6 Lessons Learned Fighting Oppressive Regimes While Trying to Protect People and Planet
Monday, 26 December 2016 13:11
Odendahl writes: "Over the last decade, I have worked as an environmental and human-rights philanthropist trying to protect people and the planet, some of that inside oppressive and authoritarian regimes. Here are six lessons I learned."
A rising sun and Earth's horizon are featured in this image photographed by an Expedition 13 crew member on the International Space Station. (photo: NASA)
6 Lessons Learned Fighting Oppressive Regimes While Trying to Protect People and Planet
By Terry Odendahl, EcoWatch
26 December 16
he U.S. is bracing for President-elect Donald Trump. All initial indications are that the U.S. is in for a dramatic change of leadership, more like some of the authoritarian regimes we are used to reading about in other parts of the world. Over the last decade, I have worked as an environmental and human-rights philanthropist trying to protect people and the planet, some of that inside oppressive and authoritarian regimes.
1. Small is better. Smaller organizations are more nimble, move more swiftly to take action, and are often more aggressive in their work and tactics. Authoritarian regimes often move swiftly and with little public process, and so the reaction from environmental and humanitarian groups needs to be similar.
2. Grassroots and local groups can be more effective. When environmental harm happens, it almost always happens on a local scale—an oil spill, a dam proposal, a timber sale, a power-plant polluter, etc. Local people are harmed, and so local groups are often the best and most effective voice that need to be supported to combat that harm.
3. Women, indigenous people, and people of color are excellent activists and spokespersons. Authoritarian oppression knows no boundaries, but it often undermines already oppressed people the worst. People who have been systemically oppressed are often grating to speak out, are excellent spokespersons, and have the most to fight for because they're poised to lose even more.
4. Structural change is needed, not just a win in the next election. Authoritarian regimes often get swept in under the guise of working-class nationalism, but when in power the same regimes often collude with multinational corporate capitalism to further undermine human and environmental rights. The fight is a battle against the regime of the day, and a war against multinational corporate capitalism over the long term.
5. Resource rights protectors need protection. Authoritarians often speak out against groups and individual people, take away groups' money, put people in jail, threaten their lives or worse. The activists and ordinary people who are defending the environment and human rights also need to be protected.
6. It's a marathon, not a sprint. The forces that sweep authoritarian regimes into power have been working to do so for decades or longer, and so the forces that fight against that power need to be funded and prepared for a protracted response.
The U.S. may now find itself in a similar position as countries like the China, Guatemala, Honduras, India, Philippines, Russia, Venezuela and many others where authoritarians have been swept into power over the last decade. As a public citizen who wants to take action, should you join a national environmental organization or should you join a local group fighting a dam or fracking? As a donor, should you give to a big environmental group lobbying in DC or to a local minority-action group trying to force their city council to clean up their drinking water? We will definitely need mass national mobilizations and we'll also need numerous local actions.
Environmental and human-rights activists and donors in the U.S. need to brace themselves, learn from other countries and dig in.
FOCUS: Will Putin Unite the European and American Right?
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=17265"><span class="small">Margaret Talbot, The New Yorker</span></a>
Monday, 26 December 2016 12:00
Talbot writes: "In some ways, this is an odd fellowship: populist nationalism would seem to militate against an international brotherhood. But the European far right shares with Putin a contempt for the liberal West and a taste for 'traditional' values, including a rejection of immigration and multiculturalism, especially when it makes room for Muslims, and, in many cases, the shunning of L.G.B.T. rights."
Far-right European leaders, united in a fight to reinforce national borders and resist globalization, see allies in both Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump. (photo: Alexei Druzhinin/Reuters/Sputnik/Kremlin)
Will Putin Unite the European and American Right?
