GEORGE MICHAEL hid his sexuality for decades for fear of upsetting his mother, the singer has admitted.

He says he was “sick of the secret” by the time his sexuality was revealed to the world when he was caught exposing himself to an undercover policeman in Beverly Hills in 1998.

Michael tells Kirsty Young on today’s Desert Island Discs on Radio 4 that it was a “self-consciously deliberate” attempt to come out as gay after many years of public speculation and that he believes he would not have behaved in such a way if his mother, Lesley Panayiotu, had still been alive. She died a year earlier.

“I think for me to do that was absolutely tempting fate,” he says. He adds: “There wasn’t any reason to be quiet now that my mother was no longer in this world, and I was proud of my sexuality.”

He says: “I had been trying to tell people in my own way for years and years . . . something in me picked the most difficult way to do it.”

Michael also says on the programme that he turned to singing at the age of eight after a bump on the head.

Before that, he had been preoccupied with collecting insects. “It was quite a bad bang, and I had it stitched. Then, suddenly, all I wanted to know about was music. Maybe it was to do with this accident.” Michael, 44, claims on the programme that he had been loath to tell the press directly about his homosexuality. “I had to fool myself that it had been dragged out of me,” he says.

The singer, who found fame with Wham before launching a successful solo career, also admits to Young that he wanted to tell his parents about his sexuality when he was 19, but thought they would be too worried about him because of Aids. “My mother was still alive and every single day would have been a nightmare for her thinking of what I might have been subjected to.”

The singer, who chooses songs by Nirvana, Pet Shop Boys and Roxy Music for the show, eventually came out to his mother after the death of his first gay lover, Anselmo Feleppa, a Brazilian, in 1993.

Additional reporting: Laila Sennah

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