Culture Club

“Do You Really Want to Hurt Me?”

 

” ‘Do You Really Want to Hurt Me?’ was about being gay and being victimized for your sexuality, which George was kind of emblematic of.”

                        –Julien Temple, Director of  “Do You Really Want to Hurt Me?”

“I went into Les Garland’s office and he played me “Do You Really Want to Hurt Me.” Everyone thought it was a chick. He said, “You believe this shit? It’s gonna be huge.”

–Huey Lewis

(quotes above from I Want My MTV, 127)

In Britain, [Boy George] retained a disturbing quality, redolent of London nightlife, transvestism, and the gay art and fashion world; in America, where he reached audiences through a series of playful videos, George was seen as a kind of benign extraterrestrial, a pop E.T.”

–Mary Harron, in Frith, ed., Facing the Music, 209

Culture Club was an iconic British pop New Wave band and probably the most vivid expression of New Wave’s underlying queerness. New Wave had several different strains: the “new romantics”, for example, emphasized classiness, elegance, and wealth with an understated hint of the dandy (Duran Duran, ABC, Spandau Ballet). Other bands, such as Missing Persons, Flock of Seagulls, and Devo, emphasized a futurist strain by evoking science fiction while pretending to be robots or astronauts. Culture Club embodied New Wave’s androgynous strain, a strain that flourished in gay clubs in England and had the most direct overlap with gay culture. Other bands in this vein include Human League, Dead or Alive, and Adam Ant, bands that wore heavy make-up and flamboyant clothing and who were influenced by 1970s era glam rock, especially T. Rex and David Bowie. Some of these stars were gay, some weren’t but evoked gayness anyway as a rebellious fashion statement. Boy George was most certainly gay, and, as MTV programmer Les Garland suggested, Culture Club was huge on MTV. Their eclectic, innovative visual style perfectly complemented their candy-coated songs. Musically, they played easygoing mainstream pop that was slickly produced, well played, and carefully crafted. Their music lacked any hard edges and spontaneity. The song’s lyrics, however, are laden with cynicism and dark undertones, with themes of deception, betrayal, anger, and sadness.

I have mixed feeling about Boy George. Sometimes I admire him, sometimes I think he’s obnoxious, sometimes I feel sorry for him. He’s an odd pop culture icon to confront 30 years later. He was very in sync with the 1980s in terms of style, fashion, and image—as much as anyone on MTV in these years, he understood the importance of creating a distinct and attention-grabbing visual impression. Yet his radical queerness put him at odds with the repressive sexual culture of the Reagan era. I admire his flamboyant boldness during such a homophobic era, yet I am also resentful that he was closeted at Culture Club’s peak and thus perpetrated homosexuality’s invisibility on MTV, just like all the other closeted MTV stars who were gay and didn’t admit it. But I don’t really blame him. He didn’t invent the rules. While he dodged and obfuscated questions about his sexual orientation during Culture Club’s brief pop stardom, at least he didn’t go out of his to hide his queerness like George Michael did. And Boy George did come out as gay sooner than most 1980s video stars. Once he came out, he did so with a vengeance, but his coming out coincided with his fade-out as a pop culture icon.

Quoth the Boy in an interview from the 1990s: “OK, so in the past I didn’t go round saying ‘I’m homosexual’,” he says now, “but surely I made it clear through all the visual statements. What else did I have to do for people to actually say ‘there’s a queen’? Hop, skip and jump across Red Square in a fucking tutu? But I suppose since then I’ve realised I was mentally closeted in a way, even though it was blatantly obvious.”

Boy George was hardly the first person to wade into such waters—30 years earlier, Liberace achieved similarly massive television fame with his own kitschy and winky-gay persona, also bending the rules and seeming to make it as obvious as possible for people to figure out without actually saying the word “gay.” Both aspects, the visible queerness and the denial, were essential to their media images and their fame in these politically conservative decades. Both also possessed a genuine musical gift and conveyed joy when sharing that gift.

Do You Really Want to Hurt Me? was Culture Club’s first big hit song and for many people, including myself, was the first Culture Club video we saw. It’s a very mellow, quiet, introspective, soft song with a strong melodic bass. The drumming is light with mostly rim clicks on the snare drum, evoking calypso or other island-inflected music. Reverb gives George’s voice a dreamy and retro sound, like a 1940s or 1950s vocalist. The song is delicate but moves along briskly.

The lyrics however are sad and melancholic, evoking cruelty and hurt feelings. According to George, the lyrics are about the pains of romance, the way people in love do cruel things to each other. The song is based his experiences being in a relationship with the band’s drummer—according to George, this was the inspiration for most of their songs. The lyrics lack gendered pronouns, making its narrative more accessible to gay listeners. The video, however, points towards a broader lyrical interpretation: society as a whole mistreats Boy George because of how he expresses himself and, implicitly, because he is gay. Boy George becomes an archetypal victim of persecution and intolerance, and anyone who has ever been picked on or felt like a misfit might see themselves in George’s performance.