By Margaret Talbot, The New Yorker
26 December 16
or several years now, Vladimir Putin has been offering himself up as a helpful big brother to the parties of the European far right, and they’ve responded with expressions of warm family feeling. Marine Le Pen, the leader of France’s anti-immigrant, anti-European Union National Front, has praised Putin’s strong leadership and defended Russia’s annexation of Crimea. Le Pen sees allies in both Putin and Donald Trump, as well as in parties on the right in Europe, all united in a worldwide fight to reinforce national borders and resist globalization. “The forces at work in these various elections are ideas, forces which could bring about my election as the President of France next May,” she said last month. Among the forces she may have in mind are the Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, who has said that he sees Putin’s Russia as a model of the “illiberal democracy” he’s installing at home. A former leader of Germany’s National Democratic Party, Udo Voigt, said recently, “We need a chancellor like Putin, someone who is working for Germany and Europe like Putin works for Russia.” And just this week Austria’s xenophobic Freedom Party, which was founded in the nineteen-fifties by former Nazis, signed a five-year “coöperation agreement” with Putin’s party, United Russia. The two parties will be partners in business development, the agreement promises, but also in “the education of the young generation in the spirit of patriotism and arbeitsfreude”—that is, “joy in work,” a term that dates to the nineteenth century but enjoyed a revival under the Nazis. Pyotr Tolstoy, the deputy speaker of the Duma, said that this bold coöperation between Russia’s ruling party and Europe’s anti-establishment conservatives would be a counterweight—this might sound familiar—to the “politically correct world, when everyone is hiding their real thoughts and feelings.” All in all, it has been an upbeat moment for Le Pen and her friends, with the potential, according to Lawrence Rosenthal, a sociologist at the University of California, Berkeley, who heads a center on right-wing studies, for an “international comity that the right has not historically had.”
In some ways, this is an odd fellowship: populist nationalism would seem to militate against an international brotherhood. But the European far right shares with Putin a contempt for the liberal West and a taste for “traditional” values, including a rejection of immigration and multiculturalism, especially when it makes room for Muslims, and, in many cases, the shunning of L.G.B.T. rights. Andrew Weiss, who oversees research on Russia and Eurasia at the Carnegie Endowment, said that there is an advantage for Putin when European countries are “myopic, consumed with their own internal political divisions,” preoccupied with policing their own increasingly heterogeneous homelands. They’re less likely to object to Putin’s expansionism in Ukraine, for example.
Now, of course, Americans have a President-elect with his own soft spot for Putin’s authoritarian leadership. At a town-hall debate with Hillary Clinton in September, Trump said that Putin “has very strong control over a country. Now, it’s a very different system, and I don’t happen to like the system. But, certainly, in that system, he’s been a leader, far more than our President has been a leader.”
Trump went on, “I think I would have a very, very good relationship with Putin. I think I would have a very, very good relationship with Russia.” Perhaps it is worth noting here that, according to Human Rights Watch, Putin has lately intensified his crackdown on civil society, “demoniz[ing]” advocacy groups, including leading human-rights groups, that accept foreign funding; using a “propaganda” law to hound L.G.B.T. activists and break up their demonstrations; restricting press freedoms; and jailing critics of the regime in Ukraine and elsewhere. And he has, of course, played a central role in perpetuating a brutal war in Syria that has killed tens of thousands of civilians.
Curiously, Trump has been able to move some in the Republican Party, once so hawkishly vigilant when it came to the former Soviet Union, toward a friendlier view of Putin, the former K.G.B. man. And that’s despite, or perhaps because of, the conclusions of the American intelligence community that Russian hackers worked intentionally to defeat Clinton. In July of 2014, only ten per cent of Republicans held a favorable view of Putin, according to a poll by The Economist and YouGov. Among Trump supporters, that number was twenty-four per cent in July of this year; by this month, it had jumped to thirty-seven per cent. Michael McFaul, who served as the U.S. Ambassador to Russia from 2012 to 2014, told me, “The explanation is obvious—Trump praises Putin, so his supporters increasingly like Putin.” Still, he said, “it’s an amazing reversal considering how critical Republicans were in 2014 of Obama’s alleged weakness in supposedly creating the permissive conditions for Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.” McFaul remembered “being on the Sean Hannity radio show in 2014 when he spoke openly of the Russian menace and Obama’s inability to stand up to Putin. Putin has not changed his policies at all in 2014, yet people like Hannity seem a lot less worried about that threat today.”
There is some history, though, among cultural conservatives, if not more mainstream Republicans, of esteeming Putin, even before Trump became the party’s standard-bearer. In 2013, for example, Pat Buchanan, the self-proclaimed paleoconservative commentator, wrote a column that asked, “Is Putin One of Us?,” in which he concluded that, in many ways, Putin was. The Russian leader was fighting the “militant secularism of a multicultural and transnational elite.” He stood against legal, accessible abortion, same-sex marriage, and other liberal indulgences, and he aimed to redefine the old Cold War conflict, Buchanan noted approvingly, as “one in which conservatives, traditionalists and nationalists of all continents and countries stand up against the cultural and ideological imperialism of what he sees as a decadent west.” According to Buchanan, Putin’s mother had even had him secretly baptized as a baby.
