Touching the Void: An essay review of Carl Toms' Michael Jackson's Dangerous Liaisons (2010)

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Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault. Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

The devil incarnate?

It would appear that the late Michael Jackson achieved the extraordinary feat of uniting his most zealous fans and his most assiduous persecutors on one specific issue - the issue they secretly shared in common: in order to be 'good', he could not be sexual. More specifically, this scintillatingly talented entertainer could not be a fundamentally gentle and kind-hearted man AND be attracted to young adolescent boys. His accusers believed him to be an incorrigible child abuser; his fans - sadly, vastly less intelligent in their responses than his would-be hangmen - mostly believed him to be a virginal, saintly emblem of purity and innocence.

A revealing sign of this unity, or shared assumption, between implacable enemies emerged with the publication of a book - Michael Jackson's Dangerous Liaisons, by a British author ostensibly named Carl Toms. Mr Toms, it has to be said, could have spared himself oceans of venom and malice had he simply sided with one or other of the two established 'public opinions' (Jackson was a wicked pervert/Jackson was as pure and sexless as a mountain spring). But he chose to do something different, unceremoniously marrying both camps on their shared ideological base in the process. This base is the 'moral' assumption which insists that a man who has been exposed publicly as sexual, especially a man whose sexual desires defy the most privileged social conventions, simply has to be an evil man.

Toms will have none of this. Calmly and wittily, he resolutely refuses the most ferociously policed orthodoxy of our age - the one that insists that sexual experience before an arbitrarily designated age is by definition not merely harmful, but permanently devastating. It's undoubtedly his principled opposition to this irrational and barbaric 'morality' which has drawn the ire of Michael Jackson's most scurrilous detractors and his most retarded fans alike (we might call them 'fantards' for short). For Toms, the giving and receiving of simple, mutually enjoyable sexual pleasure is no more harmful to a 'child' or adolescent than it is to an adult.

But what really bursts righteous blood vessels is his argument that age differences are of little consequence in such exchanges, provided the sexual parties involved experience affection, pleasure and joy. Meticulously reading the mountains of publicity and public documentation ensuing from the first public Jackson 'boy scandal' in 1993 right through to the seismic trial of 2005 and the subsequent speculation and innuendo that dogged him to the end of his life, Toms surmises that, prior to the horrified reactions of parents and prosecutors, Michael Jackson's boy friends - some of whom were almost certainly boyfriends - found his attentions, sexual and otherwise, positive and beneficial. Asserting this, in the so-called court of contemporary public opinion, is a capital offense.

Contemporary sexual morality: perverting pleasure into persecution

To put aside the inevitable lampoons, falsifications and hysterical reactions to his work for a moment, the author's prose is engaging, humorous and dramatically compelling - this is one exceptionally gifted writer who has produced a most persuasive and compassionate volume. He also happens to deploy reason, very deftly and very wittily, against the sour-faced revulsion prescribed by our moral rulers and the 'public opinion' they have both cultivated and fetishised. Despite the deceptively light touch of his prose, this book is the product of a scholarly and disciplined mind.

Wilde's verdict on literature is worth recalling here: "There is no such thing as a moral or immoral book. Books are well-written or badly-written. That is all." In 'An Ideal Husband', he put it more succinctly: "Morality is simply the attitude we adopt to people we personally dislike." The same, of course, can be said of books; needless to say, orthodox sexual morality doesn't like Mr Toms' book at all. All the more reason, it seems to me, to read it - and read it 'as it asks to be read', to use Martha Nussbaum's phrase, rather than as our moral authorities ordain.

One of the reasons the book is such a tome - 595 pages, excluding Bibliography and Index - is that it not only presents the most exhaustive collation of the (abundant) evidence supporting Michael Jackson's sexual love for young boys, it also runs daringly counter to the mandatory interpretation of such love. In every one of the book's 18 chapters, Toms forensically dissects the compulsive distortions of an orthodoxy which can only describe such liaisons in terms of forced molestation, rape and abuse.

