‘Why do people think I'm gay?’
Michael Jackson's sexuality has been the subject of speculation since he was a teenager. Perhaps it was his high-pitched speaking voice; or maybe it was his bashfulness, or the fact that he tended to avoid eye contact and seemed so uncomfortable in his own skin that caused some to think that he was either concealing something about himself or had not yet come to terms with it.
Michael has been dealing with the tabloid press for many years and feels he is misunderstood because of unfair and dishonest media coverage of his life. However, it was when he was nineteen that he first became upset about a story that was not true. Like a lot of untruths, it was silly: supposedly, he was going to have a sex-change operation and marry a handsome actor named Clifton Davis, writer of ‘Never Can Say Goodbye’. The story spread quickly across the country; numerous music publications rushed to the presses with it.
Michael once told me that he was in the music department of a store in the South when he first heard about the rumour. He said, ‘This girl came up to me and said, “Please tell me it isn't true! Please tell me!” She was crying. I asked, “What? What isn't true?” She said, “Tell me you're not going to become a girl.
Tell me.
”’
‘Where in the world did you read that?’ Michael asked. ‘
Jet
magazine,’ she responded. ‘It was in
Jet
that you were going to have a sex change.’
‘I felt I didn't know whoI was at that moment,’ Michael recalled. ‘I told her to tell all her friends that it was just a stupid rumour.’
‘Stupid’ as it was, it seemed to Michael that everywhere he went, he heard the story. At the time, nothing could be worse for him than the notion that there were people who thought he might be homosexual. Michael was raised in a family where homosexuality was sinful.
After the rumour had been circulating for months, Michael was at Caesars Palace to see Diana Ross perform when he ran into Clifton Davis. Clifton was backstage with performer, Leslie Uggams. ‘I was with Diana, holding her hand,’ Michael remembered. ‘Clifton was standing next to me, and he was holding Leslie's hand. As I was standing there posing for the photographers, I thought to myself, Oh no, this is a perfect setup for some magazine to doctor up a picture so that it looks like Clifton and I are holding hands. That's how paranoid I was getting about that story,’ Michael confessed.
After the photographers departed, Clifton went over to Michael and joked, ‘Hey, look at you. You're not a girl after all, are you?’ Michael didn't think Clifton's question was very funny. He would never get used to the stories that he leads a secret gay life, and is still upset when confronted with questions about his sexuality.
‘Just for the record, are you or are you not gay?’ I asked him during an interview in 1979.
‘No, I am not gay,’ Michael snapped. ‘I am not a homo. People make up stories about me being gay because they have nothing else to do. I'm not going to let it get to me,’ he continued. ‘I'm not going to have a nervous breakdown because people think I like having sex with men. I don't and that's that,’ he said, his sentences pouring out. ‘If I let this get to me, it will only show how cheap I am. I'm sureI must have a lot of fans who are gay, and I don't mind that,’ he continued, speaking faster. ‘That's their life and this is mine. You can print that,’ he said, thrusting his index finger at me. ‘What is it about me that makes people think I'm gay? Why do people think I'm gay?’
I didn't think I should answer his question. He was already upset.
‘Is it my voice?’ he continued. ‘Is it becauseI have this soft voice? All of us in the family have soft voices. Or is it becauseI don't have a lot of girlfriends? I just don't understand it.’
The truth is that Michael would never have allowed himself to have homosexual relationships, even if he did have feelings for other men. He was too puritanical as a result of his religious background. The Jehovah's Witnesses firmly believe that world destruction is imminent and that only a few of God's servants will survive the horrible holocaust. One question had hung over Michael's head for his entire youth; would he win salvation or burn in hellfire? If he wanted to be saved – if he wanted to be with his mother through all eternity – he would have to live up to all of the church's rigid teachings, which sure meant he couldn't be gay. Indulgence is not part of the Jehovah's Witnesses' creed. Any congregant who does not adhere to the rules and dogma is shunned or ‘disfellowshipped’. By the time Michael was a teenager, he had been trained to live his life a certain way. He would not be able to break that conformity.
Also, if Michael had any homosexual leanings he would have been too fearful to act on them. He knew that with any relationship he ever had – be it with a man or a woman – he ran the risk of the other person reporting the details to a newspaper or magazine, one that would pay astronomical sums for the story, especially if it were a sensational one. Although some public figures who are homosexual have come out of the closet in recent years – not many, though – back in the 1970s it just didn't happen at all.