At the same time, though, Boy George is playing into—and strategically appropriating—the idea of being a clown or a freak. There is more than a hint of Stepin Fetchit in Boy George. To some extent, he is putting himself out there deliberately to be laughed at and reap the profits of being the current gay version of a coon stereotype. One could argue that Boy George’s cartoonish flamboyance perpetuates stereotypes of gays as comic buffoons whose tragedies are more worthy of ridicule than empathy. No doubt Boy George was a common punchline in 1980s, and he certainly knew this and even embraced the idea of being a pop culture joke. The music’s lyrical complexity and dark tones, however, mitigate the ridicule, humanizing George’s persona—sort of like a crying clown.

Do You Really Want to Hurt Me? is an elaborate and expensive video for a new band. It was directed by Julian Temple, one of early MTV’s most prolific and skilled directors. Like Culture Club’s music, the video is polished, slick, and carefully executed. The video has artfully subdued camera work, cinematic film stock, and a careful attention to detail. Because this was the first big Culture Club video, Boy George is being carefully introduced to us (the audience) for the first time as a misunderstood freak who gets rejected, scorned, and unfairly persecuted by society. The video creates sympathy for George while also dwelling in the idea that he is a “freak.” The persecution theme is represented in the video’s opening segment, which most Americans have never seen because it was cut out of the MTV version. It’s a scene in a courtroom—Boy George is on trial, and the jury wears blackface make-up evoking 19^th century minstrelsy. Their blackface hints at the absurdity of the trial George is undergoing (for merely being different, for offending conservative standards of dress and behavior). According to Temple, “It seemed appropriate to me that in the video he would be judged by jurors in blackface, to send up bigotry and point out the hypocrisy of the many gay judges and politicians in the UK who’d enacted anti-gay legislation” (Marks and Tannenbaum, 127).

The jury’s blackface also invites comparison between blackface as a cultural practice and Boy George’s own exaggerated masquerade of gender and sexuality. George’s self-presentation definitely has a minstrel quality in how it plays into gay stereotypes. Society in 1982 expected gay people to be freaks, so George constructed a persona that is the embodiment of what society expected him to be, not unlike a black performer donning blackface. The sadness of the song hints at the sadness of such cultural practices and power inequities that generate such grotesque stereotypes in the first place. It is poignant that each blackfaced member of the jury is actually black, highlighting very absurdity of blackface as a practice.

Blackface is not considered as offensive in the United Kingdom as it is in the United States, given the countries’ different histories regarding slavery and segregation. There was actually a popular blackface minstrel show on British TV in the late 1970s. In the United States, the civil rights movement eradicated any nostalgia for blackface outside of KKK circles, and by the 1980s, any use of blackface in American media —even satirical—was unacceptable. MTV had come under heavy criticism for playing no videos by black artists in its first year, and showing a video with blackface would have certainly added to their troubles, so the intro was snipped from the MTV version. While this helped MTV avoid another racial controversy, the omission saps the video of some of its serious political subtext. As a result, the tone of the video is more comical without the introduction. George seems less like a victim and more like a buffoon. Seeing the blackface is sort of a visual slap in the face, certainly startling to an American audience, challenging the viewer to ponder why it’s there and what purpose it serves.

During this opening scene, George sings on the witness stand, with several black background singers in African clothing behind him (they are not in blackface). The camera pans down towards George and the judge shakes his head and scowls. The blackface jury members sway back and forth in neat rows, wearing white gloves and bow ties, black shirts, bright glittery gold vests and derby style hats. George puts on a pair of sunglasses, and we see that his long white shirt has Hebrew writing on it, hinting (given the courtroom context) at the persecution of Jews, and alluding to possible connections between the historical patterns of discrimination of Jews and gays. George wears a black brimmed hat—again, evoking Jewishness—pushed back on his head, resting on a bandana. A Veronica Lake wisp of hair falls over one of his eyes, and he is clearly wearing lipstick or gloss, though not as much as he would in later years. He looked slightly more male than female at this stage of his career, but the sense of androgyny is strong—he could potentially be a masculine woman. The video shows a very tight close up of his face, and in the reflection of his round sunglasses (evoking John Lennon) we see red light amidst darkness and what looks like a disco ball. The shot freezes on his face, and then the disco balls in his glasses come to life with his face frozen. It’s a neat effect that establishes the flashback narrative structure of this video. The bulk of the video consists of reenactments of his court testimony, showing three scenes from different times and places in which George’s presence has caused a near riot. He seems to be on trial for disturbing the peace and disturbing people’s sense of normality throughout the 20^th century.

This is where the MTV version began: with the close-up of George’s face, followed by the beat of the song kicking in (the intro was a capella). A graphic on the screen reads “Gargoyle Club, Soho, 1936”, taking us to the scene of this first alleged crime (or victimization, from George’s perspective.) George sings at a small elegant nightclub. He wears the same long white shirt he wore in the court scene while band members play in tuxedos behind him. The scene evokes Marlene Dietrich: glamorous but also subversive and gender bending. He dances in a swaying and shuffling manner, gently swinging his elbows and hips to the beat of the song. As he mingles around the small round tables where elegant people eat dinner and drink drinks, we begin to notice their reactions to George: shock, disapproval, and disgust. A man’s monocle falls out from his eye, other people look nervous and scared, and then two men in white jackets drag him off the stage and up a flight of stairs as though tossing him out. George continues lip synching, looking at the camera, imploring the patrons (and us), if we really want to hurt him, if we realize the pain we are causing him by laughing at him, by marginalizing him, by being shocked by him (when, of course, that is the intended effect all along).

