"I spent years growing up being told what my sexuality was"
About this Quote
There is a quiet violence baked into being “told” who you are, and George Michael makes that verb do the heavy lifting. The line isn’t framed as a coming-out confession or a plea for tolerance; it’s an indictment of a culture that treats sexuality like tabloid property. “I spent years growing up” stretches the harm across formative time, reminding you this wasn’t one bad headline but a long apprenticeship in someone else’s story.
The subtext is about power: who gets to name you, and at what cost. For a pop star whose image was meticulously marketed and relentlessly policed, “sexuality” wasn’t just private identity; it was currency, rumor, leverage. The phrase “what my sexuality was” is deliberately clinical, almost bureaucratic, as if the public assembled a dossier and stamped it approved. That distance captures a specific kind of erasure: not the absence of identity, but the replacement of it with a narrative that sells.
Context matters because Michael’s career peaked in an era when mainstream pop demanded a carefully managed heterosexual sheen, while British tabloids hunted “scandal” with puritan glee. After his 1998 arrest and subsequent public scrutiny, he became a case study in the double bind of fame: audiences demand authenticity, then punish you for the version they didn’t pre-authorize.
The line’s sting comes from its restraint. No melodrama, no grand theory, just the blunt accounting of years lost to other people’s certainty. It’s less about secrecy than reclamation: refusing the crowd’s right to define the self.
The subtext is about power: who gets to name you, and at what cost. For a pop star whose image was meticulously marketed and relentlessly policed, “sexuality” wasn’t just private identity; it was currency, rumor, leverage. The phrase “what my sexuality was” is deliberately clinical, almost bureaucratic, as if the public assembled a dossier and stamped it approved. That distance captures a specific kind of erasure: not the absence of identity, but the replacement of it with a narrative that sells.
Context matters because Michael’s career peaked in an era when mainstream pop demanded a carefully managed heterosexual sheen, while British tabloids hunted “scandal” with puritan glee. After his 1998 arrest and subsequent public scrutiny, he became a case study in the double bind of fame: audiences demand authenticity, then punish you for the version they didn’t pre-authorize.
The line’s sting comes from its restraint. No melodrama, no grand theory, just the blunt accounting of years lost to other people’s certainty. It’s less about secrecy than reclamation: refusing the crowd’s right to define the self.
Quote Details
| Topic | Equality |
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