The 1988 Show
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air in public that I'm a little nervous about. . . I’m just going to put it out
there, loud and proud . . . I’m single.”^ In the days that followed, no one
was really clear about what had happened. Foster seemed angry about
something, but had she come out? Had she told us it was none of our
business? Had she just been drinking too much?
And so, what of George Michael?
Gay leather culture began in the 1950s, most likely as a reaction
to World War II. According to Robert Marks Rindinger, many “returning
servicemen brought with them to civilian life customs based on military
social traditions.” Apart from being their first experience of extended
male camaraderie, the war also taught men the love of uniforms and
especially leather, the value of exchanging insignia “between friends
serving in different branches or units of the armed forces as a mark of
their bond, a practice which provided the basis for the creation and
formal exchange of friendship pins within leather society,” and it taught
them, simply, a love of adrenalin that transferred to a less violent outlet
in peacetime: motorcycle culture.* The leather look, and especially the
leather jacket, became associated with masculinity: straight, gay, and all
points between. Already it had made its mark in Hollywood—from
James Dean to Arthur Fonzarelli. And in the music business, it ran the
gambit from Elvis to Glenn Hughes of The Village People. In some
ways, leather was playing the role of a dual cultural signifier—^reading
different ways based on the receiver’s own past and background
knowledge. More interestingly, however, we might say that it was simply
coming to be associated with “the masculine” in general: with being a
man. The fact that being a man could include being sexually attracted to
another man just suggests how fluid such a category always is, even if
the culture is unwilling to address and outwardly acknowledge such
fluidity. And thus, in choosing to dress as he did, George Michael was
not only wearing a costume as a performer in a video, but was also
wearing a costume for a performance of his sexuality, of his masculinity.
It was a costume that could have multiple meanings—letting him express
and be many different things at the same time.
But all performances have multiple meanings. It is one of the
most wondrous and enjoyable things about art. Hamlet means something
different to me today than he meant to me in 1988. But so, too, do I mean
some different, because I am just a performance. No matter what clothes
I am wearing, they are always a costume. No matter what words I am
speaking, it is always in character. The character shifts and changes and
means something different to different people at all times because that’s