sarah: I only wish there had been a We Are the World type song about this topic. 

Marcus: Yeah, they should have assembled other celebrities to do the defensive George Michael Outside music video. 

Sarah: Yes. And at least some of them where you're like, why is that person here? They should have gotten Dan Aykroyd on this song. Just like he was on We Are the World. 

Marcus: So he's going to later say of this encounter, at the end of the day, I am gay and I'm a slut. And some of us are. And we should be fine with that. 

Sarah: I'm more familiar with the position women are in. But I think it's true, that the kind of culture we're in really views. Sluttiness as a maladaptive response to something, or just something intrinsically bad. And just pride and sluttiness and slut pride feels like one of the hardest frontiers to get to. And it just feels good to see people who have been there since the beginning, or at least for a really long time. 

Marcus: Yeah. He's going to say the reason he goes on TV in that first week, and the reason he responds the way he does, is he's in this moment, maybe the only thing I can do is reduce the stigma, make it so that other people don't have to be ashamed or embarrassed or feel bad about what they're doing in their private lives.

Sarah: Shame, even if it's not powerful to destroy George Michael at this point, then that's great, but there are plenty of people who it can destroy, then and now. And it's for them, too. 

Marcus: Yeah. Shame is a form of social control. And so the refusal of shame is really about a kind of autonomy that I get to decide what I do with my body.

Sarah: Yeah. And not internalize the violence. 

Marcus: I think you can do that in a way that can feel manic or a way that can feel reparative. Where you can say, this is actually just a part of who I am. And our culture's not going to want to see that about George Michael in the years that follow. They're going to like really zero in on this and every time he does any appearance, it's going to, there's going to be a segment about him getting arrested in this bathroom. Every journalist is going to ask him about it forever. Yeah. 

Sarah: Julia Roberts talked about in Notting Hill. 

Marcus: Yeah, that speech! Oh my god, yes, exactly that, right? It's so good. Yeah. And at the same time George's life is just moving on. But during this time, he's back in the UK. He's living mostly outside the city at Goring on Thames, which is north and west of London, about 60 miles or so from where he grew up.

Except now he's living in a 16th century castle. And Kenny's living with him. Kenny's dividing his time between Goring and Dallas where he's opened an art gallery and he's selling art from the YBA, the Young British Artists, generation to Americans. George and Kenny have dogs and their life together is pretty quiet. George likes to watch Coronation Street. He likes eating McDonald's for lunch and sitting in the garden and walking his dogs. 

Sarah: Yeah, I feel like he hasn't really been able to sit in the garden for about 20 years. 

Marcus: So the next album that's going to come out in 2004 is Patience. Patience has got some lovely tributes to Kenny, some songs that he's written for Kenny on it. It's a number one hit in the UK, but it peaks at number 12 in the U.S. and only sells 381,000 copies. 

Sarah: Still wouldn't kick those numbers out of bed for eating crackers. 

Marcus: 100%. 100%. But the public perception of George Michael in the United States has by now completely shifted.

So for example, when he's trying to promote the album Patience, he gets booked for a full hour on Oprah. Oprah's producers teased the interview episode as quote “George Michael's darkest secrets”, and they refer to him as quote “80s musician George Michael” breaks his silence 

Sarah: He's been around. It's not like he's Salinger. 

Marcus: 100%. And also, here's another quote from the promos that they're going to provide, quote, intimate details about his fall from fame. 

Sarah: Oh my God. Come on. That's rude. So the framing in the United States, 

Marcus: Yeah, is just he's a sad has been. 

Sarah: Oh my god. That feels like the need to believe that we with our media have toppled him from the pedestal.

And we're like, he's not famous anymore. And he's like, I'm famous in Europe. And we're like, that's what we said. He's not famous anymore. 

Marcus: But also he's so not famous that he gets booked for a full hour on Oprah. 

Sarah: Yeah. Come on. The only way you get that is if you're famous or if you fell down a well. 

Marcus: In the UK, he's still so famous that he has stalkers. In the year that this album comes out in October, it's discovered that there's a woman that's been living under his deck in Hampstead. 

Sarah: No! 

Marcus: Yeah, a stalker. 

Sarah: We're like, look at this has been. He only has one stalker. 

Marcus: Yeah, that's right. And I will say despite everything else, that there is this kind of loving core of George Michael supporters, fans, who feel very protective of him, even in his darkest periods.

