Inside Boy George’s First PEOPLE Feature — Opening Up About Culture Club and His Genderfluid Style in 1983!

PEOPLE is celebrating its 50th birthday this year! During 2024, the magazine will share retrospective memories highlighting the first star of PEOPLE. Like Boy George’s memoir Karma: My Autobiography hits on the shelves, we look back at the debut of the Culture Club singer and pop icon in the August 1, 1983 issue: ‘A Boy Named George Breaks Sex Barriers in Rock’s Outrageous Culture Club.’

Now that rock’s reputation can be made – or broken – on MTV, the most important thing for a new group is not how you sound, but how you look. So it’s no surprise that British singer Boy George makes an impression with his plucked eyebrows, layers of makeup and strawberry lipstick. Not to mention his brightly colored knee-length pants or ballet slippers. The most amazing thing about George, though, is that he has a swagger – or is it a calculation? — shudder at the idea that he’s the most sexually ambivalent poser since Tiny Tim met David Bowie. “I’m a very masculine person,” George snapped, however unconvincingly. “I don’t dress up. That’s who I am.”

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Do you know that? ALRIGHT. Now you must know that George, 21, came from working-class London roots (his father, Jeremiah O’Dowd, ran a boxing club) to become the founder and lead singer of the latest rock-theatre phenomenon, Culture Club. Their debut album, Kissing to Be Clever, went platinum in England and gold in the US, and their reggae single, “Do You Really Want to Hurt Me?”, sold 6.5 million copies worldwide. The second single, “Time (Clock of the Heart),” was a top five single, and the third, “I’ll Tumble 4 Ya,” is currently climbing the charts. Yet for all their gender-bending and onstage flash, Culture Club’s best trick is crafting its ambitious and undeniably likable fusion of American soul, Caribbean reggae and British new wave.

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That’s not bad for a boy who says he was kicked out of school at age 15 for dying his hair orange. Even his father reconciled with his outré son. “He started dressing outrageously at 15 and suffered quite a bit,” says the dad. “But he refused to budge.” Gloats George: “People’s attitudes have changed, not me.”

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Still, Boy George leaves even his most loyal fans wondering, “To or not to?” He reportedly wrote “Do You Really Want to Hurt Me?” about a former roommate, Kirk Brandon from the English band Spear of Destiny. When asked by the British pop weekly about his sexual preferences, George ambiguously replied: “I’ve never done one or the other.” To back up his claims of masculinity, he boasts that he once decked a guy who stole his hat. George shares his tiny loft apartment in London’s St. John’s Wood with two roommates — one of each gender — and a collection of dolls, gifts from underage bopper fans.

Boy George in 1985.

Dave Hogan/Getty

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The third of six children – five of them boys – growing up in bleak Bexleyheath, south of London, George was the odd duck of an Irish-Catholic clan. While his father trained the neighborhood kids at his boxing club – brother, Gerald, 19, is the local welterweight champion – young George often frequented discotheques in stilettos and a Carmen Miranda headdress. “I started wearing this hair just out of boredom,” George says of the exotic braids that cascade down his chest. “I had long hair and I couldn’t figure out what to do with it.” At first he paid his bills as a fruit picker and printer, then worked as a make-up artist for the Royal Shakespeare Company and landed a few modeling assignments playing punk rockers in bank and beer commercials. His gift for rage soon made him an underground celebrity, and in 1981 George began fronting the new wave group Bow Wow Wow. Later that year he teamed up with bassist Michael Craig, drummer Jon Moss and guitarist Roy Hay to form Culture Club. George, who can’t play a single note of music himself, writes the group’s songs by singing into a tape recorder and freely sings American R&B groups such as the Four Tops and Gladys Knight and the Pips. “I’m a plagiarist,” he admits. “I try everything.” Still, George has standards. For example, he despises the Sex Pistols as “a bad version of the Rolling Stones” and sniffs: “I never liked punk because I like quality.”

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Source: HIS Education