"I smoked 25 cannabis joints a day as I grieved for man I loved" 
George Michael has spoken for the first time about his deep love for another man. 
In an extraordinary interview with his friend, Mirror columnist Tony Parsons, the pop star reveals how his feelings for Brazilian Anselmo Feleppa changed his life. 
But it was a love that was to end in tragedy - with Anselmo's untimely death in 1993. George buried his grief by smoking up to 25 cannabis joints a day and immersing himself in his music. 
The resulting album, Older, was movingly attributed to Anselmo and the song Jesus To A Child was written for him. 
As time has passed George has come to believe he was lucky to have known Anselmo at all. He says "Anselmo taught me to say to myself: 'Life isn't going to hurt you.'" 
In front of a roaring fire in his north London home, George Michael curls up on a sofa and talks for the first time about the love that changed his life. 
"He broke down my reserve," he says of Anselmo Feleppa, a good- looking Brazilian man whom George met in Rio de Janeiro in 1991 but who died tragically young in March, 1993 when he was just 33. 
"My reserve was partly there because of the way I was brought up and it was partly there because I was a celebrity. And it still is, to some degree. But anyone who knew me before I met Anselmo would tell you that he opened me up completely - just in allowing myself to trust my intuition. To say to myself, this isn't going to hurt. Life is not going to hurt you if you just open up to it a little bit more. And I am so grateful for that." 
They met at Rio's popular Rock in Rio festival when Anselmo, a dress designer and huge fan of George, went to watch him perform. A friendship developed quickly. 
There has always been a certain mystery about George's sexuality. 
As night falls outside the luxurious, open-plan house that he has lived in alone for the last eight years, he is finally ready to shed some light on the mystery. 
Wearing an Adidas tracksuit and sipping from a mug of tea, he concedes that he had his fair share of women during his days with Wham! - a period he now refers to as his "lad's last outing". 
Grinning, he says that sometimes he even had Andrew Ridgeley's share of the girls. 
But there is no doubt that the great love of his life was Anselmo Feleppa. 
"I really believe that he changed the way I look at my life," says George. "And I think he changed it because he was such an incredibly positive person." 
"He had a love of life that we just can't grasp in this country. I think he took away that slightly puritanical, Victorian aspect of my upbringing." 
"I didn't really know how to enjoy myself before I met Anselmo. I learned to travel more, to experience new things - and not only with him. 
"I went scuba diving, hang-gliding - I jumped off Sugar Loaf Mountain a couple of years ago. He made me realise how English I was. After I met him, I became much more tactile with people." 
"He was somebody who was there to show me that you don't have to be the way you are." 
All this is delivered with a kind of controlled emotion. The wounds have healed but he will carry the scars for a lifetime. There is hurt in those large brown eyes, but pride too. And gratitude. 
As the shock and bitterness about Anselmo's tragic death recedes, George says he feels fortunate to have known a love that he summed up in the song Jesus To A Child as: "Heaven sent and heaven stole." 
"Going through a lot of pain, personal pain, makes you realise a lot of things," he says quietly. "I see now that everyone has their destiny." 
"I can see the balance in everything. I can look at these things as lessons. I really believe people have their time." 
"I hate the fact that I lost Anselmo but I am still incredibly lucky to have had him in my life." 
As a rule, George does not talk to the Press. But through his songs he talks to the public - his work is probably the most autobiographical of any major star. And his last record, Older, was full of references to loving and losing Anselmo. 
"I made it so clear on that album that I was not going to run away from all the Press reports about Anselmo," he says. George even dedicated Older to the young Brazilian. 
"Not to put a dedication to him would be ludicrous because so much of it was about him. Bereavement tinges the whole album." 
"It had to be in everything I wrote at the time because I write directly about what has just happened to me. But that period is over." 
George's mother, Lesley, died of cancer nine months ago. As he had with Anselmo, George responded to his grief by writing a song, Waltz Away Dreaming. But you sense that he is weary of writing songs about his loved ones who had died. 
"What am I going to do?" he asks. "Write an album about losing my mum?" 
"I can't pretend that I am going to go out and make Wake Me Up Before You Go Go again, but my next album is not going to be a down album. I want to make some great pop music before I get too old. And for it not to be about the pain in my life." 