So this is now, George Michael's in his 40s. And it's around this time in 2005 that he begins seeing an escort and adult film actor named Paul Stagg in the U.K. Paul brings drugs, particularly GHB, into their sexual encounters. GHB is a drug that is known often as the kind of date rape drug, but is also used as a party drug, especially in gay male circles at this time.

Paul's story is not totally reliable. Most of what we know about it is because he was paid for interviews in the British tabloid press. But what Paul is going to say later is that George quickly loses interest in him sexually, eventually just becomes his primary contact for supplying him with GHB. Which over text message they refer to as ‘champagne’. 

And so it's with that kind of background in mind that we reconnect with George Michael at 1:30 a.m. on February 26, 2006, a few kilometers from George's London home. And there are reports of a black Mercedes stopped diagonally in the middle of a lane and the driver is slumped over the wheel. When paramedics attend and knock on the window, the driver stumbles out of the car, and it's George Michael, and he's semi-conscious. The police search his car and they find pot and GHB. And also, the tabloids report that there's fetish gear in the back of his car. Obviously unrelated and not anyone's business. But the Mirror, for example, prints up a giant picture of a leather mask with the zipper mouth. 

Sarah: He leathered himself nearly to death, ladies and gents. 

Marcus: And police give him a warning, he's released without charge. 

Sarah: And what was going on his side of it?

Marcus: I think that's a good question. In the early 2000s, there is a turn among a certain segment of gay partiers toward drugs like GHB and ketamine, drugs of extreme forgetting. It's also a drug that can be an antidote to risk paralysis. I can see why it would be an appealing drug to take up for him in this moment. For many people in our communities to take up in this moment, as ways of letting go. And especially when you're thinking of every sexual act or activity through the lens of comparative risk, there's a kind of cash register of risk that's dinging in your head with every activity that you do. Taking a drug to shut that off, I can see that, I can empathize with that.

For example, Flick Thornley, who's a lesbian who worked in the AIDS hospice movement in London in the 90s describes this turn. It's not just George Michael, it's not happening in isolation, this sort of turn toward these drugs that can have the promise or the offer of amnesia to people who are badly scarred, people who are badly hurt and wounded.

Sarah: Maybe this is too simplistic, but it almost feels like you can talk about seeing evidence of complex PTSD within a demographic or a culture. 

Marcus: George has been drinking, he in particular loves red wine throughout the period we've been talking about, up until now. He's been smoking pot, lots of pot, sometimes as much as 15 joints a day. So he's not naive to the world of substances. 

I do also think that people who have that kind of sensitivity, people who are maybe prone to being overstimulated in moments will look for, what do I do to self-regulate? What's available to me? And there's healthy and unhealthy ways. I think most of us, most of the time, use a mix of healthy and unhealthy ways. 

Sarah: It's the project of how to survive the hits that you take in the course of your life. And how to create the inside of your body and your psyche as a livable place for you. Like, those answers are hard to come by. It's hard to fault people for not finding them sooner or finding them better. 

Marcus: And yet we never run out of ways to fault celebrities for failing to find them sooner and better. 

Sarah: And regular people too, but we get to use the celebrities as an example. 

Marcus: A hundred percent. Now that said, he shouldn't have been driving. It seems pretty clear he shouldn't have been driving on that day. He's going to have a troubled relationship to his car for the rest of his life. 

That was in February of 2006. In April, two months later, there's another incident. He gets into his navy-blue Range Rover at eight in the morning, and this sounds like me leaving any parallel parking situation, but he backs up into a car causing damage, and then forward, and takes the fender off.

Sarah: He does a Sharon Stone in Casino. 

Marcus: Yeah. He damages three different cars on his way out. The story that's going to get told is that he was up all-night doing drugs and having sex. He sends someone back later in the day to knock on doors to identify the owners of the cars that he can pay for the damage.

Sarah: Yeah. Which, if he can afford it, you got to be very generous with the people whose cars you destroyed. 

Yeah, and I feel like it's interesting, too, because we have, and as happens so frequently with these stories, we have someone who it's fair for the public to be genuinely concerned about. And for particular reasons, which have to do with just the wear and tear of life and pain and substances making you a dangerous driver, potentially. That getting knit into that is he's a dangerous driver because he's gay. 

