By George!

It is 23 years since Boy George, then the doll-like, androgynous front man of Culture Club, achieved instant fame with the No. 1 single Do You Really Want To Hurt Me? Five years of international celebrity, spectacular wealth and a succession of 21 UK top 50 singles ensued.

Vociferously gay, George confounded the nation by declaring on prime-time TV - to the chat show host Russell Harty - that he would rather have 'a nice cup of tea' than sex.

The admission, it emerged, was disingenuous. He was, at the time, enjoying 'rampant' sex with Culture Club's drummer Jon Moss, who is now, incidentally, married with children.

So why the arrant falsification? 'It was a way of avoiding the subject of sex with someone (Harty) who was a closet homosexual,' he says. 'It was clear that he didn't want to discuss his own sexuality. So I decided not to discuss the subject of my own.'

The merest whiff of hypocrisy sends George into a rant. When the double standards are blatant, he will rain torrents of vituperation on the offender. Take the hapless singer George Michael. Their long-running feud was precipitated by Michael's espousal, during the Eighties, of a macho, heterosexual image.

In fact, he was gay: a truth humiliatingly revealed when he was caught in compromising circumstances in a public lavatory. This ignominious 'outing' gave Boy George - who has advertised his own sexuality since he was 15 - the ammunition he coveted.

People saw me as the benchmark queer while George was passing himself off as a straight stud. In fact, he was loitering in public loos like some pre-war homosexual. It's one thing to keep quiet. It's another thing to pretend to be someone you're not.'

Underpinning his indignation is the suggestion that Michael promoted the straight persona for commercial ends: the legions of girl fans who bought his records might not have been so enamoured of a promiscuous gay.

Which brings us to Madonna. 'A living, breathing cash register' is what George calls her. While in the Nineties she was content to outrage, titillate and blur the edges of her own sexuality by kissing women for her book, Sex, she has now espoused a religion - Kabbalah - that denounces the 'sin' of homosexuality.

'I detect a slight edge of hypocrisy here,' says George, luxuriating in the irony of understatement. 'She has now joined a spiritual movement that believes homosexuality is a curable disease. How can that be all-embracing?'

George savours the shock of both visual and verbal outrage. His barbed one-liners are legendary and he pricks pomposity with the stiletto shards of his wit. Even hugely-inflated egos are not exempt.

Thus we have his famously protracted antipathy to notably gay Sir Elton John, who had the temerity to duet at the MTV Awards with the offensively homophobic rapper Eminem.

'It's like me singing with Pol Pot,' rages George, in his newly-published memoir Straight - a book that settles a few old scores.

Sir Elton has attempted to defend his action as a 'political move', suggesting Eminem's willingness to sing with him is evidence of a laudable new acceptance of homosexuality. George is not appeased.

'It's just a desperate attempt by Elton to be trendy,' he fulminates. 'He didn't drag Eminem on stage and make him apologise for all the vile things he's said, did he? Besides, Eminem said he didn't even know Elton was gay.'

To compound George's indignation, Elton's long-time partner David Furnish approached him at a nightclub and told him the great man was upset by his remarks.

'Who made Elton the headmaster-demanded George, before retiring to the loo.

A red-top tabloid later accused George of 'cowering' from the incensed Furnish in the lavatory.

'Can you imagine me running away from David?' asks George now. 'I'd knock him out with one finger.'

The George before me is, indeed, thick-set and physically imposing; as impressive a presence as his late father, Jeremiah O'Dowd, a builder noted for his mercurial temper. Jeremiah and Dinah raised their six children in a council house in the South London suburb of Eltham.

Theirs was a tumultuous household; Jerry's plate-throwing rages were infamous. However, when the chips were down, the O'Dowd family always rallied.

So, when George acquired a near-lethal heroin and cocaine habit in the mid-1980s, it was his brother David who - to shock his sibling out of his drug-induced torpor - shopped him to The Sun. Junkie George Has Eight Weeks To Live, decreed the headline in 1986. Manifestly erroneously, as it turned out.