Robert Horwitz, a professor at the University of California, San Diego, who has written a history of the American right, sees an ideological connection between Putinism and American cultural conservatism, in which same-sex marriage looms large as “evidence of the deep corruption of Western liberal democracies.” Cultural conservatives, Horwitz said, see Putin “as upholding tradition and traditional social arrangements in areas of gender, sexuality, the bounds of speech, and so on.” What makes this rapprochement easier, Horwitz said, is that religion is now integral to Russian social conservatism: “Putin has embraced a nationalism that has Russian Orthodoxy at its heart.”
It’s hard to know how deeply Trump holds any of the culturally conservative views he has adopted lately. He has his own, distinctly Trumpian, not strictly ideological reasons for appreciating Putin, after all: for one thing, he loves a strongman leader. His pick for Secretary of State, the former ExxonMobil C.E.O. Rex Tillerson, likes doing business with Putin; Trump himself appears to have no real problem with Russia messing in the U.S. Presidential campaign—he once invited Russian hackers to have a go at Clinton’s e-mail—so long as he won. Maybe his bromance with Putin won’t last. But if it does it’s a frightening prospect for liberal democracy. As McFaul put it, “Without question, the ‘Illiberal International’ (remember the Communist International?) has never had a better year than 2016. The far-right parties in Europe have aligned with Putin for years, and they now believe they have a new ally in the White House.”
FOCUS: Protest Like Your Basic Rights Depend on It - Because Power Is Taken, Never Given
Monday, 26 December 2016 11:54
Wilson writes: "I'll be standing for equality, and adding my voice to the chorus calling for accountability, confronting power imbalances and abuse and condemning hate."
'History has shown us that power is taken, never given, so resistance is critical if we don't want our freedom eroded.' (photo: ddp USA/REX/Shutterstock)
Protest Like Your Basic Rights Depend on It - Because Power Is Taken, Never Given
By Jamia Wilson, Guardian UK
26 December 16
The arc of change may be long, but we must keep fighting. Shared values can build momentum, shift culture and even influence policy over time
nitially,I didn’t plan to attend the Women’s March on Washington, slated for the day after the inauguration.
Though a long-time feminist activist and a passionate proponent of nonviolent resistance, I had a long list of reasons I didn’t want to protest on 21 January. At first, I blamed the aftershocks of the terror I felt after realizing that a significant amount of voters willfully chose to affirm hateful rhetoric, xenophobia, corruption and sexually predatory behavior.
Then, I reasoned that my concerns about the march’s shaky inception, initial lack of diverse leadership and a permit were not only a hindrance, but a potential deal breaker.
My mom had other ideas.
She called on a recent Monday at sunrise. “Get ready for a trip to Washington, DC. We’re going to that women’s march,” she said. Mom was a seasoned activist who marched with Dr Martin Luther King in 1963, survived the Orangeburg Massacre and participated in lunch counter sit-ins during segregation. “The election results illustrate how far we need to go. Let’s get to work.”
She’s right. Although the arc of change may be long, I’ve witnessed first-hand how amplifying shared values can build momentum, shift culture and even influence policy over time. Carrying the banner leading 2004’s million-person March for Women’s Lives was my own rite of passage.
Eclipsed only by the exhilaration of marrying my soulmate, the march was one of the greatest days of my life. Even though I participated in activism with family and friends since childhood, working as Planned Parenthood’s national youth organizer for the event defined my trajectory for over a decade. Most importantly, the 2004 march taught me that my voice was powerful and that exercising my hard-won right to free expression and assembly was a birthright my ancestors fought and died for.
That’s why, even though another march to protest similar issues 12 years later may make it look like we haven’t made progress, that isn’t the case. We’re playing a much longer game. As Coretta Scott King said when she spoke years ago at my college: “Struggle is a never-ending process. Freedom is never really won, you earn it and win it in every generation.”
Every time I hear speculation that Trump’s administration will be like the second Bush administration on steroids, I remember that I participated in the formation of a broad coalition of gender justice and civil liberties organizations that mobilized over a million people to oppose attacks on reproductive healthcare and equal rights during a hostile political and cultural climate.
And in the years following that 2004 march, emergency contraception became legal over the counter, more reproductive health and rights organizations integrated intersectional frameworks (with admittedly more work to do), and the Affordable Care Act expanded access to preventative care and contraceptive coverage with no copay. Moreover, we’ve had a pro-choice president for the past eight years, and a trailblazing popular vote winner who famously proclaimed that “women’s rights are human rights”.
