Boy George Stands With Israel, True to a Lifetime of Cultural Defiance

On the surface Boy George has been here before, on many occasions. The Culture Club lead singer and pop music icon for well over four decades is no stranger to controversy. The flamboyant frontman’s penchant for provocation is as well-established as his ability to craft a catchy melody or his gender fluidity during Culture Club’s 1980s heyday. “My whole existence became a sort of funny protest,” Boy George told Bill Maher in 2023.Yet this latest conflict feels different, owing to the vitriol and viciousness displayed by those mad about the Boy’s ongoing pro-Israeli stance over the war in Gaza. Boy George — real name George Alan O’Dowd — turned 65 last June, but his response to criticism of his recently-released song “We Will Dance Again” showed age has done nothing to blunt his defiance.“We Will Dance Again” paid tribute to the 405 victims of Hamas’s October 7 attack on the Nova Music Festival, with lyrics including “You never mention Oct. 7 / Young girls raped against trees / Murdered brutally / For the crime of dancing.” The resistance to the record was considerable. Online record platform Bandcamp not only refused to sell “We Will Dance Again,” it ejected Boy George from the platform; he parted ways with his record label manager Tony Pontius who, according to the singer, told him, “I want nothing to do with this song.”Martyn Ware of ’80s music contemporaries Heaven 17 — a longtime friend, former Virgin Records labelmate, and recent Culture Club tour support act — also severed ties with Boy George. He posted on X: “I honestly can’t believe that my old friend Boy George has made an overtly pro-Genocide anti-Palestinian piece of musical propaganda…I hope you think the money was enough to sell your soul.”More significantly, as a result of the backlash Boy George withdrew from a London theater revival of Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice’s musical “Jesus Christ Superstar,” days before he was to play King Herod at the London Palladium. Boy George’s manager Paul Kemsley wrote online: “George has never been afraid to stand by his personal convictions, and I have always respected him for that. Equally, I believe it is my responsibility to make decisions that are in the best interests of my artist while also showing respect to others. In this instance, I felt it was right to step aside.”It’s worth asking what has prompted these accusations of soul-selling? Boy George is simply standing up for Israel. He insists “We Will Dance Again” is a peace anthem, adding, “The suggestion that I feel no compassion for Palestinians is both untrue and absurd. I have read members of the press calling me a ‘genocide denier’ yet those who deny the suffering of Israelis are given a free pass.” He has also said about the reaction toward Israel: “Blaming an entire people is moronic. You can be against war and still love humanity.”Adding fuel to the fire is the fact that the new reggae-inflected song used AI. Boy George, a high-profile musical early adopter of YouTube, is a passionate advocate of machine learning in music. He has raised the prospect bandmates will be fired if they refuse to perform the song with him. A DJ as well as a singer, Boy George wrote last February, “I have DJ’d in Tel Aviv a number of times. I hope I will in the future.”It is to be hoped that the latest furore fades as previous controversies have. In 1984 Boy George, who until then had been coy about his homosexuality, caused a storm when, after accepting a Best New Artist award for Culture Club at the Grammy Awards, he quipped: “Thanks, America, you’ve got taste, style, and you know a good drag queen when you see one.” Alison Ellwood, director of the documentary “Boy George & Culture Club,” told me in June last year at the premiere of the film at the Tribeca Festival: “That was when the backlash over the gay thing started but even when that happened people who were protesting wanted to take pictures with him. The cultural establishment, people like Johnny Carson, didn’t know how to handle him. But everybody loved the music.”The ongoing fallout raises questions about whether a celebrity like Boy George, who has been so open about his sexuality and opinions for close to half a century, can still be tolerated in 2026 over an issue on which many on the left remain steadfastly close-minded. Boy George and “Harry Potter” series author J.K. Rowling recently publically duelled over trans rights, yet ironically both are now seen, for different reasons, as the wrong type of liberal. In fact it would have been shocking if Boy George hadn’t spoken out over Israel’s war against Hamas. He has long used music to comment on major news events. This include 1988’s “No Clause 28,” a protest song against the Thatcher’s government’s restriction on the promotion of homosexuality to schools and libraries; “GI Josephine,” a song opposing the Clinton administration’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy toward gays in the military, released in 1998; and “Yes We Can,” a song supporting Barack Obama and sampling his speeches, released in the run-up to the 2008 presidential election.Furthermore while Boy George’s support for the Jews