Marcus: Exactly. If we wanted to express concern for him, that's one thing. But the press are reporting this kind of gleefully. After this April incident, they run a story where they call him a quote, “Sad, tortured porker.” 

Sarah: Yes, he was so fat and gay, he just lost control of the vehicle. It's like, God, I feel like we need to immediately make a too fat and gay to drive button for listeners. 

Marcus: Into it. I'm into it. I would buy that token.

In July of 2006, he is caught by paparazzi exiting the bushes at Hampstead Heath in London, which is another popular cruising grounds. 

Sarah: For a second, I thought you were going to say the Bush’s compound at Hyannis Port, or wherever they live. And I was like, oh no, he's friends with conservatives. But no, just some shrubbery. That's fine. 

Marcus: Fear not. During this period he releases an anti-war song called, Shoot the Dog. It's mostly aimed at Tony Blair, but there's Tony Blair and George Bush in the video, like cartoons, caricatures of them. He's against the war in Iraq and he is very public about it, actually.

Sarah: To quote Jeremy on Peep Show, “You can't kill us just to protect your legacy. You're not Blair.”

Marcus: Oh my god. Yeah. But we're in Hampstead Heath at night in July of 2006. He's caught leaving the bushes, not by the police, but by photographers. He realizes he's being photographed. He confronts them. And he's basically like, “Are you gay? No? Then F off. This is my culture.” 

Sarah: Wow, I love that. I feel like he was one of the first people I can think of who was like, it is offensive of you to stop me from having sex in this bush. That's a very Zoomer argument. 

Marcus: It's great. It's great. Here's more of the quote. He goes on to say, “I don't effing believe it. If you put those pictures in the paper, I'll sue. I'm not doing anything illegal. The police don't even come here anymore. I'm a free man. I can do whatever I want. I'm not harming anyone.” 

Sarah: Aww. 

Marcus: God bless. The reporters that are there follow another man who comes out of the bushes home, in order to interview him about whether or not he had sex with George Michael in the bush.

Sarah: We now go live to Jeff, who was in a bush.

Marcus: Like, exactly that. They referred to him as a “potbellied truck driver”. So again, they're making these kind of class markers. They're also, it's obviously fat phobic. And the guy tells the newspaper, “I don't even like George Michael's music.”

Sarah: Nice. I love that. I love that. He's like, look, let's don't get it twisted. I am not a fan of his music. 

Marcus: October 2, 2006, he's in another car accident. He's spotted driving erratically and then stalled in an intersection. Basically, the lights change, and the car doesn't move. The lights change, the car doesn't move. There's no one who's going to be injured by any of these incidents. But yeah, he’s found by the police again. They search his car, and in his car they only find pot. But he's taken to the hospital before the police station and they do a blood draw, and so they get the toxicology report, and it shows antidepressants, sleeping pills, pot, and GHB.

Sarah: That's a few different things you shouldn't drive while using. 

Marcus: And early the next year he pleads guilty to driving while unfit, and they take his license away for two years. From the legal system's point of view, probably a good decision, but he's obviously going to feel like he's having his wings clipped a bit.

Sarah: Yeah, driving is such a strange thing for us to get used to doing all the time. But if you lose your ability to do it in adulthood, it can feel like losing the ability to do any of your other adult functions, like opening a door with a key. 

Marcus: Yeah. For some people it's synecdoche. It stands in for the whole of what it is to be free. But also at a practical level, he lives 60 miles out of town. 

Sarah: I guess he needs to get a horse. 

Marcus: At one point, one of the tabloid journalists in one of their many articles about him says, “George, for God's sake, get a chauffeur.” Which like, okay. 

Sarah: That's at least more helpful than what they normally talk about.

Marcus: I think that's right. It's like a kind of ‘stopped clock is right twice a day’ kind of thing, but I'm with him on this one. After he gets his license taken away, there's a lull in reporting of bad behavior. I think that's in part because he's literally not behind the wheel. He's also touring a lot. 

So he releases tickets for the 25 Live concerts, where he's celebrating 25 years in the music business. So he's touring, and by all accounts, it's a successful tour. People get their money's worth. They feel like he's given them a real show.

The next time he's in the tabloid press, he's at Hampstead Heath again. And this time, someone thinks he's selling drugs, and phones the cops. When George is searched, the police find pot and crack cocaine, and he's arrested. He's not charged. Even though he's not charged, the tabloids get a hold of it. 