Because, with the help of his parents - who moved into his home, a Gothic pile in Hampstead, North London, to support him during the painful period of withdrawal - George kicked his drug habit. Therapy and reiki healing aided his recovery. His father went along too, emerging - a surprising twist here - as a qualified healer.

At the same time, Jeremiah also acquired a new woman in his life.

After 43 years of marriage to Dinah, he began a furtive affair, though admitted only to a friendship, which his unsuspecting wife embraced.

When George discovered his father's duplicity, although the marriage had long-since descended into loveless bickering, he was furious at the hurt caused to his long-suffering mother.

'You never save people's feelings by deceit,' he fumes. 'My dad had a responsibility to end his relationship with my mum before he began his affair.'

I ask if George - with his uncompromising stance on hypocrisy - applies as rigorous a moral code to his own life as he expected of his father.

'I do not believe in open relationships,' he states. 'If you're in love with someone and it's not working out, although it's not very nice to say "It's over", it's preferable to having an affair.'

Jeremiah died in September last year. By then, George had made his peace with his father.

'Regret is pointless,' he says. 'The last time I spoke to Dad, I had a very pleasant conversation. He told me he loved me. I loved him. Do I forgive him? Of course I do. My book is dedicated to him.'

There have been bleaker tragedies in the O'Dowd family's volatile history. A decade ago, George's younger brother Gerald, a paranoid schizophrenic, was detained in a secure mental unit after stabbing his wife, Gill, to death. 'I don't think I will ever get over it,' George has said.

Much of his past - notably Culture Club days and the excesses of his drug abuse - he chooses not to exhume. Since last August he has lived in New York (his Hampstead house is rented out, suggesting a temporary sojourn), where he is enjoying a flourishing new career as a dance music DJ, fashion designer and photographer. He has not had a record contract for a decade.

He likes the fact that New Yorkers do not constantly remind him of the past.

'In London, I think I'm the only person who realises the Eighties are over,' he snaps. Then he's off on another harangue: against the BBC (an old boys' network that does not play his records, thereby denying him sales); against the music industry (so formulaic, so many manufactured bands); and against fame in general (spurious, transitory).

He went to the States when Taboo - the musical based on the wildest club night in mid-Eighties London, for which he was songwriter, occasional performer and creative linchpin - transferred from London to Broadway last August.

Taboo, which opened in the West End in 2002, was a fragile hit in London. Reviews ranged from adulatory to damning.

But when one equated George's song-writing talents with Andrew Lloyd Webber's, George wept tears of gratitude.

Later, when the show closed after a calamitously brief Broadway run, Lloyd Webber was heard to decry its creators as 'a bunch of amateurs'.

'I thought it was a bit of a cheek,' bridles George. 'I'm surprised at how many people say "We must save live theatre", then, when you try, they tear you apart.'

That said, he is not about to expend too much creative invective on Lloyd Webber. 'I met him at a party once. He was slightly pleasant,' he says, damning with fine-tuned faint praise.

Waspish and deliciously indiscreet as he is, his tirades are often legitimate retorts to unjustifiable behaviour. Of course he loves a gossip; a bitch. But his voice, surprisingly gruff in timbre, is rarely more than a cadence away from laughter.

He relishes the vitriolic soundbite. 'I won't be voting for Tony Blair again,' he announces.

His face - aside from the piercing Celtic blue of his eyes - might go unremarked in a crowd. Without the full peacock panoply of his 'going out' attire, George is almost anonymous. Only an elaborate tattoo, depicting a Star of David and lotus flower, adorning the back of his head and visible through his close- cropped hair, marks his eccentricity.

Why did he have it done? 'Because I wanted to,' he says, mock petulant. He has no partner at the moment. His last love affair ended two years ago.

'I fall in love at the drop of a hat,' he says. 'I'm romantic. I am very optimistic that I will settle down with someone, although these days there is so much emphasis on the superficial.

'Lasting relationships are harder and harder to find.'

Boy George, for all his capacity to scandalise and shock, all of a sudden sounds quite the middleaged moralist.

Straight, by Boy George, is published by Century, price £17.99.