Yet the songs, which Gavin compares to a “set of diary entries,” tenderly depict his romantic relationship with Anselmo Feleppa, whom he’d met in Brazil in 1991 and who died a mere two years later. Set to be reissued in August as a deluxe box set, “Older” came out two years before Michael was famously outed as a result of his arrest on charges of lewd conduct in a men’s room at Beverly Hills’ Will Rogers Memorial Park. Given that context, 1996’s “Older” is particularly fascinating to revisit indeed, it was the first of Michael’s albums to catch the interest of Gavin, whose previous books told the stories of Lena Horne, Peggy Lee and Chet Baker. “People would ask me if he was gay and I didn’t have the answer,” Lippman says. So it’s not hard to understand why Michael declined to engage the question or why some who worked with him sought a kind of plausible deniability. And once they came out, their queerness came to define their music in the eyes of the public, a fate Michael actively resisted for some, like Smith, coming out has arguably dampened the trajectory of their careers. Yet Tranter points out that “we’ve still never - ever, ever, ever - had a superstar who started their career out of the closet.”įreddie Mercury, Elton John, Melissa Etheridge, Sam Smith, Lil Nas X - each was able to own the fullness of their identity only after they’d attained success. Here in 2022 we’d like to think that pop music has shed its old prejudices - that a gay musician would no longer have to confront the kinds of choices Michael did.
#I DON T WANT YOUR FREEDOM WHAM PROFESSIONAL#
“For all the tragedy I uncovered in writing this book, though - for all the childhood sadness and the unhealed wounds from his relationship with his father and from losing the great love of his life to AIDS - none of it in the end overrode the joy in his music.”īut there was a clear professional risk too for a pop heartthrob who’d built an audience in part through his deft use of traditional masculine iconography. “George’s life was shot through with disappointment,” says James Gavin, author of an exhaustive and empathetic biography, “ George Michael: A Life,” published this week. But to listen to these songs now - half a decade after Michael’s shocking death at age 53 and amid a swelling of interest in his work tied to several new retrospective projects - is to confront the fact that the reason he kept singing about freedom is because he kept not finding it. The specifics of the liberation he’s describing in each tune vary so too did the shape of the British singer’s stardom at the time he wrote each of them. In 1984, George Michael released a song called “ Freedom” with his pop duo Wham! Six years later, he put out one of his own called “Freedom! ’90.” And six years after that? A song called “ Free” closed his third solo album, “Older.”
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