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As a young man, shame was a constant companion to my consideration of my sexuality. It made me question my sexual orientation: was I attracted to men, as I suspected, or did I simply have a desire for gratification?
When I tip-toed around the topic of queerness in conversations with past girlfriends, more than once it was made clear to me that bisexuality was an unattractive trait for a man to have. The shame heaped up. And yet my secret fantasies continued. It wasn’t just men I fantasised about, it was the possibility of different power dynamics, of multiple bodies, of feeling seen.
I think my father had something to do with this. He became a manipulative, and sometimes violent, alcoholic by my teenage years, and I came to associate addiction, anger and excess with him. My longing for sexual exploration felt like the early stages of the kind of lascivious male appetites that I knew could wreck lives. And so I bottled these feelings up.
This was a fool’s errand. I felt isolated and wary of other men. Then, a few years ago, when I was 23, I moved from the rural English town I grew up in to London. I came into contact with queer communities and saw that intimacy and love could take different shapes. But if something like that was out there for me, it still seemed a long way off. And then I listened to Faith by George Michael.
It was only after Michael died, in 2016, that I began to pay attention to his music, intrigued by the stories that began pouring out about the countless acts of generosity that he had kept to himself throughout his life. I had known little about him, beyond Careless Whisper and a handful of Wham! songs, and them I decided to listen to his debut solo album start to finish.
It was an era-defining album for the masses, and yet, when I first listened to it, I could have sworn it was written just for me. The first three tracks – Faith, Father Figure, I Want Your Sex – unashamedly celebrate sex as a site of play, connection and understanding in times of pain and confusion. I was enthralled.
On One More Try, Michael sings “’Cause, teacher, there are things that I don’t want to learn”. My mind raced back to my early sexual encounters with men. They were anonymous and short-lived, and afterwards I would leave in a hurry, grappling with guilt, fleeing from the spectre of my own sexuality. As I listened, I mourned the way my shame had robbed me of the learning potential of those experiences.
The often-overlooked Look at Your Hands felt like a slap round the face on that first listen. In it, Michael warns against settling for a life of repression and suburban mundanity. “Betcha don’t, betcha don’t, betcha don’t like your life,” he taunts his ex-lover. Was I also blindly heading towards a future where I would look back on my 20s as a wasteland of missed opportunities for sexual discovery?
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I finished listening to the album as if I was waking from a bad dream. It helped me clear the sleep out of my eyes and realise that I had nothing to be ashamed of, that my desire wasn’t something that needed to be suppressed.
I began to speak more openly with my girlfriend about wanting to explore sexually. She was accepting of who I am, and before long we were signing up for queer sex parties. I felt apprehension at first – would I be recognised as an impostor? But almost immediately, I got chatting to other queer people accepted me straight away. It was hugely liberating, being surrounded by like-minded people who have also overcome their shame.
Today, my sexuality is a big part of who I am. Sex is self-acceptance, exploration and communion. Though he’s no longer with us, I’ll always be grateful to George Michael for helping me to unshackle my sexuality from my shame.
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