I Just Can't Stop Loving You 

Before I begin, indulge me in a moment of confession. I . . . love . . . Michael Jackson. Seriously. This isn’t just a recent or passing phase. Oh no, I’ve loved him since I was two years old, chubby face plastered to the television screen gripping my prized possession—the Michael Jackson Barbie brand doll complete with microphone grip. My obsession even prompted a line in my baby book written in my mother’s neat script. “Alisha has a strange fascination with Michael Jackson.”

Curious? Of course, but definitely not unique. As I showed my support through MJ’s trial last year with T-shirts proclaiming his innocence and bags made from his album covers, the average response from passers-by was quite similar to mine. “Free Michael!” an older white man yelled on the J in New York. “I wish we had the old Michael back,” another woman lamented while looking longingly at the bygone days of “black” Michael gracing the cover of the Off the Wall album. Even those convinced of his guilt would balk at the thought of sending him to jail. “Yeah he’s guilty,” said a young, hip hop head in a club in Los Angeles. “But what the hell would we do without Michael?” His questions got me to thinking, Why do I, er, we, seem to need Michael Jackson so much?

Ambiguous Androgyny or Jacksonian Brand Plasticity

During the pop craze of the 1980s and early 1990s, Michael Jackson single handedly changed the face of pop music and dance culture. Able to effortlessly glide across the floor, Jackson not only invented the “moonwalk,” he trademarked it. And he sold more records than any previous artist, becoming the self-proclaimed “King of Pop.” Always fodder for the tabloids and network news, Jackson has mesmerized both national and international audiences not only with his unparalleled successes making him undoubtedly a music icon but also, more directly, with his offstage persona, particularly his ever changing plastic body. As Jackson crisscrosses identity binaries—racial (black/white), sexual (asexual/hypersexual, gay/straight), gender (man/woman, mother/father) age (child/adult), and legal (guilt/innocence)—we are arrested by his surgically altered plastic body.

Armed with his surgeon’s scalpel and a child-like imagination, Jackson has created an androgynous persona that refuses the categorical imprimaturs of a recognizable black masculinity, or as Kobena Mercer wrote in Monster Metaphors: Notes on Michael Jackson’s ‘Thriller,' “Michael Jackson is the paragon of racial and sexual ambiguity.” This ambiguity causes some to argue that his continuous procedures signal a “white ambition,” or a desire to escape the confines of a racialized body and assimilate into a mainstream beauty aesthetic. However, after taking a look at some of his recent pictures, I would argue that Jackson’s body not only steps outside the framings of a knowable black manhood, he steps outside any recognizable identity at all. Michael Jackson just doesn’t pass . . . frankly, for anything. (Madonna cattily denounced him as a “space alien drag queen.”)

In the media words like “freak,” “weirdo,” and “Wacko Jacko” attempt to situate him linguistically within a qualified knowable. As David Yuan recognized in his essay “The Celebrity Freak: Michael Jackson’s ‘Grotesque Glory,’” “Initially, the audience’s desire that the celebrity fulfill a particular identity overwhelms their tolerance for Jackson as a mercurial figure ‘morphing’ effortlessly from role to role.” Echoing Yuan, Victoria Johnson in “The Politics of Morphing: Michael Jackson as Science Fiction Border Text,” wrote, “While visible ‘difference’ may traditionally be threatening, the black man’s ability to manipulate and control the erasure of the markers of identity is perceived as a frightening and ‘otherwordly’ contemporary possibility. When a previously marginalized, containable, or definable racial minority enters into conversance as cultural plastic, where does that leave dominant control?”