At 34, George is getting ready to move fromt he house where he has spent the Nineties. Furniture has been moved out. The big black coffee table that dominated the living-room, groaning under the weight of all his music awards, has already gone. 
George Michael is also ready to move on from his long years of mourning and get on with the rest of his life. 
But he says that without the transformation he went through after loving Anselmo Feleppa, he would probably be incapable of moving on. 
"Without that change, I would have been even more hurt by losing the relationship with him and my mum." 
"If I had been the person I was seven years ago, I think it would have finished me off. I don't even know if I would still be here, to tell the truth." 
"If I had lost him and lost my mother and still been as inward-looking as I was, I don't know how I would have survived. I am not suggesting that I would have slit my wrists. I just think I would have come out of the end of it being incredibly damaged." 
To get to George's home you have to walk down a long and winding private road. But when you get to the end, you find he lives in a modern house largely made of glass. 
To me, someone who has known him for over 12 years, this seems typical of George - he is a very private man yet he lives in a glass house. He desperately wants his own space yet there is also something that compels him to bare his soul to the world. 
As we roast in front of the fire, Hippy his golden labrador sprawled on her back between us, George casually mentions that Older was written during a period when he was smoking huge quantities of cannabis. 
"It was around 25 joints a day. Older was pretty much recorded on cannabis. Who knows what you would have got out of me if you had come round then?" 
"I wasn't drinking at the time - basically because I was too stoned." 
George is on longer smoking dope and even his cigarette intake is down. He says he is going to be making a lot of music in 1998 and he wants to start getting strong. 
Six long years passed between Older and the previous George Michael record. And there have been times in the Nineties when I wondered how important making music still was to George. But now it feels like his music is what is keeping him alive. 
This image of George Michael as Victor Meldrew with designer stubble is a misconception he is keen to correct. "I know some people think I am a miserable old git," he laughs. "I want to show people that though I have had a hard time, I am not a miserable git. I am tired of transmitting pain." 
I ask George if he feels that he will ever again find the love that he found with Anselmo. He tells me that he doesn't think in those terms. "I don't think that you lose love when someone dies," he says. "If you have loved, then the love you felt never goes away. It is with you forever."

"I bawled my eyes out at Diana's funeral. It was as if I was reliving my mum's." 
When Elton John and George Michael arrived together at Westminster Abbey for the funeral of Princess Diana, some of us in the congregation wondered if Elton could make it through the service without breaking down. 
As it turned out, he managed to sing his emotional tribute to Diana, Candle In The Wind, with his feelings just about under control. 
Concealed from the gaze of the watching millions, it was George Michael who was overwhelmed with grief. 
"I bawled my eyes out at the service," he says, sipping a mug of tea at his Hampstead home. 
"There was a camera on me for most of the time but they were obviously not broadcasting images of people who were really in distress." 
"I had forgotten my hanky and I was really streaming. I was one of the few people in that part of Westminster Abbey that was really blubbering and I remember thinking:' God, this is going to be really embarrassing.' But it was almost like I was reliving my mum's funeral." 
The death of Diana was the third bereavement that George has suffered in recent years. First there was Anselmo Feleppa, his Brazilian partner, who died of a brain haemorrhage four years ago. Then he lost his mother, Lesley, to cancer ealier this year. And finally came the death of Diana in that Paris car crash last summer. 
At Diana's funeral service, George was suddenly struck by the extent of all he has lost in such a short space of time. And emotions that he had bottled up for so long came pouring out. "It wasn't as if I didn't get upset at my mum's funeral but it was just too soon after her death and maybe it hadn't sunk in," he says. 
"And also I was so upset because I did really like Diana. I met her maybe a dozen times and I always had a laugh with her and I really admired her. I thought she was so great not to be consumed by everything that had happened to her and to keep giving and giving. I thought she was a really great person - the Elvis of compassion." 
"Our generation has grown up with so much cynicism about humanity and she made you think again. I really believe that she was a beacon of compassion and hope." 
"She was the exact opposite of the paparazzi who are all about dehumanising people. But through all their attempts to dehumanise her, they made her what she was to people." 
Some American stars such as Tom Cruise and Madonna have said that they know exactly what it is like to be hounded the way that Diana was hounded. But George believes that no celebrity can even guess at what it was like to be Diana. 
