From the Vault: Boy George on bisexuality, butch versus tenderness, and the difficult side of drag

By creammagazine, July 18, 2025

Boy George has a new album out called SE18. With its cover art emblazoned in red, green and gold motifs, you can expect to hear a lot of reggae influences on it. And George does reggae really good. Just think of his hit Everything I Own, and even the nods to reggae on earlier Culture Club songs such as White Boy, Love Twist, and of course Do You Really Want To Hurt Me.

Hearing the new record via fab vinyl/CD retail platform ElasticStage.com, I can say it’s actually an absolute all-round genre-bender, and any reggae elements pay due respect to Jamaican greats as much as they are fresh-sounding. To celebrate the album’s release, I’ve dusted off a classic interview with George, posted here in full and appearing in my new anthology Conversations with Culture Icons, which is available through Amazon and in select physical bookstores.

George is in great company in the book, alongside music luminaries such as Patti Smith, Nick Cave, Tori Amos, Tina Turner, kd lang, Dave Grohl, Dave Gahan, and many more.

This interview was conducted in 1995.

Antonino Tati

KARMA CHAMELEON

One Sunday afternoon in the Spring of 1982, I had an epiphany in the middle of watching Australian music show Countdown. I was with my little sister, Lorena, and some friends of Mum’s, the lot of us huddled around the TV set, debating if we were witnessing a girlish man or a handsome woman on the screen. Our ambiguous subject wore braided hair and a long dress-shirt scrawled with what looked like Hebrew writing, singing ‘Do you really want to hurt me?’. He/she was in some kind of cabaret bar, the faces on the folk in the video’s audience looking as puzzled as ours. By the end of the clip, we learnt that the artist’s name was Boy-Something and that our object of wonderment was indeed a he. The band he fronted was called Culture Club and, as it turned out, the text on the frontman’s shirt translated to “culture” and “association” in English.

Aged just 12 at the time, I was nowhere near even thinking about sexuality but I did sense a certain affiliation with the flamboyant artist I was seeing on screen. Actually, I first felt somewhat paranoid, wondering if anyone in the room could tell I was blushing.

My mixed thoughts soon morphed into enlightenment as I realised this new pop star – singing about strength over persecution – seemed to be celebrating a mixed-up, colourful kind of multiculture.

Little did 12-year-old me imagine that I’d be sitting across the table from this Boy a decade or so on, chatting over coffee about sex and sexuality, culture and class, and the clashing of gold and silver jewellery.

ORDINARY ALIEN

Boy George is still quite the chameleon, although his costumes are less colour by numbers these days, more two-toned. The changes instead occur in his public persona: one day he’ll say absolutely no to signing autographs and will give television reporters a hard time with his one-word responses, the next he’ll play the popstar part perfectly and give enough quotes to fill a few paragraphs of an autobiography which, incidentally, he’s just released. I get him on a good day, and forsake a cup of tea for a long black coffee at our meeting in a small café in Sydney’s The Rocks.

“What’s a long black coffee?” asks George. “Does it come in a tall glass?”

He himself opts for coffee and cream.

Boy George is in Sydney to perform at Mardi Gras – as the headline act, of course. Though he’s somewhat dressed down today, he is wearing a selection of silver and gold rings across the knuckles of both hands. I dare tell him that you’re not supposed to mix silver and gold jewellery as it can seem garish. He retorts, “Look at the size of these hands.” [I realise then, George has big hands – in fact, he used to be a boxer]. “Nobody is going to comment on the mix of my jewellery when they see these huge hands.” He’s right, his hands alone are kind of intimidating.

AT: Hi George. It seems you’ve toned the wardrobe down a bit. Is that a conscious effort or something that’s happened casually?

BG: I think it’s more to do with the choices I have now. I don’t have to, but there are times when I dress really over-the-top. Before Culture Club I dressed up because it was something to do and it was fun. And then it sort of became a career and I almost got trapped in that outfit and people expected me to look like that all the time. I suppose as I got older I got more comfortable with myself and I just felt like I didn’t have to do this for anybody but myself. But there are days when I get up, or nights when I go out, and I think, “Right, I’m really gonna go for it”, although it’s not an obsession like it used to be. Certainly, the drag and the mastery of disguises is very much a part of me, particularly when I’m making videos.

AT: You’ve had some renowned quotes published: saying you sometimes prefer a cup of tea to having sex; that you’re Catholic in your complications and Buddhist in your aspirations… How does it feel to be so inscribed in pop culture, and at what point in your career did you start being desensitised by your own quotes?

BG: I don’t think I’ll ever be desensitised. I don’t collect cuttings anymore and it’s not an obsession like it used to be. But I enjoy giving promotion, although I find it a bit stifling. Like sometimes when you go on TV and you don’t get to say anything really intelligent. You’re answering the same questions you answered ten years ago, like “What should I call you: Boy or George?”… “Do you still take drugs or is the drug thing behind you?”… On TV, they don’t want you to say anything but in print I think you have a lot more freedom. And I have got a lot more to say.

AT: Could it be because traditional television is so commercially-oriented and people like yourself are well into deconstructing traditionalism?

BG: I think people are still quite uncomfortable with certain aspects of gay culture, certainly the sexual aspect. You can be camp during the Mardi Gras but the minute you talk political about your feelings or what you do sexually, people become unsettled and don’t want to hear it. In a sense I feel it’s a kind of mission of mine to promote not necessarily pornography, but indeed the sexuality that exists in gay culture. My video Love Is Leaving has been interesting.

