"Do You Really Want to Hurt Me" - Culture Club

On Complicated Legacies

Boy George helped propel the ‘80s into a more progressive and inclusive place. Forty years later, he’s proven to be a complicated ambassador for the culture he helped create.

The newspaper headlines read, “Is It a Boy or a Girl?” 

BBC Radio 1 asked, “What is that thing?” 

Insults slung by the British press in 1982 responded to the world’s first introduction to Culture Club on Top of the Pops. The perfectly plucked eyebrows and smokey-eyed androgyny donned by lead singer Boy George was too much for some viewers — as if they’d forgotten Ziggy Stardust, the space alien in platform heels who’d graced the same show with his presence 10 years earlier. 

Culture Club and its gender-bending frontman had arrived with a lilting reggae-influenced anthem about inclusion.

“Do You Really Want to Hurt Me” was Culture Club’s third single released in the U.K., but it became the group’s first hit thanks to their controversial-for-simply-existing performance on Top of the Pops. Boy George’s pretty face got the attention of British audiences, then the music video for “Do You Really Want to Hurt Me” would jolt America, including MTV.

Give me time

To realize my crime

The lyrics to “Do You Really Want to Hurt Me” don’t say much, but the video sends a sharp message: it depicts Boy George as a societal outcast throughout different historical periods and suggests his rejection by the mainstream is similar to the marginalization faced by Black and Jewish people. After all, Culture Club got its name because George is gay, bassist Mikey Craig is Black, and drummer Jon Moss (and boyfriend of George at the time) is Jewish. This diverse group of friends were speaking from their experiences.

The video opens with Boy George on trial for the crime of being different. The courtroom is filled with stuffy old white people who are aghast just looking at him. In George’s corner, two Black women dressed in traditional Jamaican clothing sing backup vocals. George wears a shirt with the Hebrew writing "תַּרְבּוּת אֲגֻדָּה" or "Tarbut Agudda," a literal translation of the individual words "culture" and "association."  Not subtly, the imagery suggests George isn’t the only one persecuted by straight, white, Christian opinion.

Most Americans have never seen this opening scene because it was cut from the MTV version for depicting people wearing blackface. 

Members of the jury wear blackface make-up, evoking 19th-century minstrelsy and, according to the video’s director, Julien Temple (who also directed Absolute Beginners, The Filth and the Fury, and Joe Strummer: The Future is Unwritten), the use of blackface was meant to “send up bigotry and point out hypocrisy” of judges and politicians that perpetuate oppression. All the actors wearing blackface are Black in the hopes of making the intention clear. The use of blackface by a white director and a white lead singer is problematic, however. Even as a statement about bigotry, it’s complicated for a white artist to use the very imagery that white society used when ridiculing Black people throughout history.

The use of blackface didn’t go over well in the United States, and MTV insisted on editing out the first 30 seconds of the video before playing it. The fledgling music channel was only a year old in 1982 and had already earned backlash for not featuring enough Black artists. This wasn’t how it wanted to court controversy. 

Even without the first 30 seconds, the video drives the point about oppression by depicting three scenes from different times in history in which George’s presence causes a near riot. The first scene takes place in a 1930s nightclub.

As he performs for an upper-class audience, George sees their obvious reactions — shock, disapproval, and disgust. One man’s monocle falls out from his eye. Other people look nervous and scared. Then two men in white jackets drag Boy George off the stage. 

Look closely, though, at those snobbish patrons: They are all played by queer people. The first closeup is of a woman dressed in men’s formalwear as she scowls at George. At another table, a disapproving older gentleman and a younger man in a frilly outfit are sitting together, making you wonder if they’ve got a “sugar daddy” relationship.

After George gets thrown out of the 1930s nightclub, the video returns to the courtroom — or, in the MTV version, shows the courtroom for the first time. The judge and spectators shake their heads in condemnation as George sings his plea for tolerance right into the camera. It is not specifically or overtly a plea for gay acceptance — otherwise the video would never have made it onto MTV — but that seems like an obvious interpretation given the politics of the day were driven by Reaganism in the U.S. and Thatcherism in Britain. 

The following scene fast-forwards to a community pool in 1957. The reactions to George’s presence are the same. People are repelled. A woman falls off a diving board from staring. 

Back in the courtroom, George is convicted of disrupting heteronormative society and is sent to jail. Don’t worry, though, he’s eventually freed by his backup singers (and presumably the music).

The lyrics to “Do You Really Want to Hurt Me” are vague, so it was the video that solidified Boy George as a queer icon. 

“In the past I didn’t go round saying ‘I’m homosexual’,” George told Attitude magazine in 1994, “but surely I made it clear through all the visual statements. What else did I have to do for people to actually say ‘there’s a queen’? Hop, skip and jump across Red Square in a fucking tutu? But I suppose since then I’ve realized I was mentally closeted in a way, even though it was blatantly obvious.” 

George would come out as bisexual in 1985, making him one of the earliest out queer stars of the decade. His legacy as a pioneer of queer culture can’t be understated. That legacy, however, tarnished with age.

George became addicted to heroin at the height of Culture Club’s success and was arrested for possession in 1986. His addiction, along with his tumultuous break-up with boyfriend/drummer Jon Moss, led to the band’s demise. The spiral continued until, in 2007, George was prosecuted for the assault and false imprisonment of a male model, who he handcuffed to a wall and allegedly beat with a metal chain. During the trial, he denied the assault (though not the false imprisonment), and his defense team claimed the effects of his drug addiction as a mitigating factor. In an interview with The Mirror, the victim said he sustained a permanent back injury from the assault and had been diagnosed with PTSD. George was sentenced to 15 months in prison. 

In 2017, George appeared on Piers Morgan’s Life Stories to talk about what happened. “I sent myself to prison,” he said. “I was having a psychotic episode. I was a drug addict so I can’t say my reasons for doing it were founded in any way. But I told the truth. I have always denied beating the guy.”

In 2020, George sparked a backlash from the LGBTQ+ community when he tweeted to his fans: “leave your pronouns at the door” — which further devolved into a series of tweets in which he referred to pronouns as a “modern form of attention seeking.” Then anti-trans groups read that and weaponized George’s words in their campaigns against pronouns.

In an interview with The Times, George insisted the comments weren’t intended to be offensive and that he’s still trying to “get his head round” modern ways of labeling gender.

“When I was growing up nobody used the term transgender, because it was almost like a medical term,” he admitted. “So this transgender thing is new… (and) people want to be offended, because they think that whatever’s going on for them is much more important than anything else.”

George accused younger generations of not understanding the battles faced by him and older LGBTQ+ people. “I grew up in the 1970s, where every day you were called faggot, puff – at home, at school, on the street. Policemen could hit you. You went to school knowing you could get whipped,” he recalled. “Kids just don’t understand. I don’t want to sound like an old codger, but they don’t get what people went through for them to be so precious, and I don’t want to dull myself to the point that I don’t have an opinion.”

In 2022, George finally came to the defense of the trans community on Twitter when criticizing anti-trans author J.K. Rowling.

Boy George was undoubtedly a mega-successful pop star in the ‘80s. No other queer band has bragging rights as the first since The Beatles to have three top 10 hits in the U.S. from a debut album. And George undoubtedly changed the cultural landscape and paved the way for queer acceptance.

Trans singer, Anohni, who collaborated with George on the 2005 song “You Are My Sister,” said of his influence: "George was really the first reflection I saw of myself in the world. I saw him and thought, 'Okay, that's what we do when we're like this: We become singers.'" Even so, Boy George has always been a complicated ambassador for the culture he helped create.

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