![]() ![]() I could hardly believe they were rabid ‘pro-life’ anti-abortionists. ![]() These pop icons were pro-gay, pro-women, pro-Black. Wham!’s video was an explosion of upbeat peppy happy glitter YAY! The t-shirt was also worn by members of Queen, both in film clips and on stage. I was instead starstruck by the soundtrack: Boy George, Stevie Wonder, Prince, Cyndi, MJ, Tina, Madonna, Bruce and the Bronski Beat. I didn’t realise at the time, but it was an historic year in late twentieth-century politics. I was six years old when ‘Wake Me Up Before You Go Go’ came out. In my mind, George’s t-shirt had always been associated with the campaign against AIDS. In the photo, taken at Midsumma Festival, I beam smugly at the clever triple-layered statement I’m making: GAY on GAY on (a) GAY. ‘didn’t pick you for a pro-lifer…’ quipped an American friend when I posted a proud selfie in my commemorative fashion garment, which I had immediately adorned with a pink triangle pin (in remembrance of homosexual victims of the Nazi regime). It was a way of connecting visibly the peppy imperative refrain, ‘Wake me up!’ before we go-go down that road, because the world has been there before and we all know where it can lead. But it was also a means for me to galvanise my optimism in preparation for 2017: the spectre of Donald Trump and the global rise of right-wing populism. During their lifetimes, each of them had in some way given the finger to bourgeois morality, which had made me love them. It was a small symbolic way to give a figurative finger to all the high-calibre pop culture losses of 2016, from Bowie to Prince to Cohen to Carrie. ‘Outfit for 2017 sorted’, I announced on Facebook. A few clicks on eBay and I had ordered myself a copy of the iconic t-shirt made famous by Wham! in the 1984 music video for their smash hit ‘Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go’, with its stark, black-on-white imperative, CHOOSE LIFE. The day George Michael died, I did what any mourning child of the 80s lost in the logic of late-capitalist consumer-fandom would do: I bought a t-shirt. ![]()
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