Boy George: This is the world I was fighting for back in 1984

[stevenleser]

https://www.yahoo.com/music/boy-george-this-is-the-world-i-was-fighting-for-124819130426.html



Back in 1972, a young South Londoner named George Alan O'Dowd saw androgynous glamazon David Bowie on Top of the Pops, and it changed his life. Roughly a decade later, when O'Dowd — now cheekily known as Boy George — famously performed on the same BBC program with his band Culture Club, his appearance had a similarly seismic effect on many starry-eyed pop fans. Wearing full-face kabuki makeup, flowing dreadlocks, and a knee-grazing smock dress, this girlish Boy played with concepts of sexuality and “gender-bending” in a way that was possibly even more radical and shocking in the '80s than Bowie had been in the '70s.

Flash-forward 30 years, as Culture Club embarks on a much-hyped (and already once-delayed) reunion tour, and the world has drastically changed. As George points out, now “Sam Smith can say, 'I’m gay,’ and no one goes on about it,” and Caitlyn Jenner has been enthusiastically embraced by the media and public at large. George is humble, but acknowledges that he and Culture Club helped pave the way.

“I always think that change is like a daisy chain,” says George, speaking exclusively to Yahoo Music in the Men’s Chorus dressing room at one of Culture Club tour’s stops, Los Angeles’s Greek Theatre. “People that kind of made my life easier, like Bowie, Quentin Crisp, Oscar Wilde, Sylvester, Klaus Nomi, it goes on and on and on… there are people that get the glory. And maybe I was one of the ones that got the glory, in the same way as Caitlyn Jenner [is now]; you know, there’s a lot of other transgender people, but Caitlyn is in the moment when people are willing to embrace that. I think that’s such a beautiful thing.

"And in a funny sort of way, it’s the world that I wanted to be in. It’s that world I was fighting for in 1984. That was what I wanted. I wanted people not to care about whether you were gay, straight, black, white, transgender, whatever it may be… That being said, there’s more work to be done… I still want to change the world, absolutely. And I feel like we did back then was part of that.”

[haikugal]

1. Some parts of the world are catching up! nt