Big Lives: Emmanuel's New Show

In 1998, George Michael was arrested in a public restroom in Beverly Hills after an undercover police officer propositioned him. The tabloids had a field day: “Zip Me Up Before You Go Go.” But Michael’s response was not shame. He walked into a restaurant with paparazzi chasing him, went on national television, and told the host, “I’m not going to be like another one of these people that’s peeking out from behind their net curtains.” That moment, as Emmanuel and KaiRai explore in the first episode of their new podcast Big Lives, is the hinge between two versions of the same man: the washed-up punchline and the gay icon who refused to be flattened.

The two origin stories

The episode opens with a puzzle. George Michael told two different stories about how he became a musician. In 1986, he said he was seven years old and “convinced that one day I was going to be a pop star” even though he couldn’t sing or write. Thirty years later, on Desert Island Discs, he offered a stranger origin: at age eight, he hit his head, got stitches, and within six months his obsession with insects turned into an obsession with music. “It just seemed a very, very strange thing,” he said, “and I have a theory that maybe it was something to do with this accident.” The hosts note that a diva’s origin story is not to be corrected—it is to be nodded at. But the inconsistency matters because it sign