Sarah: Of course they do. 

Marcus: And his former friend, Tony Parsons, the guy who published the three-part tell all about George and Anselmo, writes in the Mirror, “Somewhere inside that fat, sleazy, bloated, old geezer is the George Michael I used to know.”

Sarah: Okay. God. But of course, the real problem is that he's gained weight. And aged. Why did he do that, when he could have simply not?

Marcus: From the time that he is arrested in Beverly Hills in 1998, it's just a matter of what are we going to use to pillory George? It's not a matter of if, it's a matter of let's pick our implement of choice.

Sarah: He becomes one of those characters, like Anna Nicole, who's always good for a little laugh. 

Marcus: Yeah, it really does just go on and on. These car accidents are going to culminate in 2010 when he gets into a one-person car accident. Like he drives into the side of a shop and there's like a big dent in the wall. After it's cleared out and the next day, a fan or somebody writes above the hole in the side of the wall, “Wham!”

George then does go to rehab. He goes to rehab for two weeks as a show of remorse. And the judge doesn't buy it. He says that you put people at risk. Which is true. And he’s sentenced. The sentence is a fine of £1,250, a five-year driving ban, and eight weeks in prison. 

Sarah: I'm glad that we're treating this more seriously than the bathroom thing, because that implies, I realize things vary wildlyand it's just a coincidence that it lined up this way, but it feels alright.

Marcus: I think that's right. I do think legitimately that he was putting people at risk, and it's a good thing that, that no one got hurt. He's taken outta the courtroom and immediately to jail, and he serves four weeks in jail. Because of this conviction, he can't get an American visa and he never tours there again.

This is another example of the consequences not being the actual sentence, but something that's an external consequence of the sentence that could have potentially a more significant effect in George's life. He's going to continue touring in Europe. He's going to be fine while he's in jail. He's getting letters from Paul McCartney and Elton John. And before he leaves, he signs autographs for staff and all the inmates who want one. And he's never caught doing anything unsafe behind the wheel again. 

Although there is one more accident. It's somewhere in this period that George and Kenny break up. They deny it for a while. So we actually pinpoint the date somewhere between 2009 and 2011 they break up. And at the same time, Kenny goes into inpatient treatment for alcoholism. 

And George has a new man. He starts dating a guy named Fadi Fawaz. And I don't know whether there's overlap between the Kenny period and the Fadi Fawaz period. It seems like it's a relationship that starts more as a casual dating or casual sex scenario that becomes more serious over time. Fadi Fawaz is described in different ways by different newspapers. And you can tell what the newspaper is trying to tell you by the way he's described. He's described as a Lebanese hairdresser. And he has cut hair in his life. It's not what he does his whole life. He's also described as a former gay porn star. And that's also true, he performed under the name Isaac Mazar. 

Sarah: In this economy, you have to diversify. 

Marcus: However it starts, the two are going to remain companions for the rest of George's life.

Sarah: Good. I'm glad that he has someone. My child, my baby boy, George Michael. 

Marcus: Your baby boy, who is now in his late forties, he's about to turn 50. At one point he's so exhausted. There's a kind of undisclosed illness. We're not totally sure what happens in 2011 as he's preparing for his gig in Vienna. He goes to the hospital, he's admitted for several weeks. He's in a coma for a little while, and he has to reschedule some dates. When he reschedules, he's going to give 300 free tickets to the hospital staff in Vienna. Our boy George. 

Sarah: Our boy! Our baby boy! 

Marcus: He reschedules some tour dates, and him and Fadi take a vacation together.

Maybe I could send you some photos of their vacation. They're on Twitter and they're posting photos of themselves. This is not, these aren't paparazzi photos. 

Sarah: It's so weird when you get all the way up to the Twitter era in a story you're telling. 

Marcus: Okay, I'm going to send you two photos, and I'm also going to send you what George tweets about this tour. So they've rented a yacht and they're traveling around the Pacific Rim. 

Sarah: So it says, “I'm on the first real holiday I've had in many a year, sipping a cocktail on a balmy night, listening to the sea and the company of a painfully handsome man.” I love those moments when people use social media to just in a very honest and simple way, just be like, things have worked out for me.

Marcus: Brag. Yeah, exactly. And do you see the pictures as well? 

Sarah: I love that it's so touchy and they just look really happy. 

