John Preston reviews Straight by Boy George with Paul Gorman

Near the start of Boy George's book he recalls getting into a mini-cab in London a couple of years ago. "I wasn't sure at first if it was you," the driver tells him. "You know, you have put on a lot of weight." A few pages later, he goes to see the Indian singer Asha play at Wembley Stadium. "'Why are you wearing that silly hat?', she asked me. 'You are so fat.'" It is one of Boy George's most engaging characteristics that while he may choose to wear funny clothes and cake himself in make-up, he does not flinch from subjecting himself to mockingly close scrutiny.

Straight is part-autobiography - he has already written a more formal volume of memoirs - part series of musings on everything from religion to gay politics. He starts off by going to India in search of enlightenment, but it doesn't really work out. Part of the problem is that George is impatient with anything that smacks of laziness, or self-indulgence. "Surely it's better to clean out a river, do charity work, or support the welfare state, than sit on a mountain contemplating your navel."

To make matters worse, he finds it impossible to pass up any opportunity for cracking a joke. When someone starts wittering on about the joys of Tantric Sex, George counters that he is into Tantrum Sex - "if I don't get it, I have a tantrum".

Running throughout the book - at times on the surface, at others pulsing quietly away in the background - is George's desire to find someone he can enjoy a sustained relationship with. "I want to meet someone sincere," he writes. Not such a tall order, you might think, but greatly complicated in Boy George's case by the fact that he is sexually attracted to non-gay men: "I'm a hetero hag."

Quite why this should be, he isn't sure, although he thinks it may be a legacy of his macho upbringing in South London. "If you are raised in an atmosphere which constantly confirms that heterosexuals are superior, the message has to sink in at some level."

In some respects George is a peculiarly conservative figure. While admitting that he's very partial to a "sturdy rear-end", he finds the atmosphere at a lot of gay clubs "too sexually charged for my liking". He then goes on to speculate that gay men "tend to have no emotional education whatsoever". As a result, "most of us discover ourselves through sexual activity, which is why there is so much emphasis on it in the gay community".

But while George is plainly prone to introspection - and one suspects to a good deal of gloom - he's also a first-class gossip with a stirringly viperish tongue. He's very funny about George Michael's cottaging escapades - his "penchant for porcelain", as he puts it - and about the loathsome Courtney Love: "she reminded me of that mad snake in the Jungle Book".

The second half of Straight is taken up with an exhaustive account of the staging of his highly successful musical Taboo, which he also starred in as the performance artist, Leigh Bowery. Regarding his acting abilities, he quotes one of his heroes, the late Quentin Crisp: "London has not seen a performance like it since Sybil Thorndike the Third!" At the end, though, the tone darkens again. George's father Jerry, from whom he has been estranged for several years, dies suddenly, leaving him feeling angry, grief-stricken and guilty. He concludes with a self-assessment that is as sad as it is characteristically incisive: "My work is about exploring emotional unavailability, and perhaps the person to whom I'm most emotionally unavailable is myself."

There are few rock stars who would either care to be, or are capable of being, as candid as this. But then there are few pop stars who would be generous enough to give prominent billing to their ghost writers. Together, Boy George and Paul Gorman have come up with a book that may ramble a bit in places, but which never fails to entertain or provide food for thought.

Source: The Telegraph Arts section on 20/3/05.

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