“Was Michael Jackson gay?” It was a question a journalist once asked Karen Faye, Michael’s longtime makeup artist and one of the people who knew him better than almost anyone outside his family.
And honestly, you can almost feel what the interviewer was expecting.
By that point, years of rumors, tabloid stories, and public speculation had convinced many people they already knew the answer.
Then Karen responded.
“What?! Noooo!”
Not carefully.
Not diplomatically.
Not like someone trying to craft the perfect public statement.
It sounded more like genuine disbelief.
The kind of reaction you have when someone asks something that seems completely disconnected from the person you’ve known for decades.
But what happened next is the part I always find interesting.
Instead of talking about rumors, Karen started talking about Michael.
The real Michael.
The one she saw when the cameras weren’t rolling.
The one who had crushes.
The one who noticed beautiful women.
The one who could be surprisingly funny about it.
Karen once revealed that whenever Michael spotted a woman he found attractive, he had a phrase for it.
He would say he was “going fishing.”
Not exactly the phrase most people expect from the biggest superstar in the world.
But that’s what makes the story so great.
And it gets even better.
There’s actually footage of Michael sitting inside a vehicle while fans run alongside it.
Then suddenly something catches his eye.
A woman outside.
His entire expression changes.
He leans toward the window and excitedly blurts out:
“Ohhh… that’s a good fish!”
Everyone around him starts laughing.
Michael laughs too.
Then he keeps joking with the people around him, completely caught up in the moment.
Every time I see that clip, I think about how different it is from the image the world spent years creating around him.
People treated Michael like a mystery that needed to be solved.
A puzzle.
An enigma.
Someone impossible to understand.
Yet here he is acting like a teenager who just spotted his latest crush.
No mystery.
No hidden meaning.
No complicated psychology.
Just a man noticing an attractive woman and reacting exactly the way millions of other men have throughout history.
That’s why I love stories like this.
Not because they prove anything.
Not because they settle debates.
But because they remind us how often the public version of Michael and the private version of Michael were two very different things.
The world saw the King of Pop.
The global icon.
The most famous entertainer on the planet.
Meanwhile, his friends saw someone laughing in the back of a car because he thought a woman was beautiful.
It’s such a small moment.
Yet somehow it tells us something important.
Behind the records.
Behind the headlines.
Behind decades of speculation.
There was still a human being.
Someone who flirted.
Someone who joked.
Someone who got excited over a pretty face.
And sometimes I think those ordinary little moments reveal more about Michael Jackson than all the theories people spent years arguing about.
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