The story about Michael Jackson in the March 19, 1984 issue of Time magazine, written by Denise Worrell, I think, helped perpetuate the rumor that Jackson is gay. Michael's father, Joe, takes Worrell on a tour of the house and grounds. When they get to Michael's bedroom door and are allowed in, she witnesses this scene: "The only light comes from a television set. The light glistens off Michael's hair. He and a young man who looks about 20 are sitting side by side facing the television. Michael is watching it intently. They both stand up. ...The room is very dark.
"Michael in a very quiet voice introduces his friend to his father, giving only one name. I cannot hear it." Michael and Worrell shake hands. She describes his hand as feeling "like a cloud." His friend's hand, she writes, "is damp. He seems nervous. ...There is silence and I feel that [Michael's father] is uncomfortable." They leave. The way Worrell describes what she saw, a reader would get the feeling that something mysterious and forbidden was going on. Near the end of the article, she writes: "The cab pulls out, past the three-tiered white fountain at the front of the house. ...We start out the open gate, when suddenly the guard in the security station runs and calls after us. We return to the house." That's when Michael's parents tell her that their son is not gay. "It's against his religion [Jehovah's Witnesses]. It's against God. The Bible speaks against it," emphasizes his mother. His father further underscores his wife's statement by proclaiming ,"Michael isn't gay." If he isn't, they're doing a pretty good job of making people think he is by being so defensive.
A Michael Jackson friend, quoted in The Star (April 3, 1984), had this to say: "The young girls who adore him so much don't care about the rumors and wouldn't care if he is gay." This same friend says that the rumors started because "people never saw him go out with a woman. They just assumed he was gay. Plus he is a great dancer with grace and style and that bothered people."
Author's Note: The above sidebar is taken from an unpublished Q & A interview with Nelson George about Michael Jackson.
Although the article on which the blog posts are based is 25 years old, I hope the information it contains will be useful to music historians and future Michael Jackson biographers.
Showing posts with label Michael Jackson. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Michael Jackson. Show all posts
Tuesday, July 7, 2009
Monday, July 6, 2009
Was Michael Jackson Gay?
The following is an excerpt from an unpublished Q & A telephone interview with music journalist Nelson George which occurred shortly after the publication of his book The Michael Jackson Story (Dell, 1984).
Charles Michael Smith: How did the rumor of his gayness get started?
Nelson George: It's been going on since the mid-70s. Jet magazine, in fact, printed a story and a couple of the tabloids, the National Enquirer-type papers, had printed that Michael Jackson's having a sex change. It goes back to 1976. This is not a new rumor. Ever since he reached that maturity or he became a teen and had this high voice that really sort of sparked these things. There was a rumor that's discussed in the book that he supposedly was going to marry [actor-songwriter] Clifton Davis.
I don't think he's gay. I quote him saying just that. I don't believe [he is].
[Here's the Jackson quote referred to by George: "I know it's not true, so it doesn't bother me. I'm sure we must have plenty of fans who are gay. That doesn't bother me in the slightest, but I'm not gay."]
CMS: I've heard several gay men say that they believe Jackson is gay.
NG: Gay people like to think that people who are talented are gay. That's just the truth. What proof do we have that he is gay? He has a high voice? That he dances well? That he doesn't have a lot of facial hair? I know a lot of brothers who are quote unquote manly who have all of those attributes. I have a little bit of a cold now. So when I'm speaking regularly I have a pretty high voice myself. I've found people who are willing to try to tell me he is gay but they could offer no proof. And when you have a public statement from a figure like that who claims that while he has no anti-gay feelings, he's not gay, I think you have to go with that.
CMS: Where did the quote in which Michael denies he's gay come from?
NG: A friend of mine, Steve Ivory, who's a fine journalist out in L.A. , interviewed Michael in 1978. To Steve's everlasting credit, he's the only person who ever interviewed Michael, that I know of, and actually asked him if he was gay. Barbara Walters didn't ask him.
CMS: Maybe she was afraid of offending him or his fans. It is a very sensitive question.
NG: She asked him every other question on her show. If you're going to do it, do it. My boy had done it and he got a very straight answer from the guy. I said to Steve: "You got him to say that and you haven't done any articles on that? That's the hottest question out here now. But he said he forgot he'd done the thing. I credited him in the book for doing it. To me it was a godsend. I wanted to deal with this issue but I wanted to deal with it in a way that would have class. Sort of give him a chance to answer the question. And I had talked with some people who knew Michael, who said that he wasn't but that wasn't strong enough. When I found Michael on the record saying this, I was overjoyed. That's one thing that makes me feel very pleased about the book.
