When I go onstage, I’m going to work …I feel like my performance is about an emotional connection. I want to connect with people, whether it’s like a romantic song or a happy song.
When Culture Club broke up, I hadn’t been going out a lot because we’d been working all the time, so I suddenly had this period of leisure. And it was just around the time that the whole acid house thing kicked off in London.
I was about 16 when punk started to happen. It was so exciting. You had a social depression going on in the U.K. There was a sanitation strike. London was really grim, gray. You had Margaret Thatcher coming in. It was a really revolutionary time.
Maybe without me, there wouldn’t be Adam Lambert. Without Bowie, there wouldn’t be me. Without Quentin Crisp, there wouldn’t have been Bowie. So everything is part of a big daisy chain.
The New Romantic scene was so tiny. Although it got lots of mileage in the media, it was a really small club with only a core group of people. As it got more popular, kids started to come from the suburbs all dressed up, but it -really wasn’t as big as it looked.
I cried. I absolutely wept, because it wasn’t the usual stuff like, “Oh, he was a drug addict and he did this and that…” It was really looking at the music and it was really complimentary. It was a huge thing.
As a kid, I would’ve loved to get a tweet from David Bowie or Joan Rivers or Tom Cruise. It’s great that you can communicate with people and it’s instant.
My family knew I was gay when I was 15, long before I got famous. But it’s a very different thing coming out to your family and coming out to the universe. That’s a big step.
