I remember well the incident this documentary covers and, as a young (at the time!) out gay man, my revulsion at how the tabloid press was covering George Michael's (and my own!) sexuality. I'm fairly sure this was the final straw that enabled me to persuade my mum to give up buying the hateful Daily Mail. I was elated, until I found she'd switched to The Sun instead. :-(
The 'lewd act' itself? Well, yeah, it probably is a little sordid, but GM was only doing the same thing as thousands of other gay men at the time. Several of the newspaper clippings shown presented it as being a cheap thrill for the perverted. Doing it 'for the thrill' may have been the motivation in a small minority of the cases, but not many. For most, the risk of discovery was just another thing to be scared about. What the journalists who wrote about it at the time, and spoke of it in this documentary, fail to admit is that they themselves were a primary cause. It's probably hard for those being born around the time of the incident, or after it, to imagine not having the internet or apps like Grindr through which to meet like-minded men. The fear of becoming a few column inches in the local rag, or national press if you had any level of public recognition, was enough to make the idea of openly visiting a gay bar unthinkable.
Cruising was a fairly dumb thing for GM to do, given his global recognition and public image, and if the police hadn't arrested him on that occassion no doubt eventually one of his encounters would recognise him and go public with the story (for a few bucks and their fifteen minutes of fame). I can't help wondering if at some level, subconsciously probably, that's actually what he wanted to happen. Whilst the immediate aftermath can't have been anything but hurtful to all but the extremely thick-skinned, both his confidantes at the time and he himself spoke about how trapped he felt by his public image. Once the initial furore had become old news, it must have been a relief to finally be able to live just the one life as he wanted.
What I didn't recognise, in the months or even years that followed, was just how much of a sea change GM's handling of this incident brought about. Yes, there was Stonewall, and Pride marches, but this documentary brought home to me just how liberating it was for everyone else to have such a huge star, dripping with sex appeal, publicly say "Yeah, I'm gay ... so ****ing what?"
One thing I believe this documentary clearly highlighted is the deliberate obfuscation by the press of the difference between 'in the public interest' and 'of interest to the public', using the former as an excuse for publishing what actually belongs in the latter. It's something in which the public they spout 'have a right to know' are complicit. Drug dealing may be wrong, but if people weren't buying the drugs, there would soon be no dealers!
So the next time you come across one of the many pieces that purport to be 'news' but are really no more than an infringement of someone's privacy, turn the page / switch the channel / click away. You'll soon find that, in many cases, when you strip out what has no right to be there, there's little of substance left. That's the time to cancel your subscription and search instead for somewhere REAL news, that ought to be heard, can be found.