He says: "Nobody knows what she felt like, nobody knows what it was like to be Diana. For someone like Madonna to claim they knew what she was going through is absolutely ludicrous." 
"Diana was the only person that I knew who made me feel like an ordinary person. That's what I thought was so amazing about her. I thought: 'How can you not live in complete anger with these people who will never leave you alone?' I thought she was really quite incredible." 
"She changed the public's perception about so many things. I think she was there to remind people of their humanity. And who but the most famous person in the world could do that? Look at what it did to people when she died. It was like losing a mate that you didn't know you cared that much about until they died. People felt like they had lost a bit of humanity. It felt very raw." 
There are many reasons why there was always a close bond between Diana and George. There was only two years age difference between the young Princess and the young pop star. They became famous at almost exactly the same time. They both did their growing up in public. And now George regrets not getting even closer to Diana while she was alive. But something always made him hold back. 
"I could have kept in a lot more contact with her," he says, "because we really got on well. But I was always reluctant to call her up. It was almost like a mate of mine who doesn't want to call me up too much in case it looks strange - because he thinks that everybody else is calling me up. It was the same equation with Diana and I. She meant so much to so many people - including me." 
It is getting dark when I arrive at George Michael's large glass house. I am ten minutes early and nobody is home. 
The vast expanse of Venetian blinds are drawn. A new Aston Martin sits in an open garage. A solitary fan stands silent watch at the end of the private road, eating a chocolate bar in the rain. 
George turns up right on time in his Range Rover with Hippy, his Golden Labrador, in the back. George is a tall man who smiles a lot and he looks tanned and fit inside a tracksuit. His hair is cropped close and his beard is slightly longer than in recent photographs. 
We go inside and the first thing he does is make a cup of tea. He has just returned to London after a spell at his other house in Los Angeles. 
"I don't love this country any less than I did before my mum's death," he says. "But my ties with Britain are definitely less now that my mum's died." 
"It's hard to work out if that's because she's gone or because there are too many memories here. Here, I'm surrounded by things that represent my childhood - and her." 
Whenever I saw Lesley Panos - George's real surname - I was struck by her warmth, her humour and her unwavering support for her only son (George has two older sisters). 
She always seemed to be doing somehting to help her boy, whether it was looking after his house or turning up at the High Court for oneof his legal battles. Four years ago I remember her watching him with undisguised pride when he celebrated his 30th birthday on his father's Hertfordshire stud farm. 
George talks about his mother with controlled emotion. You sense the tears have gone, at least for now, but that he is still struggling to come to terms with his loss. 
"My mum was a great mum," he says. "She wasn't the perfect mother when I was younger. She was a woman with her own problems. But I can honestly say that over the last 15 years of her life, she was absolutely the perfect mother." 
"There was never a bad word between us. There was never a moment that I didn't feel she supported me. There's that total belief that you get from a parent which you can't find in any other relationship." 
"Because that kind of love is unconditional. I'm very lucky to have had that with my mum. And already I can feel lucky to have had her as my mum and unlucky to have had her taken away so early. She gave me a completely unwavering feeling, that nothing I can do can stop this person from loving me, supporting me and believing in me." 
George responded to his mother's death by throwing himself into his music, going into the recording studio just two days after Lesley died and eventually writing a song in her memory, Waltz Away Dreaming. 
"I do genuinely believe that my mum would have done something very special under different circumstances and I think I was her outlet, genetically." 
"Then, after about three or four months of working, I collapsed - and her death hit me harder." 
"Your grief still takes you by surprise week after week. The last couple of months have been pretty tough. But I definitely feel as though I am coming through the other end of it." 
"I was really pleased when I said 'hello' to my mum on MTV's Unplugged. I had never done that on film before. That was the last show she ever saw of mine and I know she enjoyed that more than any performance I have ever done. When I look back on it, I think it was meant to be." 
George hugs me at the door when I leave. Night has fallen. The fan that was keeping vigil has gone. 
And as I walk down his private road in the rain, I wonder if George ever gets lonely. But I decide that he doesn't. 
He has too many memories.

"Wham! was pure joy...all the things I dreamed about, like having lots of useless sex, came true." 
George Michael is a little worried about his testicles. 
"They were recently twice their usual size," confesses George, relaxing at his north London home in a pair of baggy tracksuit bottoms. 
