George Michael responded to his April 1998 arrest in a Beverly Hills public restroom by writing the hit single Outside, a decision his former backing singers now describe as a deliberate act of refusal against the shaming machinery of the tabloid press. In a new interview with EXPRESS, Shirley Lewis and Jo Garland, who now perform as The George Michael Singers with Jay Henry, recalled the phone call Michael made to them in the immediate aftermath of the incident.
Michael, who was fined and ordered to undergo counselling and community service after the arrest, used the moment to publicly acknowledge his sexuality and to reject any suggestion that he should feel ashamed of it, as Encyclopedia Britannica's biography records. The gesture has since been read as a turning point in how closeted public figures confront institutional surveillance of queer life.
From entrapment to anthem
Michael was arrested on April 7, 1998, after an officer of the Beverly Hills Police Department conducted what amounted to an entrapment operation in a public bathroom. The tabloids treated the arrest as a scandal. Within months, Michael had answered with Outside, a disco-inflected single whose video lampooned police surveillance and public morality campaigns. As the Witness History podcast on Spotify recounts, the singer chose not to hide from the controversy but to satirize it.
His own account of the moment, as reported by EXPRESS, was blunt. He phoned Lewis and Garland and told them: I've written this song, and it's going to just shut everyone up.
That instinct, to convert state and media humiliation into collective pride, is what Lewis says defined him. Speaking to Express.co.uk ahead of The George Michael Singers' UK cathedral tour, she said: He shines in vulnerability, and I think it's so important for people to be vulnerable. And you can hear all of his vulnerability in his music.
She added that the song became a green flag for the LGBTQ community, a signal that shame was not a debt queer people were obliged to pay. They were behind him anyway, but that was just a real sort of, you know, like don't be ashamed, she said.
Why a 1998 arrest still matters
It is worth situating the episode in the legal architecture that produced it. In 1998, sexual acts between men remained criminalized in parts of the United States until Lawrence v. Texas struck down sodomy laws in 2003. Police entrapment of gay and bisexual men in public toilets, a practice with roots in decades of institutional homophobia, was a routine instrument of that legal regime. Michael's arrest did not happen in a vacuum; it was the visible edge of a system that policed queer sexuality while profiting, through the press, from its exposure.
What Michael did next deconstructed the machinery. The Outside video, staged as a parody of police procedurals and disco-era morality panics, refused the confessional script the media had prepared for him. Instead of contrition, he offered satire. Instead of disappearance, he offered a chart hit. The refusal was not merely personal strategy; it was a public lesson in how a marginalized person can refuse the terms of their own punishment.
He just brilliantly flipped it. That was him. That was him all over. He's just such a genius, such an incredible lyricist, Lewis told EXPRESS.
Vulnerability as resistance
Michael's later reflections on his own wellbeing echo this politics of refusal. As Zoom TV notes, he spoke candidly about the martyr complex that drives high achievers to believe joy must be earned through suffering, an insight that resonates with disability justice and neurodivergent communities who have long challenged productivity-based models of worth. His music, Lewis insists, carried that honesty throughout his career.
Michael died on Christmas Day 2016, aged 53. Since his death, testimony from friends and beneficiaries has documented decades of quiet donations to charities, including organizations supporting LGBTQIA+ young people and strangers in need who never knew their benefactor's identity. The image that emerges is of a man who understood privilege and redistributed it, quietly and without the press release that celebrity philanthropy usually demands.
The Faith Tour returns to cinemas
The singers' reflections surface ahead of the cinema release of The Faith Tour, out November 6, compiled from a long-lost 14-camera 35mm film shot over two nights in May 1988 at the Palais Omnisports de Paris-Bercy. A live album accompanies the release, with additional vocals recorded by Lewis and Garland.
The film carries its own story of structural constraint. Lewis was originally contracted to sing on the 1988 tour but her record label refused to release her, having, in her words, just spent a bunch of money on her. Lyn Mabry took the stage instead. Nearly four decades later, the estate invited Lewis back to record the additional vocals for the remaster.
It was quite insightful of the estate to get us in to do that because they know what George would want, she said. I was like, that's a gift from George. He's sick of me b***hing that I wasn't on the Faith tour for 35 years, so he's gone, let me throw this girl a bone and let her be on it anyway.
The George Michael Singers' You Have Been Loved church and cathedral tour runs across the UK from 13 to 20 December, pairing his songs with the singers' own memories, from the final Wham! concert at Wembley to the London 2012 closing ceremony.
Frequently asked questions
Why was George Michael arrested in 1998?
He was arrested on April 7, 1998, in a public restroom in Beverly Hills after an undercover police operation. He was fined and ordered to undergo counselling and community service.
What was the song Outside about?
Released in 1998, Outside was Michael's satirical response to the arrest, rejecting shame and mocking the policing of queer sexuality.
Did George Michael come out after the arrest?
Yes. The arrest compelled him to publicly acknowledge that he was gay, and he rejected any implication that he should feel ashamed of his sexuality.