From Jailhouse Rock to Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go: George Michael and the New Man

Abstract

This article looks at the intersection between men’s fashion, ambiguous masculine identities and the emerging media form of music video in the AIDS-darkened early 1980s. It asks two questions: firstly, what enabled sartorial features in masculine fashion and grooming previously associated with queer-identifying men to cross over into the mainstream fashion culture of the 1980s? Secondly, how was it that in the startlingly homophobic climate of this ‘age of AIDS’, sexually ambiguous figures such as Wham!’s George Michael became such popular style role models? The article addresses these questions by arguing that Elvis Presley’s Jailhouse Rock (1957) – a strong stylistic influence on Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go by Wham! in 1984 – is an example of the Camp trace that remains when Camp aesthetics are removed from explicitly queer contexts. It argues that Jailhouse Rock is a dramatization of situational homosexuality, a mid-twentieth-century understanding of same-sex attraction between straight-identifying men, a precedent that permits the homoerotic group dynamic of Wham!. The article then explains how fashion worn by Michael in Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go – namely British designer Katherine Hamnett’s CHOOSE LIFE slogan T-shirt, and an alternative costume in which the colour pink is most prominent – demonstrates an intersection between fashion and politics for gay men in the 1980s. It also discusses Michael as an example of the New Man, an advertising and media trope of the 1980s that represented a blurring between queer masculine style and a new straight stereotype.