And all this happened just in my lifetime. Our foremothers – and my own mother – have been working for decades to set up our recent triumphs. Journalist Ida B Wells insisted on marching with her state in the 1913 Women’s Suffrage Parade, despite the Congressional Women’s Unit’s request that black women march in a segregated group.
Joining the likes of Wells is everyone from the women-led Rosenstrasse Protest in 1940s Berlin to the anti-lynching movement that set the stage for the Civil Rights Movement, to the movement for black lives founded by three black women, to the demonstration at Standing Rock. History has repeatedly shown that dissent through direct action matters – especially for those of us non-billionaires who lack the highest levels of political and financial influence.
Marching won’t guarantee instantaneous change. But history has shown us that power is taken, never given, so resistance is critical if we don’t want our freedom eroded.
My ancestors left us roadmaps for this fight. That why I’ll be descending on the Capitol with thousands of women and our allies on 21 January. The march’s leadership has become more diverse, and they recently secured a permit which would theoretically provide more safety and access for marchers who are disproportionately targeted by law enforcement.
I’ll be standing for equality, and adding my voice to the chorus calling for accountability, confronting power imbalances and abuse and condemning hate.
Most of all, I hope the reverberation of our voices and those of the people marching in 107 cities worldwide will inspire bystanders to own their power and rise with us. It’s time to earn our generation’s freedom.
Galindez writes: "OK, I hear you: Donald Trump is a huge step backward for our country. It was, however, the last gasp for the angry white conservatives. They may have one more national election in them, but the electorate is becoming more progressive. Millennials will lead us in the right direction."
Bernie Sanders at a November rally on Capitol Hill for economic and social justice. (photo: Mark Wilson/Getty Images)
We Made Progress in 2016
By Scott Galindez, Reader Supported News
26 December 16
K, I hear you: Donald Trump is a huge step backward for our country. It was, however, the last gasp for the angry white conservatives. They may have one more national election in them, but the electorate is becoming more progressive. Millennials will lead us in the right direction.
Bigotry is not as big a deal in our schools and playgrounds as it was in the past that many Trump supporters want to return to. Race and gender are not seen as obstacles by our youth. That is one of the reasons Hillary Clinton did not do as well with young people as Bernie. Young women do not fear the glass ceiling like their elders. It’s easy for them to imagine a woman in the White House, so it wasn’t a factor they considered when choosing their candidate.
Of course, African Americans know the presidency is a job they can aspire to and achieve.
The establishment of the Democratic Party erred in ignoring the negatives of a Hillary Clinton candidacy and blocked the candidate who energized their base from receiving the nomination.
The movement that Bernie Sanders awakened is unstoppable. Many in the establishment are reading the writing on the wall and moving in our direction. Chuck Schumer and Harry Reid are supporting Keith Ellison because they know that progressives have touched a nerve and will continue to build a majority, either as Democrats or in a new party. They know they have to make room in the Democratic Party for the Political Revolution or watch the party fade away.
I know many of you advocate letting the Democratic Party wither on the vine, but I think that would be a mistake. It will take too long to replace it with a party that the American public will take seriously. The best strategic move is to take control of the Democratic Party.
While the country took a step backward in November, progressives went from Dennis Kucinich in 2008, who never made it out of Iowa and New Hampshire, to getting 13 million votes and winning 22 states in 2016. We are on the rise, and if we look forward and continue to organize we can lead the Democratic Party when the demographic shift in the country gives us the advantage.
Donald Trump and his surrogates have said it many times. According to The Hill: “I think this will be the last election if I don’t win,” Trump told the Christian Broadcasting Network’s “Brody File.” “I think this will be the last election that the Republicans have a chance of winning because you’re going to have people flowing across the border, you’re going to have illegal immigrants coming in and they’re going to be legalized and they’re going to be able to vote, and once that all happens, you can forget it.”
Michele Bachmann echoed Trump’s remarks: “If you look at the numbers of people who vote and who live in the country and who Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton want to bring into the country, this is the last election when we even have a chance to vote for somebody who will stand up for godly moral principles. This is it,” Bachmann told the radio program.
OK ... This was Trump and Bachman using fear to motivate conservatives to vote, but there is some truth in what they were saying. Donald is wrong that it would take more illegal immigration to change the demographics of the country. According to the Census bureau, in 2055 a majority of Americans will be non-white. Between now and then the minority vote will continue to rise. Forget the identity politics if you want, Generation X is more progressive than their parents. Millennials are even more progressive than Generation X. Our day is coming.
