PHYSICALLY, the only presence hovering over us is a waitress. She tries to be discreet but can’t help fussing over Boy George, Britain’s most famous pop star from the gender-bender Eighties. Metaphorically, however, the two figures overshadowing our discussion of his new volume of memoirs are Madonna and his father. Madonna, for reasons I don’t think he has fully owned up to, he hates. As for his father, whom he knows he in many ways resembles, they were not even speaking when he died last year.
We meet in New York’s Little Italy, the Elba to which George has exiled himself since his musical Taboo opened (and closed three months later) on Broadway in 2003. Despite the flop, he reasons that America, or at least this “little leper island off its east coast”, is more likely than England to smile on his secondary and tertiary careers in fashion and photography. He looks — let us be clear — nothing like the portrait opposite, which captures Boy George’s outré glamour but not the anti-glamour of George O’Dowd, his slapless, civilian alter ego. His remaining hair cropped so short I can see a large purple tattoo beneath it, he looks fully his 43 years and fully whatever his weight may be. Only his pretty blue eyes remind you of the ethereal Karma Chameleon. In an Irish bar, he orders fish and chips to remind us of home.
Jeremiah O’Dowd died suddenly in September on holiday with his new wife. His son had disowned him after his divorce and had not intended to go to the funeral until, out clubbing one night, “a mad, loony drag queen” whose mother had recently died told him not to be so silly. He didn’t cry at the service but only because he had cried so much already.
“I went through every kind of emotion from indifference to rage to laughing about some of the ridiculous things he did. And I’m still going through it,” he says.
During George’s childhood his father, a man usually too angry to listen to his son, had headed a chaotic household in South London where dinner was as likely to end up on the wall as on the table. He did not make his wife happy.
“I was always sitting down with my dad and saying, ‘Look, you don’t get on. You feel trapped. Mum feels insulted. Why don’t you just sit down like grown ups and end it and be friends? Maybe it will take a while but . . . ’ And he’d say, ‘You don’t understand, son.’ And I was like, ‘Well, actually, it’s really clear’.”
Yet Jeremiah had a softer side. When George came out to his parents, he was supportive — and supportive too in the Eighties when, as The Sun erroneously forecast, “Junkie George Has Eight Weeks To Live”. Afterwards George, who touches nothing illegal now and hardly drinks, turned to therapy and persuaded his parents to participate. Jeremiah became interested, took courses in reiki healing and massage and met his second wife through this new set. George was furious with him for lying that the relationship was platonic.
“I think my mum really regretted not walking away sooner, because she was left with that final indignity of having to go to a funeral with some other woman there. I don’t have anything against her really, but I think you don’t go out with someone’s husband when they’re married, not after 43 years.”
Although his camp, sing-song voice turns everything into half a joke, George, as Straight, the new book, reminds us, is a moralist. His judgmentalism is a rather splendid thing in these timorous times, but it amuses me how the soppier, poem-penning fans on his website mistake him for a saintly dreamer. Although three chapters of his book deal with spiritual quests to India, he strikes me as about the least spiritual person you could ever meet.
But a therapist called Jamie is apparently working with him on his temper, he is a naturally fierce man. In his 1995 autobiography, Take It Like A Man, he described twice breaking one of his boyfriend’s fingers and once concussing him with a milk bottle. In this book he merely gets into a fight with bodyguards outside the Ministry of Sound in London and skirmishes with a reggae artist called Caron Geary. He blames his flare-ups on the physicality of his upbringing (physical in the wrong way: the O’Dowds were not tactile) and thinks it may help to explain why his brother Gerald, a schoolboy boxer, was convicted of the manslaughter of his wife a few years ago.
George, however, does not have to rely on sticks and stones to break bones — not with the mouth he has on him and the pen his co-author Paul Gorman carries. Rosie O’Donnell, the American comedienne and chat-show host who brought Taboo to New York with $10 million of her own money, gets a good beating for closing it. Gay herself, she is not gay enough for George, who accuses her of neutering the show. “She’s a Pottery Barn lesbian,” he says although he adds that she was domineering too (in the book he compares her to his father).
The crooner George Michael is also the wrong kind of gay. George accuses Michael of hypocrisy for denying his sexuality in his early career and then denounces him for getting arrested in a Californian lavatory, thereby propagating the myth that gay men are “rampant”. He is just as scathing about the stylists on the TV makeover show Queer Eye for the Straight Guy; they, however, are not gay enough. “My life is about much more than what my cushions are like or what theatre show I should go to. It’s really poncy. I just think that they should leave straight people alone, they look fine.”
The celebrity homosexual who gets the biggest kicking, however, is Elton John, whom he berates for performing a duet with Eminem at the 2002 MTV Awards. “It’s like me singing with Pol Pot,” he says, blaming the rapper’s lyrics for legitimising homophobia on the streets. “People will call you a fag or whatever occasionally, but it’s so much more prevalent now and he has to take some responsibility. He’s an asshole and I think every gay person with a brain cell found it hideously offensive to see Elton performing with him.”
