Salud, Michael Jackson.

MICHAEL JACKSON IS DEAD.

For a second I want to talk about what he meant in my life. And how I see him. There will be plenty of time for endless conversations and accusations and equivocations and decimations of his person or at least his public image as one or another person has perceived it. I don’t think I’ll join in those too much. But I do want to mark the moment for myself.

I first heard Michael Jackson in grade school! The ABC, 123 song. And then a bit later, Rockin’ Robin, when I was about 11. I found Off the Wall when I began roller skating in rinks at about the same age. His music was with me for a long time. Thriller hit the scene when I was a teen, about 15 or so. Remember that album…I think that was the first time I thought his nose (surgery) looked a bit strange. But you know. Who cares, right? Who cared. The whole suit glowed. The album was amazing.

I wore a Tshirt around that time of his to school in high school. It was not a “cool” move and got me a few punches where I was living at the time. But I didn’t care. Because Michael Jackson the artist helped me reach places in my soul that transcend my every day existence. For years. That’s not how I thought of it! But…that’s what it is. This is what art and artists do at their best. And MJ was there in my life for a long, long time helping me do that. And I identify many things with him and his music. Freedom to move in a funky manner; freedom, as a male to dance in ways that males did not. Freedom simply to exercise the joy he seemed to tap into so easily. And how many times did I practice the moonwalk?

If we must talk about the controversial reality of his apparent physical transformation (and I do think that is an important conversation at some point) I would say that to me The Standard of Whiteness and US Suckcess is a lot of what destroyed Michael Jackson. I watched his arc with both awe and horror…watched his skin get bright white over my lifetime. His nose get smaller…and then…alien, even. Watched his lips get surgicalized. He seemed to me someone who wanted to escape the bind of both race and gender…and himself. I know that over the years I watched his eyes fill with pain. And I felt that pain in part…or thought I did.

But the truth is I don’t know his pain. And neither do you. He is a star. He is there for us to project our feelings and thoughts on, and we do. Our adulation or hatred. Our judgment. And if we must condemn him, I would remind you that it is a judgment that sits upon us as a society, as well.

Words come back to me that John Lennon sang: “They didn’t want me, so they made me a star.”

Some people (I can hear them even now, clamoring for the mic) are going to jump right into sizing up his life and calling him deviant or criminal, an abuser, a bad parent, a weirdo. I don’t know. He may be those things. Not talking about that, nor do I have the whole picture. Nor do I know what happened to or with him all along the path of his life, though I do watch the same media as you. If he is or isn’t any of those things, I hope it’s clear that just as not having a green icon on Twitter is not indicative that I want the Theocracy to succeed in Iran, neither is my celebration of Michael Jackson’s music and my mourning of his passing any indication that I don’t also care about children that are harmed anywhere at any time should that be the case. I do. So I’m not warming much to hearing people sneer now about how ugly they find his past, his accusations, his life. Regardless of what might be the truth of all of that, the simple fact that you are banging a drum about it at this moment—when you know so many around you are taking space to grieve—well, that sort of marks you as the ugly one in my way of seeing things.

It was his music. The energy in his eyes. The spirit that moved through him in the form of his dancing and happiness and art. That is what I celebrate right here.

Goodbye, Michael. Rest in peace.

And when the groove is dead and gone
you know that love survives
so we can rock forever…