We must continue to build our movement and be prepared to lead when the tipping point hits. Change doesn’t come overnight, but at times it comes quickly. We made more progress in 2016 than we have made in decades.
I know that many of you thought Bernie conceded too soon. The reality is Bernie picks his battles wisely. He knew when to move on to the next fight. The Democratic Party establishment stopped him short of the nomination, but he knew he had built a movement that they wouldn’t be able to hold back forever. He could have directed that movement in the wrong direction. If he had gone third party or Green and even got 15% of the vote, Trump would still be President, and Bernie would be blamed for the Democrats’ loss.
Instead, we find ourselves in a position where Bernie’s choice for DNC chair is a frontrunner. In states around the country, Berniecrats are taking leadership positions in the party. Bernie and the political revolution are stronger today than if they had run a third party campaign that would have been seen as a spoiler. Bernie did what was right for the movement and the country. One day when progressives take power, 2016 will be seen as a turning point.
Scott Galindez attended Syracuse University, where he first became politically active. The writings of El Salvador's slain archbishop Oscar Romero and the on-campus South Africa divestment movement converted him from a Reagan supporter to an activist for Peace and Justice. Over the years he has been influenced by the likes of Philip Berrigan, William Thomas, Mitch Snyder, Don White, Lisa Fithian, and Paul Wellstone. Scott met Marc Ash while organizing counterinaugural events after George W. Bush's first stolen election. Scott will be spending a year covering the presidential election from Iowa.
Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.
Frank, Uncompromising, and Tons of Fun: What Makes George Michael an LGBT Hero
Monday, 26 December 2016 09:27
Teeman writes: "George Michael inspired us, turning a 1998 arrest for lewd behavior into a big FU to the authorities, and a public declaration of his sexuality."
George Michael performing during the second concert of his "25 Live" world tour in 2006. (photo: Susana Vera/Reuters)
Frank, Uncompromising, and Tons of Fun: What Makes George Michael an LGBT Hero
By Tim Teeman, The Daily Beast
26 December 16
How George Michael inspired us, turning a 1998 arrest for lewd behavior into a big FU to the authorities, and a public declaration of his sexuality.
eorge Michael told the story more than once: the moment when he was 8, tripping over at school, sliding along the floor and banging his head against a radiator. He bled badly, and took quite a knock. But from that moment on, his love was music.
For the next few days it will be the songs that will be played and lovingly remembered—rightly so, because Michael’s and Wham!’s songs not only gave pleasure to so many, they stood for something: sexual pleasure, letting go, getting down, getting political, and also having ridiculous amounts of fun. The songs were ‘pop’ as pop should be—they made your heart full to bursting, and they knew how to revel in the drama of heartbreak and loss.
They could sound ridiculous, yet you know every word and drink in every rich, overblown melody.
As part of Wham!, and later by himself, these songs were lush or loud, stomping or caressing. You could fast-dance to them, or place your head on a loved one’s shoulder—and they were classics, and remain so and transcend time, as we know because George Michael died today on Christmas Day, the day when one of Wham!’s most famous songs—“Last Christmas”—plays seemingly everywhere on a loop.
A group of ex-pat Brits, this reporter included, were listening to the song as part of a familiar medley in a New York apartment just as the news broke that Michael had died.
And none of us complain about its omnipresence, especially today, because “Last Christmas” in all its warmly bathetic agony is as reassuring as a shawl with twinkling fairly lights. It’s long transcended its own cheesiness. Now it is just loved, and as much a Christmas pop culture totem as “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas.”
And so it will be that Michael’s death date, December 25th, will become also marked by this song of lost love, of regret, of something ending far too soon as his life has done at 53.
Death’s ruthless scythe through pop culture this year appears not to be done yet. At the time of writing it is not known what caused Michael’s death. The time of his death was given as 1:42 p.m. The police say Michael’s death is “unexplained but not suspicious.”
Enfolded in that wonderful music—and the stories of drugs and drinking, and the scandals of later years—consider another George Michael. The one who told it as directly as possible; who, as time went on, didn’t hide when scandal or downfall or public shame came knocking, but faced all those things not just stoically, but with a mischievous smile and brave to-hell-with-it dismissal of all those who would do him down.
Part of his personal story is about making us—his fans, the media, and the general public—consider the true gamut of love, sexuality, and intimacy through his music and his life. The challenge of living openly and honestly is something George Michael met head-on, and that honesty was a challenge to many prejudices.
The most public and brilliantly outrageous apotheosis of this was the single “Outside,” which he released after being arrested and charged for attempting to solicit a policeman in an L.A. men’s room in 1998, for which he was fined $810 and had to serve 80 hours community service. It was after that that Michael came out, after many years of speculation about his sexuality.