CMS: He wrote a song called "Muscles" which people are saying indicated his sexual orientation.
NG: He has a giant boa constrictor called Muscles. If you listen to the lyric and you think about it that way, it can be taken another way. Because a guy has developed such a mystique about himself, people are quick to take a movement on his part, anything as a sign of something. I mean, either you take it at face value or you don't.
To tell you the truth, it really doesn't matter to me. Because would we care if he was gay, if he wasn't good? The bottom line is if the music didn't have it, then it doesn't matter because no one cares. No one cares about what me and you do because we haven't done anything yet in our lives that has that impact, that can reach that many people.
Charles Michael Smith: How did the rumor of his gayness get started?
Nelson George: It's been going on since the mid-70s. Jet magazine, in fact, printed a story and a couple of the tabloids, the National Enquirer-type papers, had printed that Michael Jackson's having a sex change. It goes back to 1976. This is not a new rumor. Ever since he reached that maturity or he became a teen and had this high voice that really sort of sparked these things. There was a rumor that's discussed in the book that he supposedly was going to marry [actor-songwriter] Clifton Davis.
I don't think he's gay. I quote him saying just that. I don't believe [he is].
[Here's the Jackson quote referred to by George: "I know it's not true, so it doesn't bother me. I'm sure we must have plenty of fans who are gay. That doesn't bother me in the slightest, but I'm not gay."]
CMS: I've heard several gay men say that they believe Jackson is gay.
NG: Gay people like to think that people who are talented are gay. That's just the truth. What proof do we have that he is gay? He has a high voice? That he dances well? That he doesn't have a lot of facial hair? I know a lot of brothers who are quote unquote manly who have all of those attributes. I have a little bit of a cold now. So when I'm speaking regularly I have a pretty high voice myself. I've found people who are willing to try to tell me he is gay but they could offer no proof. And when you have a public statement from a figure like that who claims that while he has no anti-gay feelings, he's not gay, I think you have to go with that.
CMS: Where did the quote in which Michael denies he's gay come from?
NG: A friend of mine, Steve Ivory, who's a fine journalist out in L.A. , interviewed Michael in 1978. To Steve's everlasting credit, he's the only person who ever interviewed Michael, that I know of, and actually asked him if he was gay. Barbara Walters didn't ask him.
CMS: Maybe she was afraid of offending him or his fans. It is a very sensitive question.
NG: She asked him every other question on her show. If you're going to do it, do it. My boy had done it and he got a very straight answer from the guy. I said to Steve: "You got him to say that and you haven't done any articles on that? That's the hottest question out here now. But he said he forgot he'd done the thing. I credited him in the book for doing it. To me it was a godsend. I wanted to deal with this issue but I wanted to deal with it in a way that would have class. Sort of give him a chance to answer the question. And I had talked with some people who knew Michael, who said that he wasn't but that wasn't strong enough. When I found Michael on the record saying this, I was overjoyed. That's one thing that makes me feel very pleased about the book.
CMS: He wrote a song called "Muscles" which people are saying indicated his sexual orientation.
NG: He has a giant boa constrictor called Muscles. If you listen to the lyric and you think about it that way, it can be taken another way. Because a guy has developed such a mystique about himself, people are quick to take a movement on his part, anything as a sign of something. I mean, either you take it at face value or you don't.
To tell you the truth, it really doesn't matter to me. Because would we care if he was gay, if he wasn't good? The bottom line is if the music didn't have it, then it doesn't matter because no one cares. No one cares about what me and you do because we haven't done anything yet in our lives that has that impact, that can reach that many people.
Tuesday, June 30, 2009
Music Journalist Nelson George Discusses Michael Jackson
The following excerpt is from an unpublished interview(12 manuscript pages long) originally intended for publication in the now -defunct New York Native, a gay weekly newspaper I wrote for from 1983 to 1988. I don't recall why the Native didn't run it.
