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Popular Culture Review
what it means to be a character. To say that identity is performance is not
to say that it is a lie. Performance is not a mask. It is the cornerstone of
the ontological status of the self Because I am always in a context, I am
always in character. To think that there is some real, permanent, nonperformed, unchanging thing it is to be me buried underneath the
performance, is to imagine that there could be some moment in which
there is no context. But that is an absurdity. There is always context.
And this is the important lesson of George Michael. It is not the
question of whether or not we wish he might have come out sooner—or
if we even have the right to wish