White Girls (20 page)
After “Ben,” the metaphors Michael Jackson used to express his difference from his family became ever more elaborate and haunting: there was his brilliant turn as an especially insecure, effete, and, at times, masochistic scarecrow in Sidney Lumet’s 1978 film version of the Broadway hit
The Wiz
. There was his appropriation of Garland’s
later style—the sparkly black Judy-in-concert jacket—during the 1984
Victory
tour, his last performances with his brothers, whose costuming made them look like intergalactic superheroes. And there were the songs he wrote for women—early idols like Diana Ross or his older sister, Rebbie—songs that expressed what he could never say about his own desire. “She said she wants a guy / to keep her satisfied. / But that’s all right for her, / but it ain’t enough for me,” Jackson wrote in the 1981 Diana Ross hit “Muscles.” The song continues: “Still, I don’t care if he’s young or old, / (just make him beautiful)...I want muscles / all over his body.” The following year, Jackson wrote “Centipede,” which became Rebbie Jackson’s signature song. It begins: “Your love / is like a ragin’ fire, oh. / You’re a snake that’s on the loose, / the strike is your desire.” In bars like the Starlite and, later, in primarily black and Latin gay dance clubs like the Paradise Garage on Manhattan’s Lower West Side, the meaning was clear: Michael Jackson was most himself when he was someone other than himself.
Ross was more than an early idol; she served as a kind of beard during a pivotal period of Jackson’s self-creation. During the late nineteen seventies and early nineteen eighties, as he moved away from being a Jackson but was not willing to forgo his adorable-child-star status, Jackson “dated” a number of white starlets—Tatum O’Neal, Brooke Shields—but once those girls were exhibited at public events two or three times, they were never seen with him again. Ross, on the other hand, was a constant. Gay fans labeled her as the ultimate fag hag, or sister, who used her energetic feline charm to help sexualize Jackson. But intentionally or not, the old friends perverted this notion in the 1981 television special
Diana
. In it, the two singers wear
matching costumes: slacks, shirt, and tie. The clip was shown over and over again in the clubs: Jackson dances next to Ross, adding polish to her appealingly jerky moves; he does Ross better than Ross.
The anxiety of influence is most palpable on the spoken-word introduction to his 1979 album
Off the Wall
, the first of his three collaborations with the producer Quincy Jones. Here, Jackson can be heard struggling against his own imitation of Ross’s breathy voice (a voice canonized in
Diana
, her brilliant Bernard Edwards– and Nile Rodgers–produced 1980 album featuring the militaristic hit “I’m Coming Out,” which has subsequently become a gay anthem of sorts). It was during this period that a number of black gay men began to refer to Jackson as “she” and, eventually, “a white woman”—one of the slurs they feared most, for what could be worse than being called that which you were not, could never be? As his physical transformations began to overshadow his life as a musician, Jackson’s now-famous mask of white skin and red lips (a mask that distanced him from blackness just as his sexuality distanced him from blacks) would come to be read as the most arresting change in the man who said no to life but yes to pop.
3.
The chokehold of black conservatism on black gay men has been chronicled by a handful of artists—Harlem Renaissance poet Bruce Nugent, playwright and filmmaker Bill Gunn, James Baldwin, and AIDS activist and spoken-word artist Marlon Riggs among them—but these figures are rare and known mostly to white audiences. In black urban centers across the U.S., where Jesus is still God, men who cannot conform to the
culture’s edicts—adopting a recognizably heterosexual lifestyle, along with a specious contempt for the spoils of white folk—are ostracized or worse; being “out” is a privilege many black gay men still cannot afford. Bias-related crimes aside (black gay men are more likely to be bashed by members of their own race than by nonblacks), there’s the bizarre fact that queerness reads, even to some black gay men themselves, as a kind of whiteness. In a black, Christian-informed culture, where relatively few men head households anymore, whiteness is equated with perversity, a pollutant further eroding the already decimated black family. So in their wretchedness, and their guilt, the black gay men who cannot marry women, and those who should not but do, meet on the “down low” for closeted gay sex and, less often, love and fraternity.
