On April 20, 1992, George Michael stood on the stage at Wembley Stadium with the surviving members of Queen and sang “Somebody to Love” at the Freddie Mercury Tribute Concert for AIDS Awareness. Around 72,000 people were in the stadium, and the show went out live on television and radio to 76 countries. Almost everyone watching saw a young star honoring a hero who had died five months earlier. Years later, George revealed that the performance was also meant for one person in that crowd: his partner, Anselmo Feleppa, who had recently learned he was HIV positive.
A love the world didn’t know about
George Michael met Anselmo Feleppa, a Brazilian fashion designer, in January 1991, when George headlined the Rock in Rio festival. The relationship quickly became the most important of his life. But George was not out publicly, and he had not told his family. He would not come out publicly for another six years.
Within months, Anselmo developed persistent flu-like symptoms and was tested for HIV. In his documentary Freedom, released in 2017 and later re-cut as Freedom Uncut in 2022, George described the Christmas that followed, sitting at the family table while the people around him had no idea the man he loved even existed, not knowing whether that man was terminally ill. He called it the darkest, most frightening time of his life. Not long after the New Year, Anselmo told him the news.
Accounts of the exact timing differ. In a separate interview, George reportedly said he learned of the diagnosis the day after Freddie Mercury died on November 24, 1991. Either way, the news came in the same winter Queen was planning a farewell for Freddie, a man lost to the same disease.
A week of rehearsals, and no room for mistakes
George took the tribute seriously. He rehearsed with Brian May, Roger Taylor and John Deacon for a week before the show, and he later said he was not going to get it wrong. Rehearsal footage shows him working through “Somebody to Love” while David Bowie and Seal stand nearby, watching.
On the night, he sang three songs: Queen’s “’39,” “These Are the Days of Our Lives” with Lisa Stansfield, and “Somebody to Love,” backed by the London Community Gospel Choir. Many critics and fans still call “Somebody to Love” the highlight of the entire concert.
A tribute, and a prayer
Only George and Anselmo knew about the diagnosis that day. Anselmo was in the audience. In Freedom, George put it simply:
“I went out there knowing I had to honor Freddie Mercury and I had to pray for Anselmo.”
He also said he “just wanted to die inside,” overwhelmed at singing the songs of a man he had worshipped as a child. Looking back, he summed up that night in one sentence:
“The performance most well known in my career was sung to my lover who was dying.”
That’s the part that changes how the footage looks today. The confident singer in front of 72,000 people was keeping the hardest news of his life to himself.
What came after
Anselmo Feleppa died in Brazil in March 1993. A few weeks later, on April 19, 1993, the Wembley recordings of “Somebody to Love” and “These Are the Days of Our Lives” were released on the Five Live EP, credited to George Michael and Queen with Lisa Stansfield. It went to No. 1 in the UK, and all proceeds went to the Mercury Phoenix Trust, the AIDS charity set up in Freddie’s name.
George Michael grieved for years. He later said there was not one track on his 1996 album Older that was not about Anselmo or the risk of AIDS, and he wrote “Jesus to a Child” in Anselmo’s memory.
George Michael died on Christmas Day 2016. The Wembley performance remains the one he called the best known of his career. For a few minutes in front of the world, he was honoring a hero and praying for the man he loved, and only one person in that stadium knew it.