Jackson’s body then ultimately produces a cultural anxiety and dis-ease, a discomfort that shifts his plasticity from a utopian possibility, or hope in the promises of medical technology, to a dystopian threat. Accompanying this anxiety, however, this dystopic fear of Jacksonian otherworldly potential is the seductive pleasure we receive from viewing, and even speculating about, the intimate places (and acts) of his body. In a 1995 Primetime Live interview with Jackson and then wife Lisa Marie Presley, the bolder of the curious barraged Diane Sawyer with reminders to ask the couple “if they have sex.” “We want to know if you’ve done ‘the thing’?” queried one fan, while yet another asked, “I know this is an intimate question, but are you having sex, together, with Lisa Marie?” Although Sawyer insisted that “I didn’t spend my life as a serious journalist to ask these kinds of questions,” we all held our breath so as not to miss Lisa Marie’s frank, “yes, we have.”

While some fans try to imagine themselves spooned between MJ and Princess Presley, still others go so far as to wonder “if his face looks like that, what’s underneath his clothes?” prompting a speculative fury on the Internet over the validity of the 1993 sketch of Jackson’s penis drawn by his first accuser, Jordie. Upon close examination of the slightly too-generic sketch, one blogger lamented, “I wanted something more graphic. This could be anyone’s dick, couldn’t it?” Another, with textbook castration anxiety, incredulously responded, “Look at his nose! You actually think he has one?!” So although we might never get a peek at Jackson’s johnson, the constant splaying of his body before the camera offers us many opportunities for more than just water-cooler speculation.

Wait, so who’s the freak?

Perhaps dismissing Jackson as “Wacko Jacko” is not simply born out of a collective anxiety but is more deeply rooted in a perverse desire for this queerly androgynous body, a virtually insatiable erotic curiosity that has kept his image situated so prominently in the cultural imaginary for more than thirty years. Could we even imagine a forty-five year old Michael without the surgical alterations? I dare say, even if we could imagine a Michael without the scalpel, we would be unable to imagine this body with the same talent. As much as we refuse to admit it, that altered, somewhat disturbing, completely unable-to-be-duplicated, surgical body is, of course, the site of our anxiety about the boundaries of identity. But more importantly, Jackson’s plasticity is the repository for our unmentionable, and yes I’ll say queer, cultural desires.

The Michael Jackson Trial and Queer Cultural Desire

As we mull over Jackson’s trademark plasticity, we sit in the shadow cast by the memory of his 2005 courtroom drama, which caused me to wonder, What exactly was on trial here? Village Voice columnist Michael Musto in “Why Jacko Beat It, Beat It, Beat It” insisted that “celebrity got Jackson into this unholy mess,” and Tom Mesereau, lead attorney on the Jackson defense team, agreed. The prosecution is “overzealous, too emotional, and too eager to get a conviction of a celebrity,” said Mesereau in a Court TV interview prior to the trial. In a way, Musto and Mesereau are right. The circus that swirled around this trial was indicative of Jackson’s celebrity status. But more specifically, the interest was more about a particular type of star body, one that confuses the generally understood construction of celebrity. Of course, Santa Barbara District Attorney Tom Sneddon wanted us to believe it was not vendetta, nor celebrity, but the flaunting of Jackson’s Neverland Ranch sleepovers that were the source of the charges against him. If Sneddon is right, though, why then, when speculation had swirled around Jackson’s alleged pedophilia for more than a decade, was he only recently facing the possibility of prison time?

Maybe it’s not just vendetta, celebrity, or Jackson’s transparent affinity for young boys, however inappropriate heteronormativity might deem this desire to be, that has created Michael the criminal. Perhaps it’s also our refusal in this sociopolitical moment of post-9/11 ultraconservatism and family value panic to be “outed” for our erotic fascination for this queer, star body. A moment signaled by the media when a seemingly innocent wardrobe malfunction during the 2004 Super Bowl Halftime Show escalates from an accidental “peak-a-boo(b)” to “Nipplegate” in the hands of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC); when Nicolette Sheridan, resident of Desperate Housewives’ Wisteria Lane, creates an uproar after dropping towel in front of Terrell Owens during a promotional spot on Monday Night Football (an uproar that likely would not have happened had Sheridan not been a naked white woman trying to seduce a black man); when even the animated show Family Guy is rushing to cover a bit of baby butt-crack in order to avoid hefty FCC fines; when our own self-dubbed Peter Pan is hauled out of Neverland for his (mis)adventures with the “Lost Boys.”