During Jackson’s childhood in Gary, Indiana, black conservatism would have reigned. Among U.S. cities with a population of 100,000 or more, Gary—a steel town twenty-five miles southeast of downtown Chicago—has the highest percentage of black residents, mostly Southern transplants, mostly Christian, and steadfastly heterosexual. Both of Jackson’s parents’ roots were in the South. His mother, Katherine, was a devout Jehovah’s Witness. She suffered Joe’s various infidelities and cruelties to their nine children with the forbearance of one whose reward will come not in this world but the next. (Joe Jackson has never adopted his wife’s faith.) In her 2006 study,
On Michael Jackson
, the critic Margo Jefferson discusses this split in parenting, the fractured mirroring in the home:
Katherine Jackson’s pursuit of her faith was analogous to what she had been doing all along: housekeeping. Dirt and disorder were the
enduring enemy in the household. Germ-free spiritual cleanliness was the goal in her religion. The Witnesses say you are not pure in heart unless you are pure in body. You must follow scriptural condemnation of fornicators, idolators, masturbators, adulterers and homosexuals...So while Katherine works to lead their souls to God, Joseph works to bend their minds, bodies and voices to his will for success. Not that Katherine objects: she has her own suppressed ambitions. The boys become singing and dancing machines. And little Michael becomes a diligent Witness.
For her children ever to have raised the issue of Katherine Jackson’s complicity with her husband’s drive for his sons’ stardom (and thus his own), and with his various cruelties—Jefferson writes, “He put on ghoulish masks and scared his children awake, tapping on their bedroom window, pretending to break in and standing over their beds, waiting for them to wake up screaming”—would have meant the total loss of family: she was the only emotional sustenance they knew. And who would object to the riches Joe Jackson’s management eventually yielded, despite his hard-line style? Two years after his fifth son, Michael, began to sing lead in the family band in 1966, they were signed to Motown Records, where they would remain for more than a decade. And despite their uneven career paths, none of the Jackson children would ever lack for financial security again.
4.
In his 1985 essay “Freaks and the American Ideal of Manhood,” Baldwin wrote of Michael Jackson:
The Michael Jackson cacophony is fascinating in that it is not about Jackson at all. I hope he has the good sense to know it and the good fortune to snatch his life out of the jaws of a carnivorous success. He will not swiftly be forgiven for having turned so many tables, for he damn sure grabbed the brass ring, and the man who broke the bank at Monte Carlo has nothing on Michael.
Baldwin goes on to claim that “freaks are called freaks and are treated as they are treated—in the main, abominably—because they are human beings who cause to echo, deep within us, our most profound terrors and desires.” But Jackson was not quite that articulate or vocal about his difference, if he even saw it as such after a while. Certainly his early interest in subtext—expressed primarily by wordplay and choice of metaphor—receded after he released his synthesizer-heavy 1991 album,
Dangerous
. That album gave us “In the Closet,” where an uncredited Princess Stéphanie of Monaco pleads, at the beginning of the song, for the singer not to ignore their love, “woman to man.” (It’s another link in the chain of influence; she sounds like Jackson doing Diana Ross.) In a later part of the song, Michael pleads: “Just promise me / whatever we say / or whatever we do / to each other, / for now we’ll make a vow / to just keep it in the closet.”
But this would be his last engagement of this kind. Unlike Prince, his only rival in the black pop sweepstakes, Jackson couldn’t keep
mining himself for material for fear of what it would require of him—a turning inward, which, though arguably not the job of a pop musician, is the job of the artist. After
Dangerous
, Jackson became a corporation, concerned less with creative innovation than with looking backward to re-create the success he had achieved almost ten years before with
Thriller
. In contrast, over a career spanning roughly the time of Jackson’s own, Prince has released more than thirty albums, not all of them great, but each reflective of the current permutation of his musical mind, with its focus on sex and religion as twin transformative experiences. When not content to sing as himself, Prince has created an alter ego, Camille, to explore his feminine side and thus help promote his stock in trade: androgyny (which is Prince’s freakishness, along with his interest in bending racial boundaries without resculpting his face). For Jackson to have admitted to his own freakishness might have meant, ultimately, being less canny about his image and more knowledgeable about his self—his body, which was not as impervious as his reputation.