At no point does Toms dispute that sexual involvements can be deeply disturbing; whenever they are brutishly coerced by one party upon another, a deep sense of violation and distress will ensue. Human beings simply can't get any closer to one another than in sex, and an erotic encounter which overrides or dismisses the other party's aversion is an act of violence, a crude exercise of sadistic contempt or primitively selfish power. No one can sanely quarrel over this; but the ecstatic intimacy and sublime pleasure experienced in mutually wanted sex is also its most precious characteristic.

The insistence that an experience of joyous, loving intimacy and generously shared pleasure between willing sexual partners must always be designated as assault and battery simply because it occurs across an arbitrarily-drawn age boundary might be seen, in a saner world, for what it is - the imposition of a narrow-minded and neurotic dogma. This is the very same sexual morality, if it can be dignified with such a title, which once drew sharp and unbreachable sexual boundaries between 'inferior' and 'superior' races, and between people of the same sex. With morality like this in town, falling in love can be a lethal affair. And, as Toms demonstrates time and time again, it is precisely this malignant malice masquerading as high morality which hounded Jackson - and the boys he adored - so relentlessly; if there are any 'victims' of 'abuse' in these pages, they are the youngsters ruthlessly pressurised by moral zealots to 'come forward' and give evidence in court under oath against someone they valued and loved and, to some extent at least, the gentle, eccentric man who was vilified and savaged by feral prosecutors, semi-lunatic child protection agents and slavering media hyenas alike.

Far from the complicity with evil his detractors accuse him of, it is Toms' integrity that makes it impossible for him to endorse the compulsory cultural split which insists (improbably) that Jackson either had no erotic desires for the boys he found so enchanting, or that he was a depraved and wicked pervert for defying an hysterically enforced social taboo. Far from coming over as a crazed partisan for paedophilic rape, Toms manages something which Freud, at his best and most heroic, often achieved - discussing issues which the prevailing moral order insists may only be addressed in tones of compulsory revulsion in calm, neutral and sane language. Sometimes, sanity is scandalous.

A deeply flawed saint

Toms is not interested, however, in air-brushing awkward details about Jackson's conduct out of the picture. If the late mega-star does not emerge as a depraved villain, neither does he appear as a saintly innocent. When the scandal of his alleged sexual interest in boys erupted, Jackson was not above permitting his paid henchman to practise some distinctly dark arts, including intimidating witnesses and crude bribery. Even if he personally played the part of the beautiful soul and didn't get his own hands dirty, it appears that he wasn't above turning a blind eye while his paid heavies did their work (one such, Anthony Pellicano, who played an active part in the 'management' of the first boy scandal to hit the star in 1993, was later gaoled for illegal possession of explosives, firearms and homemade grenades, after having been arrested for illegal wiretapping and racketeering offences).

Protestations that he was unaware of the pressure being placed by some of his henchmen on potentially ruinous witnesses do not, Toms insists, hold water. Against the claims of deluded fantards that he was so pure at heart that he would never have knowingly sanctioned any resorts to threats and violence, Toms shrewdly observes:

'This line of apologetics is unconvincing to anyone who has studied Michael's career, in which he began to show himself as a feisty player in his own destiny even before his age hit double figures, and as an independent negotiator by his mid-teens - in both cases in defiance of an overbearing father who totally dominated his older brothers. - [S]macked across the face by his father Joseph for failing to execute a dance step the right way, the nine-year-old Michael knew just how to hit back. "Hit me again," he said, "It'll be the last time I ever sing." (p. 265)

If Toms is uninterested in portraying Michael Jackson as an asexual saint, he is interested in exploring the ways in which the singer's erotic inclinations defied the most ferociously policed boundary of our times: the sexual love a man and a boy may experience for one another.