is newsworthy, it isn’t new. Right from Culture Club’s beginning, working with designer Sue Clowes, the band used the Star of David as a symbol as part of their visual identity. Boy George wore a T-shirt with the band’s name printed in Hebrew in the music video for “Do You Really Want to Hurt Me?” — their breakthrough song that was only kept off the top of the Billboard Hot 100 Chart by Michael Jackson’s “Billie Jean.”Boy George in the ‘Do You Really Want to Hurt Me?’ video, 1982. Wikimedia Commons.More recently, Boy George has refused to stop performing in Israel, called for the country to not be excluded from the Eurovision Song Contest, and collaborated with Israeli artist Asaf Goren on the 2020 Hebrew-English song “Rainbow in the Dark.”The current row is especially ironic given Culture Club’s record as trailblazers of diversity. The eclecticism of the group’s members — gay Anglo-Irish singer Boy George, Jewish drummer Jon Moss, British-Jamaican bassist Mikey Craig, and blond English guitarist Roy Hay — was mirrored by its hybrid sound of pop, reggae, and soul.As Boy George wrote in his 1995 memoir “Take It Like a Man:” “We were all embracing black culture through music and style. Because of our freaky clothes and subversive lifestyle, we had become a minority ourselves.” Referencing his band’s open-mindedness, Mr. Hay told me last year, “If you grew up with a Culture Club poster on your bedroom wall as a kid, maybe you were abit more of a well-rounded individual.”He added that “George is the most talented artist and creative force I’ve ever met in my life.” The singer’s colorful exploits in the 1980s ranged from a guest spot on NBC’s “The A-Team” in 1986 to having one of his songs, “Girlfriend,” featured in a Merchant-Ivory film, 1989’s “Slaves of New York.” Following the dissolution of Culture Club and a public battle with heroin addiction, he became a successful DJ and designer, in addition to remaining a singer.Yet Boy George remained one of pop music’s most indiscreet celebrities, engaging in public spats with Madonna, Janet Jackson, and Jon Moss, his bandmate in Culture Club with whom he had an affair in the early 1980s. I witnessed his capacity for the outrageous quip first-hand in 2002 while working on the Wicked Whispers column of the Daily Mail. Boy George wore a jacket adorned with safety pins at a London party and I asked him if this was an homage to the infamous Versace dress that Elizabeth Hurley wore to the 1994 premiere of “Four Weddings and a Funeral.” Quick as a flash, he replied, ‘I’ve done everything before Liz Hurley — including Hugh Grant!”Yet that spirit of unfiltered flamboyance was tempered by brushes with the law. In 2009 he was imprisoned for 15 months for falsely imprisoning a male escort by handcuffing him to a wall and beating him with a metal chain. Three years earlier he did five days of court-ordered community service sweeping the streets for New York City’s Department of Sanitation after pleading guilty in Manhattan Criminal Court to falsely reporting a burglary at his Lower East Side apartment.“I don’t talk about other musicians now unless I really love them,” he told Classic Pop magazine in 2021. “I can’t be as critical as I was in the ’80s, as I was just rude about everybody then.” Yet Boy George did recently confront fellow musician Dua Lipa in the row over his support for Israel. In a now-deleted post on X, he wrote: “Why is Dua Lipa allowed to say ‘Israel should be wiped off the face of the earth’ and I get abuse for defending my Jewish friends?”In an era defined by the entertainer backing down in response to a backlash with mealy-mouth apologies, the “Karma Chameleon” singer is sticking to his guns. Thanks in part to the strategic skill of Mr. Kemsley, aka PK and known to Bravo TV viewers for his appearances on “The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills,” Boy George has built up a burgeoning career as an actor. After taking lessons from a leading London acting coach, Charlie Walker-Wise, he appeared in “Moulin Rouge” on Broadway and harbored ambitions to revive his semi-autobiographical New Romantic musical “Taboo.”Whatever the repercussions to his stance over Israel, as one of pop music’s great survivors Boy George will always be creating. After being kicked off Bandcamp, he has already released another song “You are Cancelled,” ostensibly by a group called We Do Not Exist, on a rival platform, Payhip. “I know George was full of one-liners but he’s also an incredible workaholic,” bandmate Mikey Craig told me last year.The real concern is not therefore the fate of Boy George’s career but the state of the wider cultural community that seeks to cancel him. Throughout his career, Boy George has insisted that he prefers to look forward rather than back. And yet, reflecting on the hysterical response from certain quarters for him coming to the defense of Israel, he could well be forgiven for recalling the title of Culture Club’s fourth American hit single, released in October 1983: “Church of the Poison Mind.”

Boy George Stands With Israel, True to a Lifetime of Cultural Defiance

Boy George Stands With Israel, True to a Lifetime of Cultural Defiance

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