But not for him the heartfelt confession, and tears, and venerable words about being true to oneself, and stoic self-regard. Instead, Michael stayed true to pop star form, and served up a deliciously, shockingly brash and unapologetic song and video making a polysexual, multi-gender, raunchy joke of the whole incident, and skewering the historic use of “pretty policeman” to entrap men who have sex with men in public bathrooms.
Not for him the slinking away from the press after crises befell him. No tail between legs for George Michael. He not only came out, he wrote and talked about sex and having sex, and shamed all those that would try to shame him.
As he tweeted in 2011:
I HAVE NEVER AND WILL NEVER APOLOGISE FOR MY SEX LIFE ! GAY SEX IS NATURAL, GAY SEX IS GOOD! NOT EVERYBODY DOES IT, BUT.....HA HA!
And Michael’s Twitter avatar is a group of people bathed in the LGBT liberation color of the rainbow. That’s how and what George Michael imagined his voice projecting to the world.
In 2010, having just been released from jail having served a four-week sentence after crashing his Range Rover into the Hampstead, North London branch of Snappy Snaps photographic shop, he faced the press and said he couldn’t be “fookin’ bothered” to play cat-and-mouse with them, so they could take their pictures now.
He thanked everyone who had supported him. He was going to start again. He was going to stop running away from the press—they would get sick of seeing him, he said. “By the way,” Michael said as a parting shot, “I just thought of a really good idea for a song. It has nothing to do with prison.”
George Michael was an absolute pop star, but absolutely atypical in so many ways about his negotiation of the fame game. He was heartfelt and honest in both his music and his words, and this is what his fans responded to. He never stopped thanking them, and those thanks became ever more genuine as time went on, and scandals and illness were woven into his later life. The press never stopped hounding him, and his modus operandi was to speak as bluntly as possible to them—not often, but enough. You might call his a very British polite, unapologetic defiance. He never sought absolution, but he attempted honest explanation. His relationship with his strengths, frailties and demons was complex. He sought help for what was damaging him. He picked himself up, and carried on. Refreshingly for a celebrity in this pat-confessional age, Michael never wheedled or whined.
He was arrested for possession of class C drugs in 2006, receiving a caution, and the following year admitted to driving while unfit through drugs. Rather fabulously, when asked what his luxury would be on the desert island in BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs, it would be an Aston Martin DB9. No one would know on the solitary desert island that he was banned from driving, Michael joked.
In 2008 he was arrested for drug possession again—this time in a toilet on Hampstead Heath in London—and was again cautioned. In 2010 there was his time “inside,” and in 2013 he was injured in a car crash on a British motorway.
In some ways, Michael is a very familiar British pop star, and success story. He came from the suburbs: not a rich kid, not a poor one either. His father was a Greek-Cypriot restaurateur and his mother a dancer. He met his Wham! partner Andrew Ridgeley at school, and in the North London suburbs they plotted their pop-world ascent, eventually forming their pretty-boy power duo.
He was cocky-suburban-sexy to Bowie's born-in-suburbia-alien, and in their own very different ways they would go on to become sexual radicals.
To a certain generation, to a certain kind of music lover, Michael’s death will be momentous. It was Wham!’s songs that powered fortysomethings through long-ago school discos—“Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go,” “Club Tropicana,” “I’m Your Man,” “Bad Boys,” and “Freedom”—and then the dramatic and lush more adult songs for when the lights got lower, like that mournful, warning sax in “Careless Whisper” (Michael’s first solo record, made while he was still with Wham!) and, of course, the winningly camp heartbreak of “Last Christmas.”
In Britain in the 1980s, their peppy, bright pop music came with videos of the signifiers of that decade: fast cars, boats, and big hair. Wham! was the essence of eighties pop. They were anthems best sung as a shout, and best danced to as a stomp, your arms as crazy windmills. Wham! was pop joy. They were famously anti-Margaret Thatcher, but their songs were as brashly eighties as the Iron Lady herself.
Michael and Ridgeley parted ways in 1986, and it was Michael’s whose career continued and who remained in the public eye. In the beginning of that new solo life, the focus was still on his music, and his global fame grew and grew. There was “Faith,” “Father Figure,” “I Want Your Sex,” in which he writhed with then-girlfriend Kathy Jeung, the overtly political “Praying For Time,” and “Freedom 90!” featuring a brace of cavorting supermodels.
