Johann Hari

Zip me up before you go-go. Don’t let the Sun (reporter) go down on me. Yes, when George Michael was caught cruising on Hampstead Heath, the stale sniggers were dug up from the archives where they have been lying ever since he was seized by an upstanding member of the Los Angeles Police Department in 1998. Cue the shrieking homophobes, crying that having consensual sex at 2.30am in a known cruising ground – where no children or unsuspecting members of the public could amble along – is “vile behaviour”, “sordid”, “an insult to all decent people.”

And gay London has asked as one – why? The only moral question when it comes to sex is consent. George Michael consented. His sexual partner consented. Every single person who saw them together – including the stalkarazzi who took the pictures – consented to be in an area where they were only going to see one thing. And nobody can say George cheated his fans by selling them a fake image either. Last time I saw him, with that articulate, therapised candour of his he said – on the record – that he still seeks out “a huge amount” of sexual partners, admitting he snuffled out some on cruising-grounds while others were rent-boys. (Sadly, he was not saying this as part of a chat-up routine, but George, if you’re reading, my fee starts at half a million, and I am marginally more attractive than a 58 year old Geordie trucker. Well, I am younger, anyway.)

The critics are belching out on the stale air of Puritanism – a mentality defined by Oscar Wilde as “the deathly fear that someone, somewhere is having fun.” How dare these consenting people give each other a fleeting moment of pleasure? But while the moral criticisms can be easily waved away, George is self-aware enough to know there are real reasons to feel sad about cruising – and particularly its ugly toilet-based sister, cottaging. They are the practices and the mentality of the closet. If you read Matt Houlbrook’s fascinating history ‘Queer London’, you see that these practices evolved because gay men – terrorised and tyrannised by the police and the ever-present threat of prison or blackmail – could not meet any other way. They gathered in the dark because there was no light.

But that leaves the mystery – why have cruising and cottaging persisted in liberal London, long after the decriminalisation of homosexuality? Some people thought George was making a crude plea for sympathy when he mentioned this week how he is haunted by the suicide of his closeted, crushed uncle in the 1950s. But I think he was making a more subtle point. George is part of an older generation of gay men, and the face he is from a very conservative immigrant community locates him even further back on the long road to progress. He didn’t come out or find a lover – as opposed to a shag – until he was in his thirties.

He is closer psychologically to his uncle – one of the countless generations of gay people lost to homophobia – than he is to the generation of gay men I belong to, who find the idea of having sex in a toilet or behind a bush pretty grim.

He belongs to a generation that couldn’t adjust to open homosexuality, who preferred to remain a penis poked through a wall or a shadow in the night rather than a lingering romance in the lights. They reject gaydar or a gay club because it might lead to something. They want their sexuality to remain nothing.

None of the young gay men I know go cruising except one. He is from a Somalian family who would kill him – literally – if they knew he was gay. He is pickled in self-hate, disgusted by his lusts and by his body. When he heads to the Heath, he finds men like himself. “They are mostly married, or from an older generation, or from ethnic minorities like me”, he explains - people stick stuck behind a rusty closet door, unable to come out for fear of what people will say.

The homophobia that has been sprayed over George Michael’s bleak but harmless behaviour this week will help to keep them there, stuck in a melancholy, don't-tell-me-your-name rut.