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 alright for her/But it ain't enough for me," Jackson wrote in the 1982 Diana Ross hit song "Muscles." (...) 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.
(...) 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.
(...) 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.
(...) In black urban centers across the US, 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.