According to Sneddon, The People of the State of California v. Michael Joe Jackson is clearly about the ten count accusations of conspiracy to commit child abduction, to administer an intoxicating agent to assist in the commission of a felony, and to commit lewd acts upon a child. The media and public interest, however, thought otherwise. In light of Judge Rodney Melville’s decision to ban media from the courtroom, viewers, desperate for even an approximation of Jackson’s body in the absence of the real thing, tuned in to the cable channel E! to watch The Michael Jackson Trial, a daily half hour special produced by the network in conjunction with Britain’s BSkyB. The daily reenactment featured C and D list actors awkwardly reading excerpts from trial transcripts—excerpts that apparently anticipate the important legal moments that would have been broadcast if the media had been given an all access pass à la the OJ Simpson trial. The draw of the show, however, was not the canned legal commentary or the fumbled readings, but rather, the now famous Jackson impersonator Edward Moss, smeared with ghoulish face paint and topped with a mop of synthetic hair. “Just how much can someone look like Jackson?” wondered titillated fans. In “Is Jacko Our Wilde Man?” Elaine Showalter wrote, “Although Michael Jackson’s molestation trial is a form of mass entertainment, it is also a social drama. . . . There is little hatred for the alleged villain and scant pity for the alleged victim.” Bolstering Showalter’s point is March 10, 2005. On that day, the sight of Jackson in his pajama bottoms created as much, if not more, buzz than the supposedly sobering graphic testimony given by accuser Gavin Arvizo.

Hmmmmm, now we don’t have to guess what Michael wears to bed, and we can clearly imagine ourselves snuggled up next to him.

So just how easily does our love/hate relationship with Michael allow us to avert our eyes to the possibility of Jackson’s guilt? Michael Musto wrote, “Michael’s showman-like behavior was fueling the accuser in all of us—and after all we wanted him to be guilty.” I, along with Showalter, would have to disagree. A guilty verdict against Michael would have been acknowledging the guilt in ourselves for our complicity in this culture of celebrity that encourages and delights in each transformative phantasmagoria and dirty indiscretion, for perversity we displace upon Jackson’s body.

If this trial really was about sex, and sex with young boys particularly, locking up the freak would be easier than admitting our own desire. We’d seemingly rather run after our Frankensteins with torches and put our sideshows safely behind bars. But after all the alleged sips of Jesus juice, the boxes of pornography, and the carnivalesque eccentricities, Jackson did not stand trial alone, or possibly, at all. Instead, Jackson stood as a dark repository, the symbol of American excesses in a moment when it really does matter if you’re black or white, when cultural values are being (re)negotiated and identities demand solidification.

At the end of the day, Jackson’s legal moonwalk was not surprising, but rather, necessary. Unlike the official Jackson Web site MJJSource, I wouldn’t go so far as to put June 13, 2005, on a timeline of historical events on par with Nelson Mandela’s release from prison or the fall of the Berlin wall. In my own euphoria during the reading of the verdict, I, unlike “überfan” Fariba Garmani, did not release a dove after each not-guilty count. Still, it is clear that we do need Jackson and his ambiguity as a site of possibility that defies categorization and containment. Where else could we displace our fantasies, disgust, and perverse fascinations in this climate of conservatism? Or in other words, just what the hell would we do without Michael?

Alisha Gaines is a graduate student working toward her doctorate in the English department at Duke University while also pursuing a certificate in African and African American studies. Her interests include twentieth and twenty-first century African American narrative, queer epistemologies, visual studies, and popular culture. More specifically, she is in the process of turning a life-long obsession with Michael Jackson into an academic career.