Disclaimer: I am not making an attempt to “headcanon” a real-life and now deceased person. I feel that there is anecdotal evidence that points to the possibility of this being true, but I will state that for the most part, this is pure speculation. And before I get dog-piled, I am a fan. I have always been a fan. I write this mainly as an introspective piece as we come upon the ninth anniversary of Michael’s death. Please no hate. Thank you.
There are people who like to think they are serious journalists who can trace their careers back to writing think pieces on Michael Jackson. There are people who write slop and pass it off as serious journalism who wrote rag-mag articles on Michael Jackson. Then there’s us fans who wish they had had to courage to write something and publish something about the man. I have tweeted about him, blogged about him, discussed him in videos, and none of this has been professional. Now I’m taking a crack at it, for your reading pleasure.
Michael died at the wrong time. Not only because he was too young, not only because he was about to knock ’em dead with his This Is It comeback/farewell tour, but because he never had the chance to open up. Michael was a notoriously private person. Michael never told the world that he had Lupus. Michael only hinted to a close friend in a secretly recorded phone call that he had issues with anorexia nervosa. In his brother Jermaine’s book, he surmises that perhaps Michael had body dysmorphic disorder. But there’s one thing that’s been never seriously talked about outside of the tabloids, and that’s Michael’s potential queerness.
I’m not coming from a place that others have. I won’t sit here and tell you that some guy who claimed he and Michael had a passionate one-night stand wasn’t just blowing smoke. Queer does not automatically mean gay, bisexual, pansexual, what have you. Queer simply means having a way of going about relationships with others and towards oneself that lies outside the norm. By that definition, is it any wonder we don’t consider Michael as being firmly planted in queerness?
I am a non-binary aspec person. It has taken me most of my thirty years of life to clarify who I am and how I feel about other people. Even so, I could not have done it without the internet. I could not have done it without others bravely speaking out about their own identities and labels. I shudder to think if my family had never adopted me and I had grown up in that small, rural town, or if they had never left their own rural town of origin. To some, it is still too radical to be a cisgender gay person. A man attracted to other men, a woman attracted to other women? Too much to handle. Now imagine that you’re a person who feels that male, female, those labels don’t apply at all to them. Imagine that you’re a person who wonders if they feel any kind of attraction to other people. That would be how it feels to be in my shoes.
Michael was born and raised in 1960s Gary, Indiana. His father was, by his own account, emotionally and physically abusive. His mother was a part of the Jehovah’s Witnesses. I will reserve my opinions on this religious organization; the point I am making is, so many other people found themselves in this situation. So many others awoke into puberty to find themselves feeling different from other people. When you are a young black man living with a hypermasculine father and a devoutly religious mother, you have two choices: come out and risk being disowned, or repress, try to ignore how you feel deep down. Thus we saw Michael go from a sprightly child star to a painfully socially awkward adolescent. His family relentlessly mocked his appearance. He felt ugly. He felt like his days of being valued for his talents were behind him.
After Michael’s career kicked off with the release of the Off the Wall album, he then became too busy to think about himself. When he did issue statements about his personal life, he often lamented on his lack of relationships. Yet often, when presented with the opportunity for one, he had trouble sorting out exactly how he felt. A confusing, contradicting picture of him emerged after his death in regards to his relationships. Some women, such as Brooke Shields, said he seemed to have zero interest in sex and wanted only emotional companionship; others said vice versa. In a famous letter circulated across many fan blogs, an anonymous individual claiming to have known Michael says he was very interested in sex and intimacy with women, but had a difficult time trusting anyone. Especially after the birth of his children, he seemed to have had given up on lasting bonds and “was a dog,” only seeking sex. Of course, this plays in stark contrast to the image the media constructed of him, and who some insist that Michael contributed to himself, of being pure and innocent and almost a child. Yet when infamous District Tom Sneddon tried twice to pin child abuse charges on Michael, all he could come up with was that he had collected a vast array of heterosexual pornagraphic material for the purposes of grooming minors.
It has always seemed fascinating to many that for being one of the most famous people on earth, no one seemed able to put Michael under any one label. In Randy Taraborelli’s book on Michael, the Magic, the Madness, the Whole Story, he pens a never-confirmed narrative that Michael could have been a closeted gay man, or else questioning himself. The crooked Rabbi Shmuley Boteach goes the utterly ridiculous homophobic route of saying that because he never saw Michael indicate interest in men, that indicates that he was firmly hetero. When women are asked about him on the other hand, you get the idea of him being a rambunctious, flirtatious lover. He went skinny-dipping with Jane Fonda on the set of On Golden Pond; he is rumored to have slept with the likes of Diana Ross; Lisa Marie Presley went on for years about his sexual prowess; and former friend and co-star of the 1997 short-film Ghosts, Shana Mangatal, described him thusly: “his entire aura reeked of sex.”
Yet probably the best women to get an idea of what he was like were the ones he never had physical relations with, his second wife, Debbie Rowe, and Dame Elizabeth Taylor. Perhaps two of his closest friends, they shed their own unique insights on who Michael was. Debbie knew Michael since the Thriller years, as his dermatological nurse, but when he searched for fatherhood, she answered his call. Some substantiate that the act of procreation was entirely petri dish, yet Michael and Debbie each on separate occasions insisted that the conception of both Prince and Paris was natural. Besides that fact, there didn’t seem to be much of a “spark” between them, of neither lust nor love. Some people described their union as a “marriage of convenience,” but I have another theory altogether.