Marcus: Yeah, in both photos they're hugging. Fadi's a swarthy guy, right? He's got a hairy chest and he's got big, dad bod arms. 

Sarah: Yeah, it's two dad bods in paradise. 

Marcus: Yeah, totally. So he does return from this and finish the tour and the rescheduled dates. There's also a Symphonica album. There's some more difficult things that happened in 2013 and 2014. For example, he's found in a pool with hypothermia, and it's believed that he's been there overnight, and we're not totally sure why. He's found passed out in a bathtub.

And maybe the strangest incident happens in May of 2013. George is the passenger in a Range Rover, they're driving in the highway. Suddenly, the passenger door opens and George rolls out of the car, onto the highway, bouncing several times to the shoulder of the road. He's treated on the scene and, miraculously, he's fine. He never even loses consciousness. He's not charged with anything related to the incident.

Sarah: Because they don't know what to charge him with. 

Marcus: Like riding without a seatbelt. But he's not the driver. He's not driving when this happens. It's just bizarre. 

Sarah: Yeah, but it's like he's become an extraordinarily accident-prone person, it's fair to say. 

Marcus: What all of these incidents have in common the incidents in the car in 2006. And then these ones, like being found in the bathtub and being found in a pool, are this kind of freezing reaction. Some types of drugs can have that effect, the kind of K hole, where you become immobile, or sometimes immobile for a long time. And I don't know that fully explains the falling out of the car on the highway story, but it does link the rest of them. 

Sarah: Yeah, I guess it just seems, what's your take on his drug use, in roughly this period? 

Marcus: Like I say, people use drugs for all kinds of reasons. And I'm not somebody who's going to say that using drugs are bad on their own. He's a grown woman. He can do whatever he wants. He legit doesn't owe anyone anything at this point. If he wants to use party drugs and have sex and have fun, have at it. 

He comes to see it as destructive himself, though. And in June of 2015, he goes to rehab for a sustained period. It's actually almost a full year. He goes to Zurich, Switzerland. And for the first several months, he's just in-patient. And then even when he's an outpatient, he's still living in Zurich and doing several hours of intensive therapy several times a week. And he gets sober. There's lots of photos of Fadi visiting him during this period having lunch together in fancy restaurants in Switzerland. And I love that for them. 

Sarah: I love that that got to be part of the story. 

Marcus: Yeah. And that's 2015 to 2016. He gets back to the UK in the summer of 2016, approximately. And when he does, he stays almost exclusively at his country house in Goring, in the castle. He's like kind of a bit of a home body. 

Sarah: Castle body, if you will. 

Marcus: That's right. At this point, he has a trach scar from the Vienna hospital incident, and he has a big scar on the back of his head from falling out of the car. He goes out to dinner at an Italian restaurant and guess what? People take pictures of him with their cell phones and sell them to the press. And the journalists say, wow, it looks like he's put on a lot of weight. 

Sarah: This is the Phantom of the Opera's real backstory. He just gained some weight. He was like, I just got to stay in this opera house forever. 

Marcus: The concern trolling that the journalists were doing before was like, oh, he's so unhealthy. And then he goes and spends hours, 12 months, he spends a whole year getting healthy and what happens? They're still trolling him. 

Sarah: We don't want people to be healthy. We want people to be at death's door, but looking the way we prefer them to. 

Marcus: Yeah. I think that's right. I also think for George in particular, he's somebody who had such attention on his physical appearance from the time he was a teenager. And everything we know about that is it's a formula for, at a minimum, people getting to middle age and not even knowing what their body's natural set point is. He's probably been on a diet or thinking about his weight in some way or another his entire adult life and most of his teen years, too.

Sarah: In a weird way, the fat and gay insult has a certain revealingness to it, because it's the two things that your body wants naturally to be, but that you must work for your entire life to keep it from doing. 

Marcus: And so that's where he is for Christmas of 2016. He's at the house at Goring. He's not going out, he's staying in. On Christmas Eve, on December 24th, George and Fadi have a late lunch together, and reportedly there's some kind of friction, a fight, some kind of disagreement. 

His biographer, James Gavin says, “They upset each other”, which is just delightfully vague. Who knows what that means? But George retires to his bedroom in the afternoon, and Fadi's photographed coming and going from the house throughout the day. But there's one of the mysteries of this day is Fadi will later say he got into his car and decided that he was too unfit to drive, and slept there. He slept in his car overnight on Christmas Eve. And then he later says that's not true. And so I don't know. It's a weird thing to make up. 