Sex 'crime' and the disappearance of radical dissent

Most of the obligatory condemnations of 'age-discrepant' sexual liaisons, especially those appearing in the mainstream media, are slyly pornographic, deploying lurid hints and obscene suggestions by the barrow-load under cover of outrage and disgust. It's quite possibly why they are so avidly read - the morally appalled reader gains access to a covert but addictive jouissance in poring, or pawing, over the 'horrifying' narrative she is devouring (for the radical psychoanalyst Jacque Lacan, jouissance meant something like 'secret, obscene, orgasmic enjoyment'). From a psychoanalytic point of view, disgust is rarely innocent. It can provide a very useful alibi for the perturbing desires we find aroused in us but would prefer not to own up to. Toms uses frank and straightforward prose, laced with wit and levity, to address these issues, and the truths which our conventional moralism seeks to repress emerge all the more vividly and evocatively as a result.

There is no evidence whatsoever that Jackson engaged in penetrative sexual intercourse with the boys he was so obviously erotically enchanted by; but one would have to be naive in the extreme to dismiss compelling evidence that he frequently engaged in masturbatory activity with them as well as fellatio. More scandalously still for adherents of the prevailing moral orthodoxy, these sexual liaisons were, as Toms cogently argues, actively enjoyed by the boys and only became traumatic when panic-stricken, enraged and/or gold-digging adults (including police officers, prosecutors and child abuse experts) intruded.

American and British moralism remains obsessed with sex, contrary to the smug contemporary deceit which holds that the prejudices of old have largely evaporated. The movement for sexual emancipation, which was in its early days driven by radically leftist gays and courageous equalitarian feminists, mutated in the aftermath of the AIDS nightmare into just another variant of petit-bourgeois chastity. Our moral rulers have ditched their vindictive war on gay men today not because of any radical conversion on Authority's part to non-possessive, free modes of sexual intimacy (our culture still uses the priggish language of 'promiscuity' for this), but because the gays who rose to prominence in the media and elsewhere were permitted to do so only on account of their public renunciation of a revolutionary alternative morality.

The true revolutionaries in the original gay liberation movement - which was at root a movement for social and erotic emancipation - are no longer here to fight their corner. Deeply principled and uncompromisingly robust in their refusal of the prevailing sexual and moral order, many amongst them (like the poet Allen Ginsberg) were boylovers. We do not hear from them today not because they were ideologically defeated but because most of them, as the radical psychoanalyst Kenneth Lewes has argued, have died - wiped out by Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome.

Those gays who are celebrated in the media today have largely disowned the radical cause of full erotic enfranchisement for all. Having secured prosperity and comfort in the existing social order, they have become, in philosopher Alain Badiou's terms, gay 'Thermidoreans', sophists and apologists for injustice who betrayed the very project for emancipation they had once supported ('Thermidor' refers to the period after Robespierre, when the French Revolution began betraying its radical libertarian foundations and re-adopting orthodox morality).

Thermidoreans - radicals-turned-reactionaries - tend to be vastly more vindictive toward revolutionary dissent than mere conservatives. One cannot help but speculate that they are forever trying to kill off the disquieting vestiges of truth stirring within their souls by deriding radical dissidents with the utmost venom. Suppression by proxy can never quieten an uneasy conscience, however.

The new obsession with sexual abuse and sexual exploitation is an archetypically Thermidorean creation: shamelessly ditching the desperate need for an end to the mass material and economic exploitation intrinsic to capitalism, our modern day Thermidoreans opt instead for preachy, puritanical exhortations against anything which offends the new new secular God, public opinion. Comfortably-rewarded gay men are not the only traitors, however; the cause of sexually libertarian equality feminism has also been perverted by a new breed of victim feminists - Thermidors with a real vengeance. By supplanting the struggle for liberty, equality and sexual autonomy for all with the quest to purify sex, victim feminists (and the punitive, misanthropic child protection industry they have helped to spawn) have treacherously betrayed all commitments to universal freedom and justice and joined forces with the most unhinged reactionaries on the planet - religious fascists.