The question of Michael’s sexuality remained blurry for years. The tabloids did what the tabloids did (a lot then, and less so now), which was to insinuate and bait.
Much later, the satirical show Star Stories imagined Boy George confronting Michael in his most eighties, blow-dried, tinted-hair, tennis-gear-wearing-sexiness incarnation.
Boy George tells the other George he knows he is gay—and the joke is that, back then in the 80s, he exhibited all the stereotyped characteristics of being just so, although he never said so. (After he came out Michael said he wished he had done so sooner.)
At 27, and still publicly not out, Michael fell in love with Anselmo Feleppa, his first love (in 2007, Michael said there had been three to date in his life). Feleppa died of what Michael described as an AIDS-related brain hemorrhage in 1993.
Michael spoke of that relationship movingly in a 2004 GQ interview, and his frustration at Feleppa’s Catholicism. “One of the most heartbreaking things I ever saw was when I went into Anselmo’s room one afternoon and he was sitting there in bed with his prayer cards. I just thought to myself, ‘Please don’t tell me you think you’re going to hell.’ It makes me so angry and I sincerely hope he didn’t fear that.”
After Feleppa’s death, Michael wrote a long letter to his parents coming out, and—as he told the BBC’s Desert Island Discsin 2007—he had been “terrified…it was such a dark period of my life and I thought it would continue that way.” Not long after, his mother died. He took these two bereavements particularly badly, and had nobody to nudge him into activity again.
As for the 1998 incident in the men’s room, he had once mused whether cruising in a public restroom was his own way of somehow coming out.
He told GQ, “I honestly think it was a desperate attempt to make the trauma in my life about me, because then, maybe, I could control the outcome.
“Up to then, the traumas had been out of my control and the outcome always bad. From the point when Anselmo got sick, I felt out of control. There were also family problems too hurtful to talk about, but I was snowed under with things I couldn’t do anything about.
“So I gave myself this six-month distraction from every day being about missing my mother. For six months, I had to work hard to fight for my career, but once that was done there was nothing to stop what came after it, which was just total depression. But as subconscious plans go, it was pretty successful.”
In 2007, he told BBC Radio 4's Desert Island Discs, that the 1998 restroom incident was his subconscious way of coming out. One had to “understand how much I love my family and that AIDS was the predominant feature of being gay in the 1980s and early ‘90s as far as any parent was concerned... My mother was still alive and every single day would have been a nightmare for her thinking what I might have been subjected to.
“I’d been out to a lot of people since 19. I wish to God it had happened then. I don’t think I would have the same career—my ego might not have been satisfied in some areas—but I think I would have been a happier man.”
In the GQ interview, Michael talked about meeting Kenny Goss, his partner for a number of years, in a “respectable spa,” and the depression that was so corrosive and which Goss helped him healthily try to confront. “If he hadn’t been around, I think my life would have been in danger, in terms of me. After Mum’s death in 1997, when I couldn’t write and I felt really worthless, I don’t think I could have taken it really. I think I might have been one of those cowards who choose a nasty way out.”
Michael spoke candidly about his and Goss’s open relationship. “Some gay men manage monogamy forever, and I envy them because it’s a great thing. But when you first meet someone, that chemical flows through your body and says ‘fuck, fuck, fuck!’ it’s wondrous. If you can keep hold of that, great. But for me to experience that again in a relationship, I’d have to split with Kenny.”
George Michael wasn’t one of those out-celebrities trying to play ‘normal.’ He was himself. He spoke about love and horniness and commitment as he struggled to negotiate all of it. He spoke honestly of how differently framed gay sex lives can be to hetero norms. He spoke about the closet, and why he was in it, and why he came out of it. None of it was chocolate-box, and tied up with a bow.
Michael spoke about cruising for gay sex in public, and he spoke about being attracted to women still. “If I wasn’t with Kenny, I would have sex with women, no question. But I would never be able to have a relationship with a woman because I’d feel like a fake. I regard sexuality as being about who you pair off with, and I wouldn’t pair off with a woman and stay with her. Emotionally, I’m definitely a gay man.”
In the same interview, he talked about his early sexual fantasies being about women, that he put his sexuality down to nurture rather than nature.
Later, Michael had a relationship with hairdresser Fadi Fawaz, although there were reports he had become close to Goss again.
These relationships not only were written about in the press (and expect more of that in the coming days), Michael spoke about them himself—that openness again, those challenges to the prejudiced and those with narrow ideas of sexuality and how relationships and love worked.