James Baldwin did not live long enough to see Jackson self-destruct. And the most interesting aspect of his essay in light of Jackson’s death is Baldwin’s identification with Michael Jackson, another black boy who saw fame as power, and both did and did not get out of the ghetto he had been born into, or away from the father who became his greatest subject. But the differences are telling. While Baldwin died in exile, he did not presumably die in exile from his body, and while Baldwin died an artist, Jackson did not. After 1991, Jackson’s focus was his career—which is work, too, but not the work he could have done. And his tremendous gifts as a singer and arranger,
and as a synthesizer of world music in a pop context, became calcified. He forgot how to speak, even behind the jeweled mask of metaphor.
In the end, the chief elements of his early childhood—his father, his blackness, the church, his mother’s silence—won, and the prize was his self-martyrdom: the ninety-pound frame; the facial operations; the dermatologist as the replacement family; the disastrous finances; the young boys loved and then paid off. Michael Jackson died a long time ago; it’s just taken years for anyone to notice.
ONE NIGHT IN
the spring of 1993, the fashion editor André Leon Talley attended an all-male nude revue at the Gaiety Theatre, on West Forty-sixth Street. He was dressed in a red waist-length military jacket with gold epaulets and black cuffs, black military trousers with a gold stripe down each leg, black patent-leather pumps with grosgrain bows, gray silk socks with black ribbing, white gloves, and a faux-fur muff. Accompanying him, rather like another accessory, was the young English designer John Galliano.
As the driver opened the car door in front of the theater, Talley, characteristically, issued a directive followed by a question: “I shall expect you here upon my return at once! Lord, child, how am I gonna get out of this car in all this drag?” He did not pause for an answer. He stretched out his long left leg, placed his foot on the sidewalk, and, grabbing the back of the driver’s seat, hoisted himself up and out—a maneuver whose inelegance he countered by adjusting his muff with a flourish.
Appearances are significant to André Leon Talley, who seeks always to live up to the grand amalgamation of his three names. He has sienna-brown skin and slightly graying close-cropped hair. He is six foot seven and has large hands and large feet and a barrel chest. He has been described as “a big girl.” He is gap-toothed and full-mouthed. His speech combines an old-school Negro syntax, French words (for sardonic emphasis), and a posh British accent. Though a wide audience may know him from his periodic television appearances on CNN and VH1, it is in the world of magazines that he has made his name. Currently the creative director of
Vogue
, formerly the creative director of HG, and a writer, stylist, and photographer for
Women’s Wear Daily, Interview
, and the
New York Times Magazine
, André Leon Talley is, at forty-six, fashion’s most voluble arbiter, custodian, and promoter of glamour.
Inside the Gaiety—a small, dark space with a stage, a movie screen, and two tiers of seats—some men sat in various states of undress and arousal while others dozed quietly. Talley and Galliano stood in the middle of the aisle to the left of the stage and waited for the dancers to appear. Talley was hoping for a “moment.” He finds moments in other people’s impulses (“I can tell you were about to have a moment”), work (“What Mr. Lagerfeld and I were after in those photographs was a moment”), architecture (“This room could use a certain...moment”), social gatherings (“These people are having a moment”). When the dancers entered, one by one, Talley said, “This is a major moment, child.” Swaying to loud disco music and against a backdrop of gold lamé, the young men, who were either nude or partly so, offered the men in the front row a thigh to be touched, a bicep to be rubbed.
“Ooh!” Talley exclaimed. “It’s
nostalgie de la boue!
It’s
Déjeuner sur l’Herbe
, no? Manet. The flesh. The young men. The languorous fall and gall of the flesh to dare itself to fall on the herbe.” André Leon Talley came down hard on the word
herbe
as he caught sight of a lavishly tanned young man onstage who was naked except for cowboy boots and, as his smile revealed, a retainer. “What can one do?” Talley moaned. “What can one do with such piquant insouciance? How can one live without the vitality of the cowboy boots and teeth and retainers and so forth?”
