Update: Michael Jackson

"His gift was in his ability to integrate the boy and man – as well as the male and female - within and manifest the spontaneous genius of childhood throughout his life. The kinetic ability to sync mind and body that is both innate and honed by adulthood coupled with the boundless creativity of a child were crystallized by a heart filled with love and sung with an angelic voice."
Quoting: Mark Rockeymoore


Jet
Feb 6, 1984

"Jackson was a man of multiple identities, which helped account for his enormous worldwide popularity. It seems clear that he was deeply traumatized by his rough show business childhood, and that things happened to him to arrest his development. Just as a stem cell can grow into any organ, Michael's eternal boyishness made him a chameleon. Increasingly androgynous, he expressed both male and female. A boy and yet a father, he was both child and adult. In part because of his vitiligo, he interrogated his blackness and became, like some other powerful and wealthy African-Americans of his generation, racially ambiguous. Toward the end of his life he bridged his family's Jehovah's Witness brand of Christianity with a profound interest in Islam. He was all things to all people in part precisely because of his Peter Pan syndrome. A child can grow up to become anything, after all."
Quoting: Juan Cole


Ebony
Dec 1982

"Michael Jackson was also a transformative artist whose appearance provided ample material for magazines and gossip. Despite his ever-changing chameleon colors (literally, he went from black to something not quite human), or because of it, he managed to break stereotypes. He was, in a sense, both black and white, man and boy, male and female, gregarious and shy; a celebrity that we all felt we knew, but who was really a stranger in his own skin.
Quoting: Tinamarie Bernard


Jet
Aug 21, 1989

"Their father’s obsession for show biz perfection became Michael’s mania as well. It twisted Michael to transform himself from the cute little boy he started out as into a mutant—neither male nor female, black nor white." Quoting: Peter S. Ferrara



Jet
Feb 6, 1984