Still today, many entertainers hide their true sexual identities from their fans and peers because they fear rejection, and the loss of income. Ever practical where his work is concerned, Michael is aware that being gay would damage not only his career, but his relationships with his family, as well. How would Katherine and Joseph handle it if he were to announce that he is, as he put it so many years ago, ‘a homo’? ‘When I first heard the rumours that he was gay, I thought I'd go crazy,’ Katherine once said. ‘He's my son and I know the truth. He knows the truth too. We both talked about it and cried about it. Michael was very hurt by the rumours. He is not gay. It's against our religion.’ They cried about it; tears shed over the fact that people they didn't even know had whispered such things.
How would his brothers react if Michael said he was gay? Back in the seventies, they would have been upset because it might have projected a controversial image for the group. Today? Publicly, they might offer their support. However, privately, they would probably be thrown. Like their mother, they are not progressive-minded. Indeed, if Michael were a gay man today – and no one is saying he is – and suddenly made the decision to bolt from the closet after all of these years, the only Jackson who would probably be able to come to terms with it would be Janet, a woman who has been around enough and seen enough to know that there are gay people in all walks of life.
Besides dealing with upsetting questions about his sexuality, Michael had other problems in the late seventies. Of course, most people have a difficult time with certain stages of adolescence, but Michael was much more sensitive than most people his age about the common challenges of puberty, perhaps because he was the subject of such intense public scrutiny. For instance, his face had broken out severely with acne in the mid-seventies; he was so ashamed of the way he looked that it was extremely difficult for him to go out into public. ‘I seemed to have a pimple for every oil gland,’ he recalled. Onstage, his condition was difficult to notice because of carefully applied makeup and the benefit of lighting. However, offstage it was obvious that Michael had complexion problems. Reporters would comment to each other about his skin. Fans would be shocked by his appearance. Michael could barely stand the humiliation.
‘I became subconsciously scarred by this,’ he has confessed. ‘I got very shy and became embarrassed to meet people. The effect on me was so bad that it messed up my whole personality.’
Michael couldn't look at people when he talked to them. Rather, he would look down or away. He wouldn't even look at his mother when he spoke to her. ‘He didn't want to leave the house,’ Katherine would recall. ‘When he did, he kept his head down.’ He would never really recover from the psychological effects of the acne. ‘The changes that it wrought in him became permanent,’ Katherine said. ‘He was no longer a carefree, outgoing, devilish boy. He was quieter, more serious and more of a loner.’
Complicating matters was Michael's belief that, acne aside, he was not good-looking. His skin was too dark, he decided, and his nose too wide. Even though his family was aware of Michael's sensitivities, Joseph and the brothers did not afford him any special treatment. They were a rowdy, boisterous bunch offstage and teased each other, playfully. Either a brother took it well, or he didn't.
At nineteen, Michael was nothing if not a study in contrasts. He was a young man who could muster enough courage to meet with the president of Motown, yet was afraid of the kinds of propositions most teenagers found exciting, such as the opportunity to drive an automobile. Whereas many youngsters are eager to get behind the wheel of a car by the age of sixteen, Michael was still petrified of the notion three years later. ‘I just don't want to,’ he said, when pushed. ‘I just don't have the desire. Whenever you do something, you have to want to do it. And even though there are some things you just have to do, I don't have to drive. And I simply don't want to. There's nothing special about it for me.’ Michael would usually have a limousine take him wherever he wanted to go, though often one of his brothers would drive him.
Besides the fact that he was frightened of driving, Michael also didn't want to go to the Department of Motor Vehicles to take the driver's test. He was afraid he'd be recognized and then be humiliated because he still didn't have a licence at his age. The thought of this kind of embarrassment was stressful for him. At one point, when he thought he might at least try to drive, he tried to obtain special consideration so that he wouldn't have to go to the Department of Motor Vehicles for the testing. However, the Encino division of the D.M.V. is accustomed to dealing with celebrities; officials there don't consider any of them special. It was all just too much to bear for Michael. He couldn't do it. ‘But suppose you're someplace and your chauffeur gets sick,’ Katherine argued with him. ‘You need to be able to drive.’ Michael would be twenty-three before he'd finally obtain his driver's licence, and only at Katherine's insistence.