QUEER BIBLE EB

Jack Guinness

• Publisher: HQ
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780008530501
• eBook ISBN: 9780008343996
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Social Science Biographies
• Index: Literature

'We stand on the shoulders of giants. Now we learn their names.'

THE QUEER BIBLE is a collection of essays written by queer icons, about the queer trailblazers throughout history who inspired them.

From Elton John on Divine to Graham Norton on Armistead Maupin; Russell Tovey on David Robilliard to Lady Phyll on Moud Goba; Tan France on the Queer Eye cast to Mae Martin on Tim Curry, today's queer heroes write about the icons that provided a creative inspiration to them. Other contributors include Amelia Abraham, Paula Akpan, Courtney Act, Munroe Bergdorf, Mykki Blanco, Joseph Cassara, David Furnish, Paul Flynn, Paris Lees, Juliet Jacques, Gus Kenworthy, Freddy McConnell, Paul Mendez, Mark Moore, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Hanne Gaby Odiele and Matthew Todd. Each essay is accompanied by exclusive, bespoke illustrations by queer or ally artists, to create a truly beautiful celebration of queer culture.

Based on the popular website QueerBible.com, founded by model and activist Jack Guinness, this timely collection, edited by him, continues his mission – to create a space dedicated to the celebration of queer history.

The Queer Bible is a love letter to the LGBTQI+ community and its allies.

01

Words to Dance to

When I was a teenager, I went travelling. My sister made me a series of cassettes (I’m showing my age here). Each one had an abstract title scrawled onto that little label carefully placed along the centre of the cassette; names like ‘Music To Fly Kites To’ and ‘Music To Mend A Broken Heart’. I didn’t realise their significance until months later, when I found myself sitting at the summit of a mountain in Vietnam, exhausted, lonely, and exhilarated. I pushed the Walkman’s ‘play’ button and after a whirl, my sister’s cassette played. I immediately understood that she had curated a soundtrack for every possible one of my moods. I’m not as amazing as my beautiful, kind sister, but I’ve tried to collect these essays into sections that will make your soul dance, lift your spirits, spur action and raise you up when you’re feeling down.

‘Words to Dance to’ isn’t only about performers. These essays are about the originators, the innovative rebels who challenged the status quo, moved culture forward and got us on our feet! They’ll position people you thought you knew in a fresh light, and introduce you to change-makers you’ll fall in love with. I hope these words connect you with the joyous rhythm of life and inspire you to create yourself.

Illustration by James Davison

Choose Life: George Michael

by Paul Flynn

It is early 1985 and I am sat, bored, at the back of a South Manchester classroom. I’m guessing it’s raining outside. When I think of that school now – its grubby windowpanes, misfiring adventures in teenage deodorant and hours of detention – I see mostly the teachers, staring out at a grey sea of hopelessness, trying their hardest to encourage some method of escape for us all. Everybody needs good teachers.

We were taught by a cascading rota of staff during English lessons. For a spell, there was a witty young Black woman called Miss Black, a literalism no fiction would dare invent for the depressed northern comprehensives of the time. And someone with thinning hair whose name I’ve long forgotten was soon shipped in from a stint teaching adult literacy classes at Strangeways prison. She told us during her first lesson that we were considerably more charmless than her inmates. Then there was my favourite; a ruddy-faced, thickset Scotsman with a moustache who would get misty-eyed when reading aloud, especially sensitive stanzas of wartime poetry. Was this his trenches?

I cannot begin to tell you how much I loved their company. They opened up other worlds beyond the drizzle of our immediate sightline on the simple act of turning a page. I am 13. Today’s lesson is for 30 schoolboys to rein in our collective ADD and sit in the humming, itchy quiet of bored pubescence, reading the opening passages from Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis. For homework, the Scotsman wants to encourage our writing valves, our imaginative capacity. We are instructed to go home and write our own metamorphosis, a transcendental change in which we are no longer who we are, transposing our lives into those of others. Nothing appeals more.

(Do I know I’m gay by this point? Certainly, the initial inklings are present enough to get a brief, spinal twitch at this early intimation of complete personal reinvention; which may or may not be connected to the new urges I’ve developed concerning Lewis Collins every time a repeat of The Professionals appears on TV.)

A week hence and a pile of schoolbooks sit on the teacher’s desk, annotated with wobbly handwritten care and attention. All but one follows the same predictable sequence of events, in which our little protagonist turns from scruffy oik into star striker at Manchester’s United or City football clubs. If a collective dream can be located among our class, this is it. Local heroism located below the ankles.