With Mrs. Taylor, the love was deep, but there seemed to be no sexual attraction. What accounts for both of these is that Michael was aromantic, or else somewhere along the spectrum. He was healthily allosexual — whether exclusive to women or with some foray into other genders, we won’t debate — but his interactions on the romantic side always come off as stilted. The biggest point of controversy in his life was undoubtedly the fact that he “shared his bed” with children, but I think that this should not have been interpreted as predation. Rather, he longed for closeness but of the platonic variety. Michael spoke of loving everyone, showing great, passionate love for his fans, his children, and many close friends, but in the context of relationships, he seemed lost. Outside of the bedroom, he seemed very unsure of how to maintain an adult relationship. This could have been the mark of trauma, or it could have been a sign of something deeper. There were simply so many women in his life that he seemed to love a great deal, yet never cemented that affection into a romantic relationship. It’s obvious to me that Michael knew love, but not romantic attraction.
There are now many means of describing what it’s like to feel love without feeling romantic love. There are also several identities that could encompass this desire. If Michael had only had the opportunity to know them, and to question himself, I think that he would find himself very comfortable identifying as aromantic, or arospec. Quoiromantic is one having confusion over whether their attraction towards another is platonic or romantic in nature, and it seems to match Michael’s pattern. Very often, women would complain that he would flirt with them, kiss them, but then disappear, never allowing love to grow. Also, there is the label akoiromantic, where the excitement is in the pursuit of a relationship, but once it’s been found, the attraction is no more. The game of flirting, courting, and showing affection for someone and then seeming uncaring and cold matches what some say happened between themselves and Michael, as well. Then there is also cupioromantic, where one loves the idea of love but not towards anyone special; aegoromantic, where you enjoy the idea of love but only when seeing other people experience it, detached from oneself; or perhaps he was gray-ro, only experiencing true love every once and a great while. There are even labels ascribed to those who feel that trauma or other emotional difficulties directly impact one’s desire for a romantic relationship. I do believe that this experience was one had by Michael, and he could have benefitted from knowing that some people sometimes or never feel romantic love.
Now for gender, it’s much the same: people were confused as to what to make of Michael. Likewise, he never seemed sure of where to place himself. This is not taking into account his gender expression — a fully cisgender heterosexual man can enjoy wearing makeup with no bearing on his gender or sexual orientation whatsoever. Perhaps Michael was just another cisgender heterosexual who had inventive ways of expressing himself, because he as confident enough in his masculinity to do so. But a different picture emerges from an unlikely source.
I despise Dr. Conrad Murray. I think his incompetence and malpractice as a physician is largely to blame for Michael’s death. But we must concede that he was often around Michael, being his live-in doctor. Michael’s bodyguards in their book Remember the Time, and Frank Cascio (aka Tyson) in his own, Michael and Me, each lent their own unique lens on what it was like to know Michael. In Whitfield and Beard’s tome on their late boss, there are moments where they see Michael’s angry outbursts, his loneliness, his misery, and his absolutely mundane parenting towards his children. Michael and Me has passages that seem to paint the picture of a man struggling with his mental health, from stress, depression, and trauma. If these people, who spent years of their lives being around him, can be trusted, we should at least lend some credence to Murray’s accounts, albeit skeptical. That’s why I was floored when reading that sometimes Murray wondered if Michael suffered from gender dysphoria. And as fate would have it, in the midst of writing this article, The Guardian published an account from Michael’s personal photographer, Harrison Funk, feeding right into this topic.
As the article states, “It wasn’t so much femininity on Michael’s part as androgyny — he was fluid around gender… he didn’t overtly identify as one particular gender.” As someone who experiences their gender as being void, and yet wants to show an outward appearance sometimes of high femme and others as low-effort neutral, this sounds very familiar. There is no kidding to a person who has ever questioned their gender versus their birth assignment, and enjoys experimentation, if someone is firmly cis or not. If you want to broadcast to the world that you are flexible, that you are not simply in one box but choose one, the other, or multiple, you don’t take a firm stance on binarism. Funk goes on to state that once embracing fatherhood, Michael “became a strong man in that sense,” but should paternal feelings necessarily equal male? To trans men who have given birth, they fit simultaneously into the roles of mother and father. Likewise, Paris Jackson, now twenty, once had the realization that Michael had not given birth to her. It seemed hard to wrap her head around, because throughout her life, Michael had been her only parent. He cooked, cleaned, did laundry, saw them off to “school” in one room of the house, and did so while being their father. Yes, in the twenty-first century, more men than ever are now stay-at-home husbands. But Paris also reports that when she had feelings for a girl on the cover of a magazine, Michael naturally accepted it. Queer people find it easy to love and affirm other queer people. We may find that Paris is heterosexual, or we may find that that childhood crush means something more. Just something interesting to think about.
By all accounts, Michael rocked the world, and often via being provocative. Years after his untimely death, questions remain unanswered. But imagine if he had come out. Imagine if, for the first time in the world, we had a celebrity of his magnitude say that he was nonbinary, or aro, or both. It shook enough people when Sam Smith, the hugely popular British crooner, announced he felt a combination of man and woman both. There is so little representation of diverse genders and orientations that to have the King of Pop be anything but cisgender heterosexual would have changed things forever. I wish someone had given him that chance, not only for us, but for him and his soul. Maybe Michael finally would have found an internal sense of happiness in knowing that who he was, how he felt, could coincide with being the greatest entertainer. Now we’ll never know, but we can hope that somewhere, he’s found himself, and can still inspire others to do so.