Less forgivably still, in a move which betrays their authoritarian inclinations more transparently than anything else, they have unashamedly turned to the repressive forces of the State to regulate, criminalise and punish all aspects of sexuality which cannot be contained within their vapid, bourgeois niceties. This leaves pretty well most of human sexuality, with its lust, passion and wild disregard for rank and moral posturing, in danger of becoming unlawful.

Little wonder that police forces, hardly the repositories of liberty and free thought anywhere in the world, jumped on the victimologist bandwagon with such gusto. Their former contribution to maintaining decency and moral order in the populace - entrapping and hounding homos - was, after all, becoming less and less permissible. The new scapegoat manufactured by the victim feminists - the adult male 'abuser' of helpless children and women - was the perfect substitute. The recent Establishment indifference toward 'decent' homosexuals (i.e., those who want to get married and join the ranks of the normal, even the police force or the army) has little to do with enlightenment and much to with displacement. Hatred and revulsion have not so much diminished as migrated to a new target.

The void in the moral order: the locus of truth

Michael Jackson's Dangerous Liaisons runs to so many pages not least because the author refuses to compromise on truth, no matter how paranoid and murderous our digitally manufactured public opinion has become. Inevitably, this means that he is driven to take issue with all the shibboleths and lies of received wisdom (and the pre-programmed officialdom that enforces it) as he chronicles Michael Jackson's unconventional love life. He does so, remarkably, with grace and compassion, even though contempt and scorn would be entirely understandable responses to the viciousness of the moral elite and the public opinion it has so meticulously crafted.

As Badiou repeatedly observes, public opinion has nothing whatever to do with truth; my opinion on whether or not beef tastes better than lamb will never get to anything resembling a truth, no matter how many people end up agreeing with me. Neither will a victim-feminist opinion that 'pornography degrades all women'. From a psychoanalytic point of view, truth is that which is repressed and barred from adequate representation in the existing symbolic order; it is intrinsically subversive to established states, from the political State right down to the state of individual beliefs about sexual morality. Toms writes from below this bar - from the position Badiou describes as the 'void' - daring to inscribe into the symbolic order the very disavowals moral authoritarians would prefer to eradicate.

In any established order, Badiou's 'void' is the location of repressed truth: it is that which is incomprehensible to the smooth narratives of normality and decency orchestrated by those who dominate. To the bourgeois 'fat cat', the 'masses' are the void. Unable to conceive of ordinary, struggling people as anything other than a mindless, potentially violent rabble, he is unable to see the intelligence and ethical integrity of proletarian resistance.

Although Badiou doesn't specifically refer to it, there is another 'void' in dominant ideology; before reading this book, I would probably never have thought these thoughts, but dominant ideology can only conceptualise older-younger sexual liaisons in terms of abuse and exploitation. The two 'boy scandal' ordeals Jackson and his boys were subjected to (one in 1993, the other ten years later after Martin Bashir's notorious and vicious 'documentary') amply testify to this, as Toms painstakingly shows. A morality incapable of distinguishing between sexual pleasure and sexual abuse is a bludgeon, not an instrument of enlightenment; it prescribes crazy category errors rather than sanity and sound judgment.

Thoms is practising - on every page, in every sentence - what Badiou would term 'fidelity to a truth', an immensely difficult project which is forever imperilled by relentless intimidation and insistent entreaties from the Established Order to betray the commitment, or simply relinquish it out of exhaustion, fear or despair. He is up against the full forces of the political State, and the corrupt and servile 'free' media which overwhelmingly supports it. And nowhere is it more coercive and punitive than in its crude, black-and-white age-limit criterion for the distinction between harmful and approved sex. If a man sucks my cock at age fifteen, he is an abuser and I am a victim, no matter how intense the love and friendship which may exist between us; he must go to prison and be forever ruined for his evil predilections (and I must live with my part in his destruction for the rest of my life). If he does the same thing four years later, everything's fine and dandy, even if there is no affection between us at all and I'm doing it simply for the twenty quid he's just offered me. Who needs depravity when a morality like this calls the shots?