All the TV shows have just shown little bits of it and have said, “We can’t show it all because it’s men touching each other”. But all they’re doing is dancing. They don’t actually kiss although it is inferred. But then, football players are always touching each other on the pitch…

For me, showing men touching isn’t a political gesture; it’s a part of my life. I sleep with men, I embrace men, I like to see men being affectionate with each other. And I actually think that one of the biggest things missing in gay culture is tenderness.” If you look at any of our magazines or any of our porno videos, it’s all fucking and aggression; it’s all “Get on your knees and suck my dick”. That’s something I enjoy, but I think tenderness is something that also really needs to be put across.

“For me, showing men touching isn’t a political gesture; it’s a part of my life. I sleep with men, I embrace men, I like to see men being affectionate with each other. And I actually think that one of the biggest things missing in gay culture is tenderness.”

AT: There’s also the bitchy aspectof the gay community that might need some tending to…

BG: I think the bitchiness is a defence mechanism. You tend to find camper gay people are the ones that are the most defensive because they have a lot more to deal with. If you’re a drag queen, you’re putting your head on a chopping block every day of your life and so that makes you defensive. Even in gay culture, there’s a lot of animosity towards camp, and a lot of gay people want to disown it. That’s something that really disturbs me because I see it as a form of treachery. If you go back to the 1920s or the 1930s, camp was the only way to be counted. We were called fairies but you had to be effeminate in order for people to realise that you were different. So camp has a very important role in our history; it’s very much woven into my act, and I’m very protective of that.

AT: Do your Buddhist beliefs incorporate the idea that you were a gay man in past lives?

BG: Well my views on sexuality are contentious anyway. I don’t believe there’s such a thing as gay or straight. I think the only thing that exists is sexuality. Everybody is sexual, and all sexuality is fragile. To me, a truly evolved individual is bisexual, or at least open to the possibility of being bisexual. I don’t consider myself to be liberated because I sleep with men. There are things about women that I find attractive, although the idea [of sleeping with women] is something that I’m not comfortable with because it’s kind of too late in my life. What I know is that I enjoy male company and sex, and to go out of that would be too threatening for me.

AT: So you haven’t yet reached bisexual nirvana, so to speak?

BG: I haven’t at all. When I was 13 I kissed girls and touched them. I got aroused by them but I never actually had penetrative sex with a woman. Then I started going out with boys and there was a period when I first came out and I thought “Women, yuk, the idea of it makes me sick”. Then, when I went to group therapy, I suddenly had to undo a lot of my sexual perceptions.

“[Pauline Hanson] is not very clever. She looks more like a country singer than a politician: part Anne Murray, part Eva Braun.”

AT: Do LGBT communities have a lot of work to do on the road to acceptance?

BG: I think so, yes. Outside of it, they think our culture is all about fucking. They don’t think of us as being emotional or spiritual. For a kid growing up, getting all that information about gay culture is kind of terrifying. Of course, none of us are concrete, and all human beings are a multitude of feelings and experiences. What we do sexually is a big part of what we are, but there’s more.

AT: We have a politician in Australia named Pauline Hanson who was in strife earlier in her career for homophobic comments and, more recently, racist remarks.

BG: I read a thing about her in England and I think politicians who preach racial hatred – any hatred – are immoral and it should be illegal. We clearly live in a multicultural world and I think anyone who preaches racism or homophobia should be gagged and tied to a tree in the outback. Australia is Aboriginal country. People came there and settled, or they were sent there and settled. It’s almost ridiculous to say she wants to curb immigration, because that’s actually the foundation of Australia. She’s not very clever. She looks more like a country singer than a politician: part Anne Murray, part Eva Braun.

POSTSCRIPT

This interview was conducted some 30 years ago and it’s surreal to see how far we’ve come with LGBTQI rights and visibility, and how far we’ve got to go.

In the current sexual-political climate, George’s words are as relevant as they ever were. Just as we thought things were getting better for LGBTQI culture, suddenly a new obstacle has struck: the big queer backlash, especially that stemming from the more conservative side of the aisle. Drag queens are being persecuted simply for wanting to read to children; athletes are being criticised for happening to have an extra chromosome; and trans folk are having a hard time online thanks to some of our biggest cultural influencers, such as author JK Rowling and comedian Dave Chappelle (not to be confused with photographer David LaChapelle whose work has always been proudly queer).

Anyway, hopefully steadfast artists like Boy George will continue to bring stronger queer sensibilities to the fore, so that gender and sexuality won’t be such big issues to future generations. Already, Gen Z appear to not think of sexuality as a label, and by the time Gen Alpha have grown up, hopefully everybody will finally realise: your sex is what you’re born with – male, female, or intersex genitalia. Sexuality is what you choose to explore – and you should celebrate it unashamedly, whether you’re monogamous and vanilla, gay and in an open relationship, or pansexual and proud of it.

As for gender, seriously people, the entire gender spectrum is all of ours for the taking, and limiting ourselves to one gender ‘identity’ would be just that: limiting. I say be what you want when you want – masculine one moment, feminine the next; heck, who even has time or energy to classify these days? When we truly realise that all gender is a construct, only then will we feel free in simply being and letting others be.

Boy George has just released his new solo album ‘SE18’ through ElasticStage.com. The album is available exclusively on vinyl and CD since George feels this is what fans prefer to own. That we certainly do.

This interview is published in the new music interview anthology Conversations with Culture Icons by Cream’s founding editor, Antonino Tati, available now through Amazon.