My work that day broke the mould. From a head buried mostly in the pages of Smash Hits magazine and schooled in the extra-curricular music TV shows, Top of the Pops and The Tube, I conjured ‘The Day I Turned into George Michael’. That was my idea of the most fantastical metamorphosis a grown man could experience, at the furthest removes of glamour and excess from my first teenage year. George was my favourite pop star. He was still in the last of his brief Wham! years, a joyous, youthful place of suntans, Speedos and Fila tracksuit tops, arced by blue-sky melody and killer couplets.

George Michael was the first everyman pop star to pierce me deeply, at an age when I could not fully control the depth of the incision. His story was shaped out of complete suburban escape, close enough to touch yet still miles beyond my ken. With his best friend Andrew Ridgeley he fashioned a run of effortless white-bread pop classics that owed everything to the Black music of his instruction. He sang like an angel and danced like a lunatic with a hairbrush in the bedroom mirror. His gift for song and poetry cut swiftly through to the premium mass market, a place he never left until his dying day. He was still only just out of his teens and had turned his ludicrously prolific talent for the connectivity of music into something luxurious, soulful, aspirational, immediate and loved.

My work that day broke the mould. From a head buried mostly in the pages of Smash Hits magazine and schooled in the extra-curricular music TV shows, Top of the Pops and The Tube, I conjured ‘The Day I Turned into George Michael’.

George was always with his best friend, everywhere he went. That was Wham! Two boys together. There was something soft, gorgeous and open-armed about the duo, framed by the three-minute pulse of hit noise. They contained every gay man’s camaraderie with the best friend he loves, sometimes wordlessly; the one who is so near but so far. Platonic, yes, but more so. They were Bushey’s Bodie and Doyle, ramped up on naïve Home Counties’ ambition. Their buoyant cri de coeur spoke of soul on the dole, the Bee Gees, cigarettes and love bites, death by matrimony, guilty feet and rays of sunshine.

There are lines George Michael wrote back then, at the start of his incredible pop life, that still make me shiver – silver-lined and gilt-edged with instructive possibilities. For a long time after his death, these were the songs that cut the deepest, not his later, more mature work. Because they spoke of a blind faith in his own transformation, an osmosis which turned out to be so much trickier than he’d imagined. As he grew later as a lyricist, he became a poet. There were early hints. I loved the way he sang, ‘wise guys realise there’s danger in emotional ties,’ long before I had any idea what it implied.

When we think of Wham! now, we think of a proto-boyband, a confection, something lightweight and innocuous. But a handsome duo opening their hit deck with an anti-Thatcherite rap about rejecting the system that middle England carved for them in favour of a life on the DHSS had more in common with the later work of another gay man and his best friend, Sleaford Mods, than it did One Direction.

George Michael had fired himself an atypical starting gun on the pop blocks. He wasn’t the man who was lost in the hunt and heartache of love. That was to come. He was the assiduous best friend warning his buddy about girls who’d trap them into the boredom of domesticity, robbing them of spark and fire, a curious vantage point to first position his pop life. Sometimes it was as if his tenacity alone turbocharged him along. In ‘Everything She Wants’ (‘And now you’re telling me that you’re having my baby/I’ll tell you that I’m happy if you want me to’) he had sculpted a work of indisputable, hard-bitten, blue-eyed soul genius. This idiosyncratic kitchen-sink drama played out in pop couldn’t – and didn’t – last long. At the time I turned into George Michael on the lined pages of a homework essay, they were well into their final furlong, four years after their keen sprint began. By 1985, Wham! were comfortably the biggest band in the world, the first to gleefully leapfrog the iron curtain and play in China.

They contained every gay man’s camaraderie with the best friend he loves, sometimes wordlessly; the one who is so near but so far. Platonic, yes, but more so. They were Bushey’s Bodie and Doyle, ramped up on naïve Home Counties’ ambition.

Teen pop could not have been any more tribal back then. This was not about preferences for me. I wanted to swallow the whole giddy, gay canvas of British pop oddities, fashioned to alert each one of my newly developing adolescent senses in one gulp. Wham! pricked something so specific in me, a sensation I could taste before I could get close to articulating. They had just released their second album, Make It Big, a droll bit of wordplay on their tumescence. They were cocksure from the groin out, electrified by a sexuality percolating just below boiling point.

Wham! were supposed to be hetero-sexy but they looked like something more complex. George had hair like Princess Di and was always dressed in white. He wore a crucifix earring, appealing to the rejecting Catholic in me. His chest was emblazoned with the positivity slogan, Choose Life!, an edict the designer Katharine Hamnett stole from some Buddhist tract or another, a slogan which cut at right angles against the messaging of the government AIDS leaflets (‘Silence=Death’) posted through every British letterbox at the start of the pandemic. Amid the hits George wrote for that record was a cover of the Isley Brothers’ ‘If You Were There,’ a song I loved from the opening bars. It found in me a new flavour of personal ache and hope that is almost certainly realer and harder in the imagining than it is played out in your twenties, when the adrenalised drama of life itself takes the place of tough, formless projection. The inescapable ballad ‘Careless Whisper’ hinted at some of his commercial plaudits to come as a solo star; the sad, lonely lament ‘A Different Corner’ at his incumbent artistic greatness. The sun shone in summer, the snow fell at Christmas for Wham! It never rained.