In the evening on Christmas Eve, it's tradition in the town of Goring for there to be this candlelight procession. The townspeople come out and they sing Christmas hymns together. As the holiday procession passes below George's house, some people say that they can see him watching the festivities from his darkened bedroom window. 

Sarah: That is a lovely memory, and exactly the kind of thing that people would fabricate later on.

Marcus: 100%. 100%. I don't know. I like to think of it that way. If it's true, it's fitting that the last people that would see him alive would be the public, as opposed to his friends or family. 

And the next day, in the early afternoon, George fails to emerge from his bedroom and Fadi goes to try to wake him up. The room is dark, the curtains are drawn, and George is in bed under the covers and he's not breathing. His body is cold and blue. Fadi claims that when he found George, he then tried to revive him. But it later emerges that Fadi did not immediately call for an ambulance, and instead he called like several of his friends and acquaintances before. He calls his niece, he calls David Austin, who's a longtime friend of George's. And David Austin's like, “Hang up with me and call the call 999”, which is the British 911, which is what Fadi then does. 

So it's 1:45 in the afternoon on Christmas Day and Fadi calls 999. Because it's Britain and because of the tabloids, the text of that phone call is going to be leaked to the media, and I would say Fadi doesn't come off very well in it. He seems like he's in a rush to get off the telephone, and he's asked what George's birthday is, and he gets it wrong. At one point he says, “Do I have to stay on the line while the ambulance comes, or can I hang up?” George Michael's fans are grieving when they receive this leaked 999 call, but they're going to lash out pretty strongly against Fadi in response. To me, it's not strange behavior. That's just somebody who is expressing surprise and grief and shock. 

Sarah: And yet, if you want there to be someone to blame for it, then he's making himself a soft target. 

Marcus: Yeah, I think that's right. When the emergency personnel do arrive, it's clear that George has been dead for a long time. In a practical matter, it wouldn't have had any effect on anything. 

Sarah: Yeah. When someone's dead, you can usually tell. 

Marcus: I think also because of this story about the car, people blame Fadi because this idea that he was messed up on drugs, asleep in the driveway during George's final moments. But the two slept in different bedrooms. So the alternative was that they would have been in different bedrooms and the same thing would have unfolded. So people blame him for the way he behaved that day. But I think even more people blame him for the fact that George Michael died alone.

Sarah: And I feel like when you love someone as a public, you have the sense of, if only I could have been around I would have done a better job. But that's the thing about relationships. It's also, we can believe all kinds of things about something you weren't a part of. 

Marcus: For a lot of people, myself included, the idea of passing away suddenly in my own bed at night is comforting, maybe even ideal.

Sarah: It seems harder and harder to get the chance to do it these days. 

Marcus: If it's any consolation, after he died, his fans left cards and notes and flowers and little stuffed animals in front of his house in London and also in Goring. And the message is not to flatten the whole thing, but with greater or lesser degrees of complexity, the messages were essentially that I love you, George. I'm here. I won't forget you. You're safe. 

Sarah: How did you feel about this news when it reached you? Do you remember this? 

Marcus: Like a lot of people, I was struck by how young he was. He was 53 when he died. We got to see his life in so many different phases, from the kind of bubbly youth, to the kind of sex pot figure, to the like kind of older gay uncle.

When I was a kid growing up gay in the 1980s, we didn't have examples of gay adulthood taken to completion, like a life from beginning to end. It's not like role model, I wouldn't use that word about George Michael, but just an example. Here's an example of a life, here's what a life could be. Queer people growing up today have examples of people who were gay and lived full and complete lives. 

Sarah: Yeah. And lives shaped by hate and trauma and injustice, but also lives where he had a life where he had love. 

Marcus: There were so many men who jitterbugged into his heart. And I do think there was this kind of outpouring of unironic love and grief for George Michael after he died. And even the newspapers, which had been so cruel to him in the years before he died, published these glowing accounts. 

Like one of the things that emerged as a theme in the writing afterwards was, oh, it turns out he was such a philanthropist. He was hiding how secretly he was giving money away. And it's true that some of the money he gave away was in secret. But it's also like that was hiding in plain sight. He was giving away money from the release of his single, we talked about a bunch of it, the money from Last Christmas, the money from his duet with Elton John.

