Tuesday, June 30, 2009

Michael Jackson: closet case?

From this story:

He was 29 and at the height of his popularity when he bought the ranch, naming it after the mythical land of Peter Pan, where boys never grow up. There, he surrounded himself with animals, rides and children.

Jackson fled the ranch -- and the country -- after his acquittal on charges that he molested a 13-year-old cancer survivor in 2003 at the estate after getting him drunk.

Just because Jackson was acquitted of those charges (and that wasn't the first time he'd got into trouble over this) doesn't mean he didn't do it. I followed the last trial very closely and happen to believe he did. Luckily for Michael, he could afford the millions of dollars to get out of these scrapes.

Despite the fact I found Jackson's "childlikeness" sappy, I can sympathize with wanting to go through life trusting everyone and taking a child's delight in everything. (And apparently Michael Jackson's childhood was all work and no play.) But, unless you're castrated before puberty (as many boy singers used to be), you do grow up to have sexual feelings, and these have to be reckoned with.

I'm afraid Michael Jackson's cultural and familial milieu would never have allowed Michael to come out of the closet as a gay person. Instead he went down the path of molesting male minors. (Maybe if he'd been born 25 years later, things would've been different.)

I feel sorry for Michael that he was never able to grow up. It appears that he spent his whole life running away from who he was--with all the plastic surgeries, prescription drugs, child molestations, etc. I think it's a singularly sad case of a gay person in serious, self-destructive denial.

Tonight I heard on MSNBC that Michael wasn't even the biological father of his children. (It doesn't surprise me.)

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