In a telephone interview, Nelson George, the Black Music Editor of Billboard magazine and author of The Michael Jackson Story (Dell Books) explains the enormous attention being paid to Michael Jackson: "The reason we're interested in this guy is because of his music. That's the bottom line to me. Michael's most interesting work is about his psyche, more than about politics. Things like 'Billie Jean,' 'Wanna Be Startin' Somethin',' and even 'Heartbreak Hotel,' [from the Triumph album] say a lot more about his own insecurities and his feelings about his relationship to the world. That's what I was interested in. How his personality is reflected in his artistic statements and how his business or economics has affected his career in terms of why he left Motown. I don't think normally most of the fan books that I've been reading since I was a child deals with those aspects of the career. So that was in there," he continues," plus the typical things: 'Is he gay?,' 'What kind of makeup does he use?' I tried to get a balance of all those [questions]."
George wrote the book in two and a half months without "any direct input" from Jackson. "I tried to get Michael's official cooperation in this book. I could not get that. I tried his father. His father said the best thing to do was to reach Michael directly. I tried through a number of sources, I got nowhere." So then George " did what every biographer does when he can't get [cooperation from] the source person, you talk to everyone you can who knows Michael." That included record producer Quincy Jones, Michael's parents ("I had a chance to talk with his mother on two occasions") ,the musicians who performed on the Thriller album, and Michael's sister LaToya with whom Nelson George did a long interview. "That turned out to be very valuable," he says. "She's the one who more or less told me the whole background. I didn't realize that the Jacksons had made records before they joined Motown. They're not good records by any means. They're interesting more or less as historical documents. They were made one or a year and a half before they joined Motown. That really gives you an insight into what Motown did for those guys in terms of production quality and song quality."
The book, says George, has received "real good response from the teen crowd" because of its straightforward approach as well as from rock critics "who basically felt more or less that while it was written straightforwardly and very acceptably, it also did touch on a lot of the things in terms of his musical development."
George initially set out to do a Village Voice-style book, one in which there was "a little more delving in, from my point of view as a writer, into the whole context of Michael; his music in more detail. A lot of things would have been more detailed, and more intellectually rigorous in that way." But the people at Dell Publications wanted "more of a fan book. They wanted more of a People magazine book. The resulting manuscript is a compromise between [those] two points of view. It seems like it's working well."
In a telephone interview, Nelson George, the Black Music Editor of Billboard magazine and author of The Michael Jackson Story (Dell Books) explains the enormous attention being paid to Michael Jackson: "The reason we're interested in this guy is because of his music. That's the bottom line to me. Michael's most interesting work is about his psyche, more than about politics. Things like 'Billie Jean,' 'Wanna Be Startin' Somethin',' and even 'Heartbreak Hotel,' [from the Triumph album] say a lot more about his own insecurities and his feelings about his relationship to the world. That's what I was interested in. How his personality is reflected in his artistic statements and how his business or economics has affected his career in terms of why he left Motown. I don't think normally most of the fan books that I've been reading since I was a child deals with those aspects of the career. So that was in there," he continues," plus the typical things: 'Is he gay?,' 'What kind of makeup does he use?' I tried to get a balance of all those [questions]."
George wrote the book in two and a half months without "any direct input" from Jackson. "I tried to get Michael's official cooperation in this book. I could not get that. I tried his father. His father said the best thing to do was to reach Michael directly. I tried through a number of sources, I got nowhere." So then George " did what every biographer does when he can't get [cooperation from] the source person, you talk to everyone you can who knows Michael." That included record producer Quincy Jones, Michael's parents ("I had a chance to talk with his mother on two occasions") ,the musicians who performed on the Thriller album, and Michael's sister LaToya with whom Nelson George did a long interview. "That turned out to be very valuable," he says. "She's the one who more or less told me the whole background. I didn't realize that the Jacksons had made records before they joined Motown. They're not good records by any means. They're interesting more or less as historical documents. They were made one or a year and a half before they joined Motown. That really gives you an insight into what Motown did for those guys in terms of production quality and song quality."
The book, says George, has received "real good response from the teen crowd" because of its straightforward approach as well as from rock critics "who basically felt more or less that while it was written straightforwardly and very acceptably, it also did touch on a lot of the things in terms of his musical development."
George initially set out to do a Village Voice-style book, one in which there was "a little more delving in, from my point of view as a writer, into the whole context of Michael; his music in more detail. A lot of things would have been more detailed, and more intellectually rigorous in that way." But the people at Dell Publications wanted "more of a fan book. They wanted more of a People magazine book. The resulting manuscript is a compromise between [those] two points of view. It seems like it's working well."
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