Sometimes when Michael spoke would be to decry the press for getting things wrong, and sometimes it was just to talk. Michael was a wonderful storyteller, as his Desert Island Discs appearance shows. Every anecdote he relays has so many wonderful, tantalizing strands unpeeling from it. The George Michael story is far from fully told.
When he was released from hospital in 2011, after treatment for life-threatening pneumonia, Michael gave another impromptu press conference. He said he had “plenty to love for. I have an amazing, amazing life. If I wasn’t spiritual enough before the last four or five weeks I certainly am now.”
It had been touch-and-go for a couple of weeks, he said, and—voice cracking and with warmth—he thanked the medical staff for all they did to save his life. “I’m a new man.”
In 2014 came what would be Michael’s sixth and final album, Symphonica, deriving from one of the tours he undertook in the last years of his life.
As I type this, I am listening to “Last Christmas.” Again. Of course you listened to it today and maybe tonight—probably more than once. You hear those slinky bells, and you know it, you hear George Michael’s yearning voice about lost love—“Last Christmas, I gave you my heart/And the very next day you gave it away”—and you know it. How many Christmas discos have it as their last song? Or office parties? The song long transcended any sense of cheesiness, and just became loved.
It even featured on the BBC’s flagship soapEastEnders this Christmas—not just as background music in the Queen Vic pub, but on a tape made for legendary character Dot Branning by a deceased character, Heather Trott, whose love for George Michael knew no bounds. It even led her to once scale the walls of his London home.
And now “Last Christmas” becomes the anthem for Michael’s last Christmas. But also as I type this, I am playing the joyous whoops of “Bad Boys,” and thinking of all those mirrored doors and walls opening chaotically as the sexual riot of “Outside” unfolds.
Those were George Michael’s closet doors, finally being thrown open en masse to reveal sex, joy, dancing, and sexuality itself. No shame. No going back in. His lesson to younger gay pop stars, and in fact radically to his fans, to all of us whatever our sexuality and political beliefs was uncompromising: not only can you be out, you can boldly claim and revel in your sexuality. You can be out, but you don’t have to be the good-gay they want you to be. You can be yourself.
After Feleppa’s death, Michael not only wrote “Jesus To a Child” in his memory, but also—in Michael’s opinion—his best album, Older. “I never want to feel that loss, that depth of emotion again,” he told Desert Island Discs. “I hope he’s very, very proud of it somewhere.” Maybe, hopefully, somewhere Feleppa is telling George Michael precisely that.
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he U.S. is bracing for President-elect 
or several years now, Vladimir Putin has been offering himself up as a helpful big brother to the parties of the European far right, and they’ve responded with expressions of warm family feeling. Marine Le Pen, the leader of France’s anti-immigrant, anti-European Union National Front, has praised Putin’s strong leadership and defended Russia’s annexation of Crimea. Le Pen sees allies in both Putin and Donald Trump, as well as in parties on the right in Europe, all united in a worldwide fight to reinforce national borders and resist globalization. “The forces at work in these various elections are ideas, forces which could bring about my election as the President of France next May,” she said last month. Among the forces she may have in mind are the Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, who has said that he sees Putin’s Russia as a model of the “illiberal democracy” he’s installing at home. A former leader of Germany’s National Democratic Party, Udo Voigt, said recently, “We need a chancellor like Putin, someone who is working for Germany and Europe like Putin works for Russia.” And just this week Austria’s xenophobic Freedom Party, which was founded in the nineteen-fifties by former Nazis, signed a five-year “coöperation agreement” with Putin’s party, United Russia. The two parties will be partners in business development, the agreement promises, but also in “the education of the young generation in the spirit of patriotism and arbeitsfreude”—that is, “joy in work,” a term that dates to the nineteenth century but enjoyed a revival under the Nazis. Pyotr Tolstoy, the deputy speaker of the Duma, said that this bold coöperation between Russia’s ruling party and Europe’s anti-establishment conservatives would be a counterweight—this might sound familiar—to the “politically correct world, when everyone is hiding their real thoughts and feelings.” All in all, it has been an upbeat moment for Le Pen and her friends, with the potential, according to Lawrence Rosenthal, a sociologist at the University of California, Berkeley, who heads a center on right-wing studies, for an “international comity that the right has not historically had.”
nitially, I didn’t plan to attend the 
K, I hear you: Donald Trump is a huge step backward for our country. It was, however, the last gasp for the angry white conservatives. They may have one more national election in them, but the electorate is becoming more progressive. Millennials will lead us in the right direction.
eorge Michael 