I have no idea what I wrote in that essay. But through it I felt touched, in some small way, by George’s magic wand, the generosity of his songwriter’s gift. He looked like someone who’d come from nothing and turned himself into something. If he could do it, why couldn’t we all? He hid a secret I could sense without being able to spell it out loud.

The burly Scot gave me 20/20 for my homework, making a point of taking me aside for a quiet word. He said, ‘Paul, you have a talent for this,’ the first time I’d ever been told I was good at anything. In that moment, I decided I would one day like to be a writer, a notional possibility at such far remove from the lowly employment we were being farmed for as to now feel almost laughable. It is a kindness I’ve remembered with every pay cheque received during my working adult life since.

It is 1985. I am 13. And in my own small way, led gently by George’s unknowing, distant, guiding hand, I begin the slow, clunky process of accepting that change is afoot, that my coming out is less probability, more inevitability. And there is your metamorphosis, right there.

**

For a while, George Michael turned into my professional default mechanism while interviewing stars, a useful divining rod to organise the good-natured from the ill. Kate Moss loved recounting a story about a party George had thrown in the three-tiered back garden of his Highgate pile after the closing ceremony of the London Olympics, 2012, an event they’d both lent their amazing faces to. Paparazzi parked up outside and she’d escaped by climbing over the back wall in the early hours of the next morning, before legging it to her home across neighbouring fences.

In summer 2016, the year George later died, I was despatched to profile the novelist Jackie Collins in her elegant Bel Air home, a louche dreamscape crafted entirely from marble, mirror and gold, against which she twinkled mischievously in one of her tailored white trouser suits. Her swimming pool was copied from a Hockney painting. She said she rented the next-door property out to Al Pacino. She, too, wanted to keep her neighbours correct. With the benefit of middle-aged hindsight, if I really wanted to turn into anybody, it was probably her. I can’t even sing karaoke and hate cameras. I adored Rock Star.

It is 1985. I am 13. And in my own small way, led gently by George’s unknowing, distant, guiding hand, I begin the slow, clunky process of accepting that change is afoot, that my coming out is less probability, more inevitability. And there is your metamorphosis, right there.

I’d arrived twenty minutes early and wandered the pristine sidewalks of her Los Angeles neighbourhood to kill time, happening upon the Will Rogers Memorial Park at the northern end of her boulevard. ‘Oh, George’s park?’ she said, when I told her about the walk. No surname, no explanation, just complete cultural ownership of the site of his arrest for soliciting during a police sting in 1998, handed over to one of her absolute favourites. I mentioned the George incident might make a good storyline for one of her blockbusters, at which point she scribbled something down longhand in a notebook before sauntering off into a recess of her extravagant parlour to sign a glossy hardback of The Lucky Santangelo Cookbook for my mum, another fan.

I heard about George’s cottaging arrest while at my first press conference, for the Spice Girls, backstage in a colourless, airless, windowless suite at the then-named Nynex Arena, Manchester. Rumours were rife that one or all of the Girls were about to quit. They were then performing the exact same sleight of hand on the ambitions of suburban girls, on the exact same astronomical global platform that George and Andrew had for boys a generation earlier with Wham!. The UK showbiz press, a hardy, journeyman contingent as it turned out, had descended on the event and the quick, excitable rumble of impending world news began to fill the room. In the event, it came from unexpected sources. Mobile phones began buzzing before the girls took to the stage, all playing the same unexceptional ringtone. They were just there to announce extra tour dates, anyway.

One by one, the room emptied as the story filtered through from reporters’ respective news desks, of George Michael being caught with his pants down, coming on to an undercover LAPD officer at a latrine in Will Rogers’ public lavatories. Zip Me Up Before You Go Go had been born, the moment George Michael officially came, or was rather thrown out of the public closet.

For anyone keeping a close eye on his tale, the fifteen years prior follow the basic public relations’ rubric of keeping George’s sexuality hiding in plain sight. Decoys were planted in the press. The rumours would go away. Until they came back. Another decoy. Etc. While...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Note to Readers
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• One: Words to Dance to
• Two: Words of Joy
• Three: Words to Inspire Change
• Four: Words of Wisdom
• Artists
• A Note on the Endpapers and Maps
• About the Publisher