4 August

This is George Michael as a kid. I watched the Wham movie (excellent), and it resonated with the post I did about Freddie Mercury yesterday. Like Mercury, Michael was a social outsider all through his life. You can see it in the photo, it was Andrew Ridgeley who rescued him at school. His entire career, and the docu-movie makes it explicit, was less about music for him than it was about making a space in the world where he could be accepted. This is what Michael, Mercury and also stars like Elton John did. Being gay and often social outsiders on top of that, they created larger-than-life characters with their huge talent that smashed through the social barriers, to give them a place in the world. For Michael and Mercury, that also proved to be fatal. Living that pretend life of stardom killed them. Elton John has said he’s only still alive because he was very lucky. Underneath the fake smiling veneers of social lives, society is brutal. Lethally brutal, social media has enormously magnified the damage, now that intense social jostling for status of high school continues into old age. Without international fame Michael, Mercury and Elton would never have been accepted in society. It took that level of superstardom to break through the social barriers. And for two of them, again it also killed them. These are tragic stories, hidden by fame.