George Michael and Stephen Fry do Parkinson and chat about being gay

For those who don’t live in the UK, Parkinson is the nation’s biggest chat show - our equivalent of Letterman or Leno. And the show on the night of Saturday 19th May seemed to promise to be a particularly gay one - George Michael, Stephen Fry, and Joan Rivers were all appearing as guests, while the Scissor Sisters supplied the music.

As an hour of full-on gay entertainment, the show didn’t quite deliver. Michael, who is currently on trial for driving under the influence of drugs, spent most of his time droning on about the wonders of marijuana. But he also briefly discussed his part in the new Greg Berlanti drama Eli Stone in which he appears in the first episode as a vision. Each episode thereafter will also be named after a song of his. Stephen Fry talked about his cameo role on the US TV drama Bones, and also his new British TV show Kingdom.

While disappointing in one sense, it is also unquestionably a good thing to see two openly gay celebrities able to spend a chat show talking about their work rather than their sexuality (it’s a bit less good when they spend it talking about their drug habit, but anyway...)

From a gay visibility point of view, however, the most interesting bit of the interview came when Fry and Michael got into talking about their contrasting experiences as openly gay celebrities. The discussion was triggered when Fry made a throwaway comment to host Michael Parkinson about how he and Michael were both gay and how this was no longer a big deal in Britain.

George Michael interrupted Fry to say that he did think it was still a big deal. He said that he thought his sexuality affected the way the press treated him, that he had been treated much worse by the press post-outing, and that "hand on my heart", he didn't know if he could say to a young pop star nowadays that he thought it was a good idea to be openly gay. He also said he thought it should be illegal for young gay people to be exposed to some of the homophobic language the press uses about him.

Stephen Fry, who has never been anywhere near the tabloid target that George Michael has, looked a bit bemused during all this. Perhaps he was considering telling Michael that if he would stop cruising on Hampstead Heath, and smoking marijuana and then getting into his car, the tabloids might pay a bit less attention to him, too.

But while Michael’s behavior makes it pretty difficult to sympathize with him, he does have some grounds for saying that the British tabloids treat him homophobically. Although I have never seen them use an overt slur (as he seems to suggest), they can be relied upon to play up his sexuality when it has nothing to do with the story: “Gay George drives while on drugs”, not “George drives while on drugs”.

Take a look at his speech in this clip from the show, and see what you think.