July 12, 2021 12:59 pm
On May 24, 1988, an amendment to the Local government act called clause 28 (section 28). This clause, passed by Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government, obliged local authorities to: “not intentionally promote homosexuality or publish material with the intention of promoting homosexuality” or “promote teaching in any state-funded school of ‘acceptability of homosexuality as an alleged family relationship ”.
It is a law that today we would not hesitate to define as discriminatory, born in a historical period in which LGBT + communities around the world were exterminated by AIDS and gays, lesbians and transs were generally seen by public opinion as smearers. In 1989, he remembers Maya De Leo in Queer: cultural history of the lgbt + community (Einaudi 2021), legal proceedings for consensual homosexual acts reach the maximum ever recorded, surpassing the numbers of the 1950s. In the UK, homosexuality, let us remember, was decriminalized in 1967. clause 28 it was definitively repealed only in 2000 in Scotland and in 2003 in the rest of the United Kingdom.
Some elements of this story seem to come back to the surface today, on the eve of the discussion in parliament of the Zan bill on homotransphobia. In the rambling public debate we are witnessing there is not so much talk of “homosexual propaganda” (at least not so explicitly) as of a phantom “gender theory” and the importance of protecting children from an unidentified conspiracy which, according to more enthusiastic commentators, it would lead to a rampant and dangerous sexual anarchy. In short, prejudices against LGBT + people never die (they are the same as in 1988) and above all there will always be someone on the more conservative and reactionary front ready to ride them.
In 1988, the now former pop star Boy George was an ideal target for the British media’s new hate campaign against gays. In the first half of the 1980s he had had unprecedented success with his band, the Culture Club, one of those British groups (along with Duran Duran, Eurythmics and Human League) who had led the so-called second british invasion of the US pop charts. Unlike most of those artists who played with androgyny without exposing themselves too much, Boy George (born George Alan O’Dowd in 1961) exhibited brazen effeminacy and above all declared himself openly gay. As long as he was successful, his harmless pop doll appearance made him loved by everyone and unassailable; as success began to wane and when her heroin addiction was exposed by the British tabloids, her life began to fall apart. By 1988, hating Boy George and hitting him publicly with all kinds of homophobic slurs had become a national sport. To defend it there were not even gay associations because the clause 28 he had dismantled most of them. The George O’Dowd of the late 1980s was struggling to get out of addictions and keep the pieces of a lost career together, but he did so with the irony and swagger of all time. Boy George had hard skin, nothing but pop doll.
The recovery of bodies and minds
In those years dissent traveled through the underground network of the first clandestine raves and the music of the rescue and the liberation of bodies and minds was the first acid house. After second british invasion, this time from Ibiza and no longer from London, he left there second summer of love, a long summer of love, smiley pills and dance music like never before. Boy George is adopted by this new music scene: when the circus moves from Ibiza to London, George is present at all the first acid house evenings, such as the now legendary Spectrum and Shoom, and arrives to open his own record label, the More Protein, dedicated to dance and ragamuffin music. And in 1988 Boy George launched into the production of a new single, a protest song against homophobia by Margaret Thatcher with an unequivocal title: No clause 28.
The piece opens with a voice that sounds like that of the first minister: “The goal of this government is to make everyone’s life as unhappy as possible” and then a tight beat and a barrage of samples (including Housequake by Prince, released just the year before). Boy George’s voice, despite the harshness of the times, does not lose its pop sweetness when he sings:
To deflate our pride
they tell us we celebrate it
it is a social suicide
Even the video, covered with colorful flowers, acid colors and smiles, is in line with the times: a bit of a clandestine rave flyer and a bit of Gilbert & George. And then tank tops, wide pants and baby carriers, the perfect uniform of raver. In his autobiography Take it like a man, Boy George nostalgically remembers the fashion of those times: he who had spent the eighties wearing make-up and dressing, now experiences the liberating joy of going dancing in just a pair of yoga pants and a tank top.
After a decade of arrogant individualism, the acid house scene, with the help of MDMA, invites singles to melt, to get lost in an anonymous crowd united by music, sweat and endorphins. For Boy George it is pure liberation: being able to disappear into the music while out of that bubble the newspapers continue to show his emaciated and make-up-free face with headlines like “Fag and drug addict”, “Ruined”, “Is it the end of Boy George?”. When LGBTQ + communities talk about “safe spaces” they speak of this feeling: that of entering a place where you know you will not be judged, teased or attacked.
Jesus loves you
In the two years between 1988 and 1990 Boy George begins to piece together the pieces of his life and career. After a trip to India, hilariously recounted in his autobiography, he will return home with only partial spiritual enlightenment and with the conviction that all religions, even the best ones, always have it with gays in the end. Despite this awareness, he approaches the Hare Krishna and begins to incorporate in his look and in his music various freak elements that would not have disfigured in the Magic shop by Franco Battiato: sari, pashminas, cimbalini, tambourines, chants and mantras. He returns from India above all with the intention of no longer being Boy George: he signs his pieces with the pseudonym Angela Dust (from angel dust, the slang name of phencyclidine, a powerful hallucinogen), and puts together a new project who decides to call Jesus Loves You, Jesus loves you.
In 1990 it comes out The martyr mantras, the Jesus Loves You album. Boy George’s name appears nowhere: there is only his solarized face on the cover amidst a riot of If and graphics between psychedelic and cyberpunk.
The album is all wrong but it is the most honest thing Boy George has ever produced: it has no direction precisely because it is the diary of a transformation and awakening to a new awareness. Pieces already published appear, No clause 28 in a new remix by Pascal Gabriel and the exceptional After the love, perhaps the best dance piece by Boy George composed, ironically, with Jon Moss, the drummer of the Culture Club with whom he had had, in the eighties, a sentimental relationship as secret as it is unhealthy.
Generations of love is the first single from the album and is remixed by Paul Oakenfold, the DJ whose birthday in Ibiza unleashed the wave of second summer of love. It is a hymn to unity and to listening to the most marginalized voices: “I don’t need redemption or government plans”, sings Boy George in his most angelic voice. Generations of love it speaks of awareness and pride (not only gay) and it is a piece that, even if it is hardly remembered today, has left important traces in those who were twenty years old at that time. The writer Matteo B. Bianchi has titled his own Generations of love his debut novel in 1999, the story in a very pop key and finally without too many dramas of an Italian coming out.
The martyr mantras, in its disorder, it is full of hidden pearls: I specialise in loneliness is a great quality rnb ballad that works whether sung delicately by Boy George or played harder by dance singer Ultra Naté. And also the bizarre Always love You has its own irresistible contagiousness. Bow down mister, with its choirs Hare Krishna and the participation of Indian singer Asha Bhosle, the famous voice of Bollywood musicals, remains one of the most bizarre pop singles ever made and had a surreal success in Germany and Switzerland. The Jesus Loves You operation allowed Boy George to get up and refocus his talent but above all it allowed all of us growing up in those years to reflect on how homophobia and marginalization, especially when they are encouraged and ridden. from politics, they can be fought hard-nosed. With activism and information first of all, but also with the liberating force of dance and music.
Jesus Loves You
The martyr mantras
Virgin, 1990
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