Michael's Essence;4208315 said:
Was there any concrete evidence that Michael himself planted those stories about the oxygen chamber and the elephant man's bones, aside from that one book that I refuse to mention? Why would he do that, then get upset with people giving him the reaction he sought out in the first place? It doesn't add up.
I support Michael's statement in the Ebony interview in '87. Responding to such stories only dignifies them. Besides, that would be a full time job itself with the amount that Michael had to deal with! He was more focused on the overall plan of creating a lasting artistic legacy 
'Leave Me Alone' was the perfect way to throw it back their faces and laugh at them.
Also, let's not forget that there were tabloid lies written about him before '86. I saw a report when he was a child that claimed he was a castro! They said he was having gender reassignment, and planned to marry Clifton Davis (the writer of 'Never Can Say Goodbye') when he was a teenager. That he was taking hormones to make his voice high during 'Off The Wall'. People were already talking about his surgery in '83 (my favourite year or him )
They've always been there.
It think some of you are being unfair with your expectations of not only Michael, but entertainers in general. How can one person embody the hopes and dreams of billions of people they don't even know? We may not agree with all the choices that Michael made, but we should respect the fact that it was his life, and he had the right the live it the way that he chose to.
I agree completely. This thread feels like it belongs in the 'tabloid discussions' 'Trials and Tribulations section.
Michael understood from a very young age that the press would write anything to sell copies, and fans / the general public would believe anything they wanted to believe about him, to suit their own aims and agendas. There are still
fans who believe Michael is alive!
There are still people who believe he didn't have vitiligo, despite the PM report.
There are people who believe vitiligo is a 'disease'. (The absence of melanin itself is not*....although there may be auto immune conditions underlying it).
Michael gave fans and the public his life in music, dance and art. He doesn't 'owe' anyone ANY information about himself beyond his public career. He knew from 1993 that even some of the people closest to him would be prepared to make up the most heinous stories about him. Why would he even take anyone close to him into his confidence, let alone fans or the general public?
Why should he have been a 'poster boy' for vitiligo? He wanted to be entirely himself, and to help as many people in the world as possible; not to be pigeonholed into some convenient category.
We can 'project' whatever of our 'wants' or 'needs' or 'beliefs' on to Michael, but I'm glad he lived his own true life in his own true way. 'Be true to yourself' is one of his best and strongest messages. I'm glad that he didn't feel that he needed to 'justify himself' to gain acceptance for who he was or how he looked. That's exactly as it should be.
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* by most definitions
Cambridge English dictionary
disease: (an) illness of people, animals, plants, etc., caused by infection or a failure of health…
Britannica
Disease, any harmful deviation from the normal structural or functional state of an organism, generally associated with certain signs and symptoms.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1299105/
'An absence of health'?
At first sight, the answer to “What is a disease?” is straightforward. Most of us feel we have an intuitive grasp of the idea, reaching mentally to images or memories of colds, cancer or tuberculosis. But a look through any medical dictionary soon shows that articulating a satisfactory definition of disease is surprisingly difficult. And it is not much help defining disease as the opposite of health, given that definitions of health are equally tricky.
It might not be easy to articulate what a disease is, but we like to think we would at least all know when we saw one. Unfortunately, this is problematic as well. Notions of health are highly context-dependent, as human diseases only exist in relation to people, and people live in varied cultural contexts. Studies in medical anthropology and sociology have shown that whether people believe themselves to be ill varies with class, gender, ethnic group and less obvious factors such as proximity to support from family members.
What counts as a disease also changes over historical time, partly as a result of increasing expectations of health, partly due to changes in diagnostic ability, but mostly for a mixture of social and economic reasons.
