“Do You Really Want to Hurt Me” was the third single from Culture Club’s debut album. Like most songs on it, “Hurt” was written by Boy George primarily about his relationship with drummer Jon Moss. The band had come up with the melody during some spare time while recording for The Peter Powell show on BBC Radio One.

After the band’s previous two singles made little impact, their label wanted to release “Hurt” as the group’s last chance to find success. George did not want the record label to send it to radio as a single because not only did he feel it was too personal, but “it wasn’t club music” – threatening to leave the band if they did so. The label moved forward anyway, but things continued to look fruitless at first, with an early review in Smash Hits calling the song “weak, watered-down fourth division reggae”.

After Shakin' Stevens canceled his appearance on the popular UK music show Top Of The Pops, Culture Club was asked to fill in. George’s controversial cross-dressing look filled the newspapers and airwaves the next day with statements like ‘Is it a boy, is it a girl?’ and ‘What is that thing?!’ The massive publicity of the performance helped launch the song up to the #1 spot in the UK for three consecutive weeks.

“Hurt” also topped the chart in several other countries around the world, and reached #2 in several more – including the US in March 1983 where it was held from the top spot for three weeks by Michael Jackson’s “Billie Jean”. Within a few months, the band were international stars.

Its music video, showing George being not accepted in various scenarios, including a courtroom with a jury in blackface, was in heavy rotation on MTV in the US. Director Julien Temple explained it was:

…about being gay and being victimized for your sexuality, which George was kind of emblematic of. It seemed appropriate to me that in the video he would be judged by jurors in blackface, to send up bigotry and point out the hypocrisy of the many gay judges and politicians in the UK who’d enacted anti-gay legislation.

Soon after, their follow-up single “Time” also shot into the top 20 in several countries around the world, and the band would eventually reach the top 5 in the UK seven times before their breakup in 1986.

George has stated that despite the outward appearance that the song could have been written about S&M, it was simply about emotional pain. But in an “apparently accidental allusion” to this song, while he was being tried for handcuffing a male escort and hitting him with a chain in 2009, the prosecution asked the jury, “Did he really have to hurt him?”