Popular Culture Review Vol. 25, No. 1, Winter 2014 | Page 16

12 Popular Culture Review Given the particular form of bigotry that took over the culture in the 1980s, the unfortunate term “welfare queen,” coined by Reagan years before, was soon joined by the term “crack whore,” both calling up, in a sweep of an ugly phrase, the blatant dual misogyny and racism that was always there in America and simply came to the fore in the Reagan-Bush culture. In the end, Prozac and crack, that is, manifested themselves economically and socially in a society that prejudged what it meant in terms of one’s identity to take such drugs. Indeed, it is the problem of prejudice that calls our attention now, for as we will see, the real question of change is not an ontological one but an ethical-political one. Here, then, is our first hint of an important truth; metaphysics offers us little in terms of an answer to the question of change. But if we refocus our efforts and begin thinking about the ethical-political implications of change, we begin to make headway. Specifically, it might be possible to find a better way to think about identity across time if we investigate the problem of prejudice and the construction of gay identity in 1988—and fascinatingly, 1988 was a year in which George Michael was dressing as a cliched gay-bikerleatherman, but still, somehow, in the closet. It would be one thing to focus on how it is that Americans in general missed all of these cues.^ George Michael did not come out until 1998, and the sad circumstance of his public embarrassment following his arrest for lewd conduct in a men’s bathroom in a Beverly Hills public park is nothing short of tragic. But the arrest, and the coming out, came as a surprise to many people. Some might say that looking back to George’s time with WHAM!, it is hard to imagine that there were ever questions about his sexual orientation. While there may be some truth in this and there might even be something interesting to investigate about what it means for “mainstream” culture to never quite get it—or at least pretend that we never quite got it—^the reason I want to avoid framing the question in this way is that it focuses too much on reactions to gay identity, on what Liberace or George Michael’s sexual identity means to us, does for us, and affects us. No matter who gets included in that “us,” it seems, in some deep sense, disrespectful of the person and of the political and ethical question of gay rights to frame the investigation in terms of what the culture gets out of it. That being said, it is a simple matter of fact that 1988 was not a time in America that was friendly to gays and lesbians. An artist with hopes for mainstream success had legitimate concerns, economic and otherwise, in terms of making an announcement about his or her