A Cipher Who Never Fit Into the Obama Era

It has never been easy for a black man to be himself, no matter who he is. An essential feature of a black man's social toolbox is the ability to fit himself into narrow compartments in order to get by – to get a job, to get picked when he puts up his hand at school, to be taken seriously for who he is.

There was always something intangible, distant, noncommittal about Jackson. As a teenager, I remember not quite fancying him – partly because of the way he looked at the camera in his videos; it was a look that said, "I'm not here, I'm not real, I'm not yours." He was an individual in the truest, most dangerous sense, the danger existing at the junction between what he was inside and what he felt he was allowed to be on the outside.

In the last months of his life, when the world had shifted into one in which a black US president was not just a possi­bility but a reality, Jackson stood out ludicrously and tragically as a cipher from another era, when black people might still go to absurd lengths to erase themselves. The lighter he became, the more androgynous, then womanly, the more shy was that look of his into the camera.

Jackson betrayed that damaging stereo­typical image we were used to being fed of black men – butch, broad, strong, sexual. He was pretty. He was camp. The kisses and embraces he gave those dancing women in his videos were untrue. If Michael Jackson was gay, he didn't ever want us to see it.

Diana Evans's new novel, The Wonder, is published in August by Chatto & Windus.