Boy George is discovering what it’s like to be cancelled by the thought police
Boy George is discovering what it’s like to be cancelled by the thought police
Suzanne MooreMon, August 3, 2026 at 4:13 PM UTC
0
Boy George has released a song, ‘We Will Dance Again’, about Oct 7 - Mike Marsland/Getty Images for SeriousFun
How little it takes these days to be an iconoclast. I am not wild about Boy George, nor I am a fan of the song he has recorded, We Will Dance Again, in defence of military action in Israel. But I am inclined to admire anyone who refuses the soul-crushing conformity of our current cultural establishment.
Everyone these days seems to get their worldview pre-packaged. And yes, it starts in our educational establishments. It is convenient, I suppose, not to have to think for oneself. Just answer a few random Instagram quiz questions and a suitable selection of acceptable stances will be suggested for you. For a small fee this will be uploaded into your brain. This will be particularly useful if you go on to work in the cultural sector.
On every issue the bundle will give you a pre-loved opinion that means you will fit in perfectly with your friends and your workplace. The added bonus here is that your self-image may be that of a dissident, even though you agree with all your peers about Gaza, trans rights, net zero, white supremacy and defunding the police. Amazing!
This “right side of history” package really is a bargain. A political perspective and a lifestyle that involves no self-reflection, no historical nor geographical knowledge, but purrs with self-righteousness.
I have not been to one art event, gig or exhibition in the past few years where some kind of “Free Gaza” message was not pumped out. I am bombarded with press releases about queer comedy, musicals, films. Some are great, some are not, yet they are all billed as some kind of “challenge”. To who exactly? Increasingly they act merely to affirm the audience’s pre-existing view. How cosy this all is. Top-down arts funding flows only to the correct causes. This is suffocating. If we are truly post-woke, someone needs to tell the commissars. This has been going on a long time.
I was struck during the Brexit referendum that the entire arts and cultural establishment spoke in one voice (Remain) and exhibited no desire to connect or understand the “bad” half of the country. In the current climate, support for Israel is simply unthinkable.
Boy George had already ruffled feathers with an appearance on Ireland’s RTÉ‘s The Late Late Show after the awful stabbings in Golders Green. The host Patrick Kielty showed little sympathy for the Jewish community, linking this violence with “the horrors in Gaza”. Boy George then asked the audience whether they knew any Jewish people and was met with a telling silence.
Advertisement
Having worn Hasidic items of clothing since the 1980s, having Jewish friends and lovers, it seems that a visit to the Nova exhibition made Boy George want to write We Will Dance Again. He sings: “You never mention October 7/Young girls raped against trees/Murdered brutally/For the crime of dancing.”
His management has now pulled him out of his role in Jesus Christ Superstar because of the backlash against this song. But surely we are grown up enough to absorb a cod reggae song by a 60-something ex-popstar? He does not pretend to understand the complexities of the Middle East but wants to show solidarity to Jewish people.
The strange thing is, it would actually be a lot easier for me to defend him if he was not so vile to women who he deems Terfs. As a “trans ally” he has been spectacularly rude to JK Rowling, calling her a bored bully. He is obnoxious and has refused to listen, especially when people like Rowling have tried to explain women’s rights. The musician Róisín Murphy was excommunicated by the music business for expressing her very mild view on puberty blockers. George has never shown any respect to her.
So here we are. He may stand up on one issue but not another – and this is the point. This is how most people are, this is how alliances are made. Do we expect people to think the same on every single issue? Since when? It was only the old-style totalitarian Left that demanded that. It is sad but unsurprising, for instance, to see Diane Abbott spewing an arguably pro-Russian line on Ukraine. Her anti-imperialist worldview has not changed since the 1970s. What is shocking is to see younger generations rerunning versions of this and ending up with the incoherence of “Queers for Palestine”.
All of this is ultimately about performance (let’s twin Manchester with Ramallah!). It’s a politics that, by connecting every issue in such a rigid way, is very disconnected from how people really live. Don’t we all have someone in our lives with whom we agree on certain issues and disagree on others? Don’t we change our minds? Don’t we feel capable of empathy for both sides in a conflict sometimes?
More and more, I feel that the true measure of a person is the ability to live with disagreement and not to demand compliance.
That, when all said and done, is surely what diversity actually is.
Source: “AOL Entertainment”
