March 6, 2019
I watched the first part of the Michael Jackson documentary. All of it rang true: the sense of romance and excitement the boys felt, their anguish at being replaced, the sexual acts they performed and the way these acts made them feel, their ambivalence about the love Michael aroused in them and appeared to feel in return. The seduction of the parents. We all lie to ourselves sometimes. The tone in both men of continued wonder and grief and a desire to protect their experience from rage and blame, alone. You feel they feel everything. The sex was allowed to happen the same way all people in power get their way. Priests, teachers, shrinks, the rich, the famous. Watching the documentary, you think about the audacity of Michael swearing on camera, “I would never hurt a child.” He knew he was harming children. He played the card of false criminal accusation that is routinely heaped on black men. When you listen to Michael’s music and watch him perform, will you think about these revelations? I should think it would be impossible not to. How that will color your reactions is individual. Can we keep complexity in the picture without shaving some part of reality? The first part asks us to do this.
March 9, 2019
I finished watching Leaving Neverland. Part two is extraordinary and moving. The men are present and touching, grappling with the complexity of their childhoods and the legacy of those experiences in their adult lives. Wade’s mother asks, “How could you not have told me?” It was the question my sister asked me about the sexual abuse I experienced at the hands of André Glaz, the psychoanalyst who treated various members of our family and who was trusted and revered by everyone in the family. I was 14. My cousin, to whom it also happened, was 11 when it began for her. André, who was in his 60s, took me to his bed twice in the course of a day and night. That’s all, and yet it marked my life, because the person who is doing it to you has no idea how they are changing you from that time forward. You are never going to be the person you were before those experiences, but this is only something I can tell you looking back over many decades. My sense of myself and of the world was spliced that day. It didn’t occur to me to tell anyone at the time. Just as it did not occur to Wade and James to tell anyone, despite the fact that other boys came forward. It is part of the enchantment of the experience that you live with it inside you in ways that are not translatable. The film conveys this beautifully in the attention it pays to these men as they remember their lives with far less interest in blame than in seeing who they were and who the man was who ushered them to sex before they had words for these states of being. I was older and could attach language to it. Also, I was not seduced and did not love the man, as James and Wade loved Michael. I knew all sorts of things I could not speak about. The film is important in tracing the natural history of sexual abuse inside the people it happens to, inside the families that allow it to occur, inside the culture that accepts the limitless power of certain individuals.
I added remarks after respondents switched the focus in the comments thread from the accounts of the men to damning a bad man.
So often in stories about sexual abuse, the focus is on the abuser, so people can aim their righteous contempt without having to take in the more nuanced and layered story of the person who came under the influence of power. What does it feel like being a child with the potential to upend the reality of everyone you know? That circumstance alone has enormous weight in your psyche, especially if your knowledge is unable to be shared. When I wrote about The Incest Diary, written anonymously by a woman who had sex with her father from the time she was five until she was twenty-one, I found the same wish to shift focus to a man who is bad away from a narrator who is female and taking pains to present the moment-to-moment variability of her consciousness. Summing up her feelings about her father, she writes, “I want him to think that I’m sexy. And I want to savagely mutilate his body and feed his corpse to dogs.” Some people found her range of feeling too difficult to look at, so they wanted to shut it down. To me, what Wade and James are doing on camera in their vigilant accounts is riveting because it feels so right and because what happened to them and who they were in those moments also contains a component that will remain mysterious and unanalyzable.