 

Amidst this scene of hostility and persecution, however, there is an odd subtext. The patrons that are so offended by Boy George seem to be rather queer themselves. The first close-up, for example, is clearly a woman dressed in male formal clothing, looking like a vintage lesbian from the 1930s. She gives the first scowl, her eyebrows raised in disapproval as George sings in her direction. At another table, an elegant older gentleman sits with an obvious rent boy in sort of a dandyish outfit, hinting at male prostitution. A couple making out looks vaguely like two women, though it’s hard to tell exactly. I think Culture Club used their dance club friends as extras in the video (very common in those days), so many of them are gay and gender bending themselves but pretending to be the “shocked straight establishment” for this video. I don’t think we’re supposed to notice all the gender bending in the audience. But it is quite noticeable when you pay attention to it. It is an odd and unintended moment of actual gay visibility on early MTV: a bunch of gay people playing dress up with George for the band’s first big video, a quick peek into the actual gay subculture that helped create New Wave music itself.

After George gets thrown out of the 1930s nightclub, the video returns to the courtroom—or, in the MTV version, shows the courtroom for the first time. The judge and spectators scowl and shake their heads in disapproval as George sings his plea for tolerance to the court, right into the camera, right at us. It is not specifically or overtly a plea for gay tolerance, otherwise the video would never had made it onto MTV, but this seems like an obvious interpretation given the political mood of Reaganism in the US and Thatcherism in Britain. George puts his sunglasses back on, and we are taken to the second scene: the Dolphin Square Health Club, 1957. We see an indoor swimming pool with a couple of diving boards reflected in them; everything is bright blue, idealized like a 1940s Technicolor Hollywood movie. At the corner of the pool, we see George rise up (a reverse shot) out of the water almost magically. Apparently he jumps around time freely, giving him a ghostly quality and the video a dash of magical realism, like Michael Jackson in Billie Jean. Boy George represents some eternal notion of offensiveness, an eternal rebel.

He dances around the pool like he did at the club, and the reactions are the same: shock and disgust, but also curious fascination, like they are repelled by him but can’t take their eyes off him. The key shot shows a middle-aged woman sitting on a diving board listening to a radio, then, in slow motion, she falls backward into the pool upon seeing George. The pool setting provides an erotic charge to the scene as many of the patrons (disproportionately male) wear little clothing. George is way overdressed and therefore looks very out of place. Eventually two burly men (lifeguards?) descend a diving board and approach George—they look like the same two men who kicked him out of 1930s nightclub. But this time, as they get close, they suddenly freeze, and George vanishes (again, like Michael Jackson in Billie Jean, almost verbatum) and the two men look at each other like “Where’d he go?”

 

Back in court, the judge hammers his gavel and issues a ruling. George gets escorted out of the courtroom, mugging and winking to the camera as he goes, a glamorous victim indeed. The blackface jury members shake their heads sympathetically, as though they can relate—having a system rigged against you, wearing a mask, unfair treatment, profiling, playing the fool. Cut to George sitting on a bed in a jail cell. During an instrumental break before the song’s final chorus, the three background singers appear at his cell door. As the women dance away off camera, George gets up and walks out of his cell door (security apparently being lax in this prison), eventually resuming his signature movements while lip synching the final chorus in the prison stairwell surrounded by the other band members and background singers. It’s never explained why he just walks out of the jail cell so casually. Maybe he’s freed by the power of music. Maybe someone posted bail, or maybe it’s because he’s ghostlike and magical realist. For whatever reason, he’s free. The band plays with a comfortable bouncy motion as everyone moves along to the light groove. It’s a happy resolution to an oppressive situation, perhaps suggesting that throughout time, the spirit of rebellion, of radical self-expression, of gayness, of whatever lesson we choose to draw, never dies, can never be locked up, and in the end will always triumph over stuffy fuddy duddies.

Given the nature of 1980s culture in both the US and England, the video deserves credit for depicting, however obliquely, actual persecution of gay people by showing George in prison and by showing an unfair court proceeding, even if the video must frame that oppression somewhat more broadly as mere difference rather than gay oppression specifically. The video shows the hurtful consequences hysteria and fear. So while George certainly revels in being the “freak” and even cultivates the very shocked reactions he condemns, he mitigates the gay-as-freak-show stereotype by pleading for tolerance and understanding. This is probably the best one could do in the 1980s. It is a protest against the homophobia of these years—a weak, muted, and indirect protest to be sure, but a protest nonetheless, an acknowledgment not just that gay people existed, but that they suffered from ignorance and prejudice. Now that Boy George is fully out and something of an official gay spokesperson, the gay subtext of the video is much easier to see. But it was never really that hard to see in the first place.