There's a report in the eighties that he'd already given away 6 million pounds to his friends and family. And it's like, what did the tabloids want to see? When they were just like kicking this man when he was down, all of that philanthropy was on the record. 

Sarah: Yeah, but they didn't want to, they needed the fat, shrubbery sex, gay headline. So you can't use that information, right? It's only when someone is dead that you can be nice to them profitably, allegedly. 

Marcus: Maybe it's that it was profitable for the tabloids to put up this image of George Michael as this quote, “sad, haunted porker”. And then once he's dead, it's profitable to put up this other version of him. It's like St. George. 

And so the coroner's office does a second, more detailed examination, but it takes time. It ends up taking about two and a half months. And so the media is left during this period following his death without conclusive answers. And that leads to a lot of speculation. And for the family and for his loved ones, it also means they can't bury him until the second examination is concluded. And they're stuck in this kind of period of perpetual mourning. 

The second examination, the conclusion is that he died of a heart failure and that he had fatty liver. In other words, his death is ruled to be from natural causes. The report looks like the report of somebody who drank and smoked heavily during his life, which is undoubtedly true. However, the toxicology report, like what was in his bloodstream at the time that he died, is withheld from the public. And we don't know so we can't say for sure whether he relapsed at the end. And I think people at the time were really sad that they couldn't get that finality from these reports. And I don't know, like to me it's like, why does that matter? 

Sarah: Why does it matter, right? What's being unsaid and the need for that information, right?

Marcus: Are we waiting to cast our final judgment on George to say the toxicology report is clean, and therefore he is a somebody who overcame his demons? We can tell that arc like it's a pretty clean narrative story. Or if there is something in his blood at the time, then we have a different story that we have to tell. But I actually don't think that's true. He was both things throughout his life. He was a high achiever, and he was a person who used drugs. And he was somebody who sometimes had battles. And whatever was happening on that last day, I doesn't erase. It's like the least important part, or it's just a tiny fraction of the story. 

Sarah: And I feel one of the kind of human behaviors around death is the need to come up with a reason for why it wouldn't happen to us, or why the person deserved it, right? And I feel like we're trying to create some kind of cause-and-effect narrative out of, if someone is found with drugs in their system, then we can blame them for it. That’s on them. We can blame their death on their behavior in a way that probably makes us feel safer. And I think really, it doesn't make us safer to do that, even if it feels that way sometimes.

And really, I don't know, it feels relevant about the information that we have is that he lived a long life. Not necessarily in years, but in terms of the events crammed into all of his adult years and had survived a lot. And there's just a limit to what our bodies can survive one way or another.

Marcus: Yeah. Yeah. I think it's in a way, it's nice that we're denied that total closure. 

Sarah: The public should have more limits placed on what we know. 

Marcus: The funeral isn't broadcast. And when he's buried in a private plot, they don't want heaps of flowers at his gravesite or the risk of vandalism. For a number of years afterwards, he's in some sort of private cemetery where the only way you could get in to even look at it was if you were on a guided tour, basically. 

Sarah: He gets to have some privacy, which I think gets really high time. And it matters how we treat the dead. If the dead don't know, then the living do.

Marcus: Yeah. And the service is very private, it's not televised. In this moment, the family decides not to invite Fadi Fawaz. But he shows up anyway. The service is set to start, the doors swing open, Fadi Fawaz swaggers in with a pair of aviator sunglasses on. He will not be excluded. And they let him stay. Kenny, on the other hand, is invited to be a pallbearer. 

Sarah: What do you think about that? 

Marcus: It's clear that the family doesn't like Fadi. The family has a sort of favored member of George's sexual life or past, and it's Kenny. After George's death, Fadi is living in the London house. He's not at Goring, he's in the London house. And Fadi says that George has told him, you can stay in this house, even if after I'm gone, this house is yours. But he's not in the will. 

Sarah: Yeah, get it in writing, folks. 

Marcus: There's a question of would he have been a common law spouse in other jurisdictions in, for example, in the US or in Canada. But in the UK, somebody in that kind of conjugal relationship isn't entitled to what we would call the matrimonial home as inheritance. 

And so the family says, you don't have a claim to this house, and eventually send a bailiff to forcibly remove him. I should also say that his estate is valued at this time at around 95 million pounds. In the will, the money mostly goes to his family, in particular his sisters. He's got two sisters. But he says that his art should be sold, and the money should be donated to charities. He gives a list of other charities and people that he would like to receive some money, but he's not specific. He says, I trust my sister, Melanie to decide on the distribution. But Fadi's not on the list.