Wanted: an adequate theory of power

The three extraordinary chapters on power, perhaps the core argument of the in the book, advance a line of reasoning which is both subtle and sophisticated - adequate, in other words, to the phenomena under consideration. The adequacy of Toms' thinking, however, stands in marked contrast to the primitive methods used routinely by police and prosecution lawyers to categorise so-called age-discrepant relationships and 'abusive images'.

The latter resemble the stage of thinking that small children reach when they being to recognise pattern (Piaget called it 'concrete operations'). Lacking the capacity as yet to make meaningful and accurate abstractions, their thinking sees that, for example, 'big' means 'more size than' and 'old' means 'more years than'. A tall container has 'more of something' (height) than a short container; to the concrete operations thinker, the basic visual cues are all that counts. More of one thing means more of everything, leading small children to believe that a tall container holds more water than the short one, even though the latter's volume is much greater. They are unable yet to conceptualise more complex phenomena, such as wisdom, justice and compassion, in any terms other than the concrete operational ones they are just grasping. This is fine if you're describing a simple line drawing - 'the cat sat on the mat'. But it gets vastly more complicated when a more intricate image or incident is involved, as any art historian (or psychoanalyst) can testify.

Here, the capacity to generate multiple interpretations and create multiple potential meanings from the raw material of the image or incident is a sign of adequacy and intelligence. But not if you're a police officer or a prosecution lawyer dealing with 'child abuse'. The exact reverse is maintained instead as a compulsory professional standard. Complexity and multiplicity is to be rigorously banished, often at great violence to the subject under consideration.

As Toms vividly draws out though a brilliant exploration of racism in the American Deep South of the nineteenth century, white women who had sexual liaisons with black men were compulsorily redescribed by the dominant morality of the time as victims of powerful black male rapists. But in fact, a white woman, while 'smaller and weaker' than a black man in Piagetian concrete operational terms, could wield immensely more power over her illicit lover than he could possibly wield over her. All she had to do, if her affair got discovered and the moral heat was turned up, was cry rape and a lynching would ensue (or at least a death penalty). Toms maintains that it is impossible to understand rape in 19th century southern culture without understanding how an overweeningly powerful racist discourse actively created the myth of the black rapist. It could only be possible to deal with real rape by making the South safe for interracial relationships, he argues.

In the light of the 'vulnerable, delicate' white woman's actual power over her black male lover, we begin to see the serious limitations of concrete operational thinking when it is applied to something as intricate, mobile and mutative as human sexuality, including the so-called 'intergenerational' sexual liaisons Jackson and his boys engaged in. The idea that an age differential is invariably a telltale sign of abuse is about as sane as the idea that my left knee-cap is invariably a telltale sign of my kindness.

De-repressing ideologically barred truths

In preference to the academic apparatchiks who have assisted the US and UK-led witch-hunt against so-called 'paedophiles', Toms cites abundant scholarly evidence which is routinely ignored by the British and American prosecution 'services' and the judiciary en masse. You will not find learned expositions endorsing the frankly mad theories of academics from the COPINE project here, who believe that a cartoon depicting child eroticism is somehow identical to rape. But you will find examples of the gentle, meticulous studies conducted by less compulsorily disgusted academics like Professor Bruce Rind and Professor Theo Sandfort.

Sandfort was able in the 1980s to interview boys in the Netherlands who were involved in sexual friendships with men. His research is of especial significance in our age of compulsory paedohysteria. To conduct empirical research, of course, you have to have a research question. But he did not ask the obligatory questions - the only questions which would today make it through a university 'Ethics Committee'. No 'official' research can proceed without this official stamp of approval these days. Instead of today's 'approved' questions (such as 'How negatively does childhood sexual abuse affect the subject later?' or 'On a scale of 1 - 10, how damaging do you consider your early sexual experiences to have been?'), Sandfort asked a simple but truth-seeking question: 'Is it possible for a boy to enjoy sexual experiences with a man?' Overwhelmingly, the boys Sandfort interviewed reported that their sexual friendships with men were beneficial and positive, something our own law courts would find utterly incomprehensible unless instantly translated into the language of abuse.

