Content area
Full Text
All sex, all the time: Whether it's an addiction or a compulsion, some people can't stop having sex -- and they're Finding the repercussions last far past the orgasm
When George Michael was arrested April 7 on a charge of engaging in a lewd act in a park bathroom in Beverly Hills, the tabloids went wild. The New York Post's April 9 cover screamed DOWN AND OUTED IN BEVERLY HILLS, and the banner for the article inside was ZIP ME UP BEFORE YOU GO GO. Much fun was made, mostly because Michael had always been coy about his sexuality, never really making a firm statement about which gender he preferred. Boy George told Michael not to be ashamed. "We are sisters under the skin," he wrote in an open letter published in The [London] Express after the arrest.
The shock, though, was not so much that Michael was gay. Rumors about that had been circulating for years, and in an interview last year he talked about his love for a male Brazilian fashion designer who died of a brain hemorrhage in 1993. What everyone kept asking was, "What the heck was he doing in a bathroom?" This is a wealthy, talented, attractive man. If he was doing what he is accused of, if he was trying to pick up a man in a public rest room, then how down on his luck must he have been that a toilet stall was his best bet for human companionship? A few people wondered aloud, Is George Michael a sex addict?
When Michael talked to CNN a few days after his arrest and said he is gay, he also implied, without coming right out and saying so, that he has a problem. "I think it was the danger of the situation that must have compelled me to do it, because it was absolutely compulsive," Michael said to interviewer Jim Moret. Earlier in the interview Michael had said, "I won't even say that it was the first time that happened. You know, I have put myself in that position before. I can only apologize. I can try to fathom why I did it, to understand my own sexuality a bit better, but, ultimately, part of me has to...