Eminentoes

...Cheek-tocheek has an altogether different meaning in songs like Michael's hit "I Want Your Sex," in which it's more likely people will end up in the infectious disease ward than in anything resembling love: "Don't you think it's time you had sex with me / Sex with me / Sex with me / Have sex with me...

...As pop duo Wham!, the pair looked set to carve out a glorious career as goofy pin-up boys whose appeal to teenaged girls was apparently not diminished at all when it was revealed that the lads posed for press photos with shuttlecocks stuffed in their trousers...

...Little Georgios had got it into his head to become a pop star by age 7, and might have made it even earlier than he did if only he'd been able to resist the sensual temptations of the Greek islands—the food, that is...

...He insists on what the record business calls "complete creative control," which is what the rest of us know as being a total pain in the neck...

...Given that his videos have featured every thinkable variety of sexual suggestion, and his lyrics often border on the obscene, it's hard to think how much less repressed George Michael imagines he can be...

...Unlike other fashionable rockers, Michael had always maintained an image that was more squeaky-clean Walton than sordid john-boy...

...Indeed he does Narcissus one better, and gets other people to watch him enjoying himself, too...

...But eventually Michael grew restless and broke up the group, declaring that his partner had accepted that "what I was doing was going to be so huge that neither of us thought there would be any point in trying to collaborate when it would just dilute what I was doing...

...In the 1960's a friend of mine threw his entire collection of one star's records right through the window after learning the singer was gay...

...He conducted himself with such consummate discretion that when American commentators saw him enter Westminster Abbey for the funeral of Princess Diana, they didn't even recognize him...

...EMINENTOES by Marc Carnegie Out of the Water Closet W hen Georgios Kyriacos Panayiotou dropped his trousers in the men's room at Will Rogers Memorial Park in Beverly Hills, and invited the guy in the next cubicle to watch as he pleasured himself, the man declined the invitation—perhaps keeping in mind that old warning about Greeks baring gifts...

...Around the world, newspapers featured accounts by other men who claimed that the singer had solicited them in similar circumstances...

...They are caught up in themselves, and perhaps none more so than Michael...

...A fellow rock star turned journalist even MARC CARNEGIE is correspondent-at-large for The American Spectator...

...He wanted them to know: "I am OK...

...his latest, filled with discreet homosexual references, was dedicated to one Anselmo Feleppa, a fashion designer "friend" who died of AIDS in 1993...

...For once, at least, you get the feeling that George Michael knows what he's talking about...

...With that kind of an audience, you can understand why his record company, not to mention the singer himself, wanted to keep it secret that Michael rows his boat toward the other shore...

...I have no problem with people knowing I am in a relationship with a man," Michael declared, revealing that he shares a Los Angeles home with his boyfriend, Kenny...

...With an estimated fortune of $ioo million, of course, he's actually a little bit better off than that...

...Like that other famous Greek, Narcissus, he enjoys nothing so much as self-regard (if only from the left...

...That may seem an odd worry for a man who likes showing off his manhood, but then Michael is no ordinary artistic genius...

...Moreover, he said, the incident would help him "try to understand my own sexuality better...

...For a while Michael went round telling people that Feleppa was the person who made him realize how "repressed and uptight" he really was—which just goes to show how much pop music has altered what society thinks of as mainstream...

...But then, as the saying goes, they don't write 'em like they used to...

...Well, you can't say he doesn't get his point across...

...It's difficult to know who was more surprised: the man, who turned out to be an undercover cop, or Panayiotou, who turned out to be an undercover pop star, better known to the world as George Michael...

...My friend had courted his wife to the singer's romantic crooning, danced cheek-tocheek with her to those songs, and it genuinely disgusted him that, while the singer sang so about boy-girllove behind the mike, in reality he was thinking of some Mike's behind...

...I do not feel any George Michael wanted your sex, but settled for his own...

...I f so, it was a slavery he had been chasing all his life...

...As a solo artist his records have gradually gotten weightier and more pompous...

...Just as with his escapade in the toilet at Will Rogers ("I never met a man I didn't like") Park, Michael obviously likes to take matters into his own hand...

...and you can't help but wonder if Michael himself wouldn't be better off riding the waves rather than cruising the lays...

...On his latest record he scorns celebrities, "Counting the cost of your desire to be seen...

...I want to f--k you...

...As for his millions of fans...

...For years the singer insisted on being photographed only from the left, among other things, and spent $7 million suing the Sony Corporation, claiming that its various contractual obligations and insufficiently enthusiastic marketing had left him in a state of "professional slavery...

...64 June 1998 • The American Spectator shame, and neither do I think I should...

...There was a time when news of such shenanigans would have sent a star's career right down the toilet...

...But within days of the arrest, Michael had become the latest winner of the Hugh Grant Sex Appeal Award—given semi-regularly to the English celebrity who gets arrested while appealing for sex in greater Hollywood...

...But after the news was out, and so was he, the singer sang a different and almost defiant tune during his post-arrest appearance on CNN...

...His ex-partner, a very likeable (and very straight) The American Spectator June 1998 His ex-partner, a very likable bloke named Andrew Ridgley, now spends his days surfing off the coast of Cornwall...

...Paparazzi photos showed Michael prowling parks in search of trade, repeatedly going in and out of public washrooms for a variety of solo performances...

...Despite an ambitious 15-year career which has shifted more than loo million records, Michael apparently still preferred being a flash in the can...

...But then pop stars, like most modern celebrities, don't pay much regard to what society thinks...

...What's probably been the most difficult part of this episode for him is the loss of control: over his image, over what people see of him...

...77 bloke named Andrew Ridgley, now spends his days collecting royalty checks and surfing off the coast of Cornwall...

...Michael was always hopelessly chubby, and only until a school chum with similar ambitions forced him to diet did his career, along with his body, start to take shape...

...4 65...

...revealed that the singer's promiscuity had been an open secret in the industry for years, and that, by age 19, he was known on the London gay circuit as the "Toilet Queen of Boreham Wood...

...It was a classic case of a performer misreading his audience...

...The young girls who fill the front rows of his sold-out concerts get the picture, anyway: they routinely scream out to him between numbers, "George, I want to have your baby...