In the mid-1980s, the bomb that I expected to explode the whole world into a nuclear winter, and a bomb Trump recently reactivated with a tweet about reviving the arms race with other superpowers, became the implosion of a disease that was spread sexually, AIDS. I became sexual at a time when precisely the thing to avoid was sex. As a consequence, I did not have sex until I was almost 22.
In 1987, a year when there was still no light in the long night of that disease, and no idea what the future of human sexuality might be, the British pop singer and former member of Wham! George Michael shocked me and millions of other teens with a tune that was pointblank about fucking, "I Want Your Sex." I was not prudish. I was fine with smutty pop, but it had to be from other ages. In the 1970s, a safe fuck was, for a hetero man, a woman who couldn't get pregnant; in the 1980s, it was masturbating. Michael was singing about the joy of sex like it was still the 1970s. What was this about? Was he mad? Was he dangerous? I certainly thought he was, and that uneasy feeling has not left me to this day—two days after we learned about Michael's death. My generation and milieu didn't have sex; we just talked about it.
In what way was Michael dangerous? In the prologue to Chenjerai Hove’s excellent collection of short essays and sketches on life in Harare at the middle of the 90s, Shabeen Tales, the Dutch publisher Jan Kees van de Werk gives this description of one night in a club in the capital of the country, Zimbabwe, at the end of the first wave of the AIDS crisis: "One evening I go out with a couple of people to a township. The night club is a bare space with wooden tables, a bar and kitchen. The band plays non-stop from nine in the evening to four in the morning. Music gives time wings. Men dance with one another. Women dance with one another. Sometimes they mix. Dance, dance, dance. Alone with the music, hardly any talk. One remark keeps coming back to mind: '..We are in shit, man. Deep shit. Come on, dance, man. Dance!'”
George Michael's celebration of sex at a time when it transmitted death sentence after death sentence and seemed to be unstoppable was, for me, like this dancing in deep shit.
Editor's note: the Stranger would like to point out that George Michael was clearly aware of the potentially dangerous nature of his proposition in "I Want Your Sex," but, as he sings in his chart-topping hit, "One More Try," Michael had "had enough of danger" and was willing to be open and honest about his needs and expectations. And yet, as Michael also sings in "One More Try," if the object of his desire does not want to establish a longterm relationship (perhaps in order to reduce the risk of STI transmission [c.f. "I'm looking out for angels / Just trying to find some peace"]) despite making empty suggestions otherwise, then that person needs to just let him goooOOoOooOohhhhOoooOOhh. In this way, Michael offers a model for freedom to have sex with who you want and freedom from having sex with someone who ain't treatin' you right, heroically increasing the complexity of sexual relationships during that difficult decade of forced onanism.