"Now the swelling has gone down and they have returned to normal - unfortunately. In fact, I think they might even be a bit smaller than they were before." 
Is the trouble in George's trousers the painful result of his days in Wham!, when he famously drove young girls wild by inserting a shuttlecock down his satin shorts? No, he is merely recovering from a recent hernia operation in America. And yet Wham! are very much on his mind these days. 
"I see now that my time with Wham! were the happiest years of my life," he says. "When I listen to our records I hear two young men who are having the bets time they would ever have. It's amazing - the joy in it, the spirit of it." 
"I listen to myself singing in Wham! and I think - who is that person? And I know who he is, and I know who those two boys are - two kids at the top of a dream." 
We have met up in George's north London home to discuss the group that made his name. As his Golden Labrador sleeps at our feet, George drinks endless cups of tea and talks with real affection about the time when he was half of the first boy band. 
He loves Wham! now but it wasn't always this way. I first met him in 1985, at the height of Wham!'s success, and life as a teen idol was wearing him down. The screaming girls, the media scrutiny, the punishing work schedule and the need to smile through it all were exhausting him. 
But now, eight years after he went solo, George has only fond memories of Wham! 
"When you get older, you realise how much pain is out there in the world and you see just how much people need music as a form of therapy," he says. 
"The reservations and criticisms that people had about Wham! - that it's music that's just there to make you feel good - seem so childish. Music's major use has always been to make people feel good. And as your life goes on, you realise how important that is." 
Wham! were a very young group. When George and Andrew Ridgeley broke up in the band in front of a packed Wembley Stadium in 1986, George had just turned 23. 
Listening to the music of Wham! today, it seems full of mad, youthful optimism - a touching belief that life is just going to keep on getting better. And of course life is not like that. 
In recent years George has suffered the deaths of both Anselmo Feleppa, the man he loved, and his mother. 
As he listens to Wham! today, he remembers a time when such tragedies were beyond his imagination. When he talks about the group he formed with Andrew, the boyhood friend he met in a Hertfordshire playground at the age of 12, this man who has recently been through so much can't stop smiling. 
"At 34, I can see now that you have this fantastic period in the middle of your life between living with your parents and settling down when, probably for the purpose of making sure you go out shagging and procreate, you can briefly be your own creation. That was Wham! for me." 
"Wham! were shamelessly joyful. I knew I wasn't cred - but I didn't know how to be cred. I had no idea what to wear. I had no real idea about adult sex. I was just a kid with a smart musical head. I couldn't try to be cool. I didn't know how. So Andrew and I just had a laugh." 
"I was smart musically but at the same time there was a certain childishness about it all - and that's what made the records so good. There were about 18 months when it was pure joy - the realisation of dreams." 
"All these things that I had dreamed about, like having a lot of probably quite useless sex. I was 20-years-old and my dreams were coming true. There's a window in there were I was blissfully happy. It is different for Andrew." 
As George went on to become one of the biggest solo acts this country has ever produced, Andrew Ridgeley became the forgotten man in Wham!. Because he didn't write the songs, Andrew's contribution to the top British act of the Eighties has always been criminally underestimated. 
Wham! were built on George's songwriting and Andrew's personality. Wham!'s image was full of breezy confidence, easy charm and infinite cheek. Away from the cameras, George wasn't really like that. But Andrew was exactly like that. 
Andrew's personality gave introverted, insecure George a chance to swagger and strut. And George's talent gave Andrew a career, a career that he has now rejected for a quite life in the west country. 
"When I was younger, I was offended when our former manager said that Wham! was the real Andrew and the fake Andrew - meaning me," says George. 
"Not that I am older I can see it more. Andrew and I were totally different people. But during Wham! we went his way." 
"Andrew was my best mate from the age of 12 until just before the end of the group. To be honest, Andrew's relationship to the past is different from mine." 
"He has taken a severe beating from the press because my career has stayed so high profile. I'm not saying he blames me in any way but it has pushed him away from the past. He wants nothing more to do with the music industry. He doesn't want to hear about it. He doesn't want to talk about it. And it's my life. There's no strain or rift between us but we don't see each other because he lives in Cornwall and he wants to move on. But I feel more affection for Wham! as time goes by." 
George smiles, and for a moment you can see the ghost of the boy he was in Wham!, that boy who believed that life would just keep on getting sweeter.