This is the height of Twitter, right? 2016, 2017. So Fadi's on Twitter and his first messages after George's death are like, “I'm heartbroken. I'm never going to be the same. I loved him. I will never, I'll never have a happy Christmas after this.” Messages like that. And then he starts sending these messages out that say, “I hate you, George.” And he sends messages out purporting to reveal secrets. And he's later going to renounce those messages and say even that his Twitter was hacked. I don't know. But things like, George had five or six suicide attempts, and this last one was finally successful. And that George had HIV. And of course, this is also somebody who's in the midst of grieving, and who's sad, and also is being evicted from his house, which is what happens. 

After he is removed from the house in London, he spends some time in a low rent hotel/hostel kind of situation, and then at least some time living on the streets in London. He's living in his car. He eventually sells his car because he's trying to get money to move onto his next thing.

In the James Gavin biography, the last glimpse we have of Fadi is it's nighttime, and he's in one of the tony neighborhoods in London with a hammer, and he's smashing the windshields of cars as he passes. And then Fadi's tweets disappear, like there's no tweets since 2019. And he fades from public memory.

Sarah: I hope he's okay. What do you think about the reliability of the stuff that he's saying? How do you read that, personally? 

Marcus: I can see in those tweets that he is trying to say the most hurtful thing possible. And also, is it hurtful and true or hurtful and untrue? That I can't tell. If he had been smart and together about it, he would have approached a British tabloid and said, I knew he was HIV positive, or I knew this was a suicide attempt, and sold the story for some amount of money.

And releasing this on Twitter means that the next day all the tabloids get to report it for free. And I don't know, I'm not trying to say that Fadi Fawaz was a saint or a martyr. Everybody's relationships are a mystery. We're always on the outside of them. 

Sarah: My own relationships are a mystery, it doesn't even have to be someone else's relationship. I find it confusing. 

Marcus: We know that there were happy times, and we know that there were periods where they were fighting. Also, most people fight. And sometimes that's just a normal part of the relationship. And sometimes it's awful and abusive. And I don't know in this. It’s outside of my realm of visibility. 

Sarah: This is my favorite thing about this show is that this is a place where we can bravely step up to the soapbox and say, I don't know. A relationship can be bad or good, and we just can't know it from the outside. Sometimes we have enough material, but often we don't. And I love this being the show where we don't know things and where we celebrate not knowing. 

Marcus: And it's easy to say George's relationship with Anselmo was the love of his life, and it was pure, it was undiluted in a way. But also his relationship with Kenny, long, long term, stable, loving, secure. And then I also think about his relation, his even shorter-term relationships, the relationships with the guys that he picked up in the gay bars or picked up in the bathrooms. 

Sarah: His shrubbery relationships. 

Marcus: What he describes in that quote from earlier is, that there were bonfires and parties, and he had friends up there. That it's in a way, it's not necessarily a relationship with a single person, but with a community of people. And I like the idea that maybe his relationship with strangers was the most enduring relationship of all.

Sarah: Marcus, if people want to learn more about George Michael and related topics, what books do you recommend? 

Marcus: I consulted a number of his biographies. I would say probably the best and most complete is the James Gavin biography. The best short biography is the Rob Jovanovic book, I would say. But there's other good biographies out there. There's one by Robert Steele, one by Sean Smith. Andrew Ridgely wrote a memoir about his time in Wham!. 

And if you're interested in thinking more about the law and culture of cruising, you can pick up my book, Park Cruising: What Happens When We Wander Off the Path? 

Sarah: And I'm so excited for your book. I think this is such a wonderful area to learn more about and also an important ethic, as we think about how do we build the societies and the communities that we're missing and that we're so starved for in modern life, and maybe get in the shrubbery.

And that is our episode. Thank you. Thank you so much for being with us today. Thank you to Marcus McCann for being our wonderful guest. Marcus is again the author of Park Cruising: What Happens When We Wander Off the Path?, and we were so lucky to have him. It was such a joy to work with you, Marcus. 

Thank you so much as ever to Carolyn Kendrick for producing and for bringing these stories to our ears. Thank you to Colin Fleming for editing help. Thank you to you for listening. We'll see you in two weeks.