Boy George has defended Sam Smith's performances and outfits as merely "theatre" and "fancy dress" after a string of backlash.
Sam has come under fire for their outfit choices, particularly over the past few months, something which Boy George only knows too well, having experienced backlash for his own clothing choices over his long career.
Speaking on Good Morning Britain today, Boy George spoke out in support of Sam, saying most of their outfits were just "fancy dress" as he admitted it must be harder for them now because of the rise of social media. Boy George recalled how any criticisms of him were made to newspapers and most of the time had been ignored or filtered out.
Speaking on the breakfast show today, Boy George said: "When I was on TV in the 80s, somebody might have watched me and thought oh that's disgusting and they'd write into the paper and sometimes it would get printed. But now you just need to push a button and say I don't like this and I'm going to tell the world."
Defending Sam's outfit choices, he added: "We're talking about theatre here and I think to a certain extent, if you take most of Sam Smith's performances, it's fancy dress. If you saw someone on Halloween with devil horns, you wouldn't say they're the devil.
"I would say the same as I did 20 years ago, I don't dress up for other people but I have a great face of make-up."
Sam announced they were non-binary in 2019 and asked that people use they/them pronouns when referring to them moving forward. At the time, they admitted they found backlash to coming out as non-binary "really hard".
They said: "All in all, it's been wonderful, I've always felt the way I felt. Being able to tell everyone that and feel so much more open about certain parts of my personality and my life has been absolutely incredible.
"It's been amazing, but it's also been really, really hard to see all the backlash and the amount of people that are still so unsupportive of gender nonconforming people and trans people all around the world. It's definitely more of a struggle than I was expecting, but I feel good in my skin, which is the prize and the wonderful thing."
Sam had also said they find the negative reaction to their identity to be "exhausting".
"Just the amount of hate and s***ness that came my way was just exhausting," they said, "It was in the f***ing news. It was hard not to look. What people don't realize with trans non-binary people in the UK is it's happening in the street.
"Like I'm being abused in the street verbally more than I ever have. Someone spat at me like in the street. It's crazy."