Given the unmistakably psychoanalytic leanings of this reviewer, it may strike some as curious to find endorsements of Toms' work here. Whenever he directly refers to psychoanalysis, he does so with barely veiled contempt. But this could only be an oddity to those who know little about Freud's own writings; I find little to quarrel with over Toms' intelligent hostility toward the stupid, formulaic, Oedipus-obsessed reductionism of a conservative strand in clinical psychoanalysis, which he rightly dismisses as so much 'Oedipus-schmoepidus'. To be honest, this happens to be more of a tree-trunk than a strand; when psychoanalysis joined the psychiatric Establishment in the USA (and to a lesser extent in the UK), it instantly began betraying the subversive, radical core of Freud's work. Converting a revolutionary exploration of desire, in all its diversity and subversiveness, into an instrument of social conformity takes quite a bit of violence, but the American psychoanalytic establishment managed to pull it off. American clinical psychoanalysis provides a compelling case study of what it means to betray a fidelity to a truth, even if there were (and are) honourable exceptions to the mainstream trend. I suspect that Freud would not have disagreed.

There is, however, another psychoanalysis, a psychoanalysis which can be found abundantly in Freud but which the clinical tradition practised in his name appears largely to have mislaid. Freud is often at his least interesting (or convincing) when he attempts to impose narrative coherence on the unconscious phenomena he is studying; but, as Leo Bersani and others have shown, it is his failure to wrap his discoveries up in neat theories which is actually the most compelling and enduring legacy of his work.

The unconscious, as Adam Phillips once put it, doesn't respond to elocution lessons (or tidy teleologies). Freud's luminous texts are suffused with ambiguity and contradiction, usually expressed in a subversive footnote immediately undermining a neat theory he's just formulated in the main text. It is as if his own unconscious cannot allow him to get away with his own formulations; whenever his authoritative self tries to impose a storyline on the material he is contemplating, a dissident self emerges immediately to destabilize it. This is a psychoanalysis which I suspect Toms would have little difficulty in aligning himself with, wherein the unconscious, in Bersani's terms, is not (or not only) the hiding place of the repressed, but the source of an endless creativity, a 'reservoir of possibility, of all that might be but is not'. (Bersani, 2008, pp. 24 -25). This is as good a summary as one can get of Toms' courageous and intelligent counter-interpretations of the issues our moral authorities would bury. Authority, in Toms' work (as in the work of the unconscious itself), can never have the final word, no matter how fervently it attempts to achieve the final solution.

The poison of moral vengeance

The tragic dimensions of compulsory paedo-revulsion emerge in several places in the book, although one of the most poignant and harrowing is undoubtedly the example of Jordie Chandler, the boy who was to instigate the first attempt at a child abuse witch trial against Jackson. Toms provides compelling evidence that Jordie himself hated what he was forced to do, and only triggered the huge prosecutorial reaction under duress after being intensively browbeaten by his father. But the boy's father, Evan Chandler, also emerges as a tragic figure, driven by a paranoid and ruthless moral ideology to bring the matter to court, even though it caused inestimable suffering to his own son. Jordie did not, in the end, give evidence against Jackson in court but Toms provides compelling material to suggest that to have done so would have been torture for him (and it would almost certainly have resulted in a lengthy gaol term for Jackson). There is no convincing evidence at all to suggest that the boy had been traumatised or harmed by his involvement with the singer, even though it was almost certainly a sexual one. But there is overwhelming evidence that the ferocious adult response to the affair was horrifically traumatic and distressing to the youngster.

Toms' chapters on Jordie Chandler are almost unbearable to read. Jordie's father - who loved his son very much and held very liberal views about homosexuality - was driven to destructive madness and betrayal by a combination of Jackson's narcissistic indifference toward him and by child protection ideology itself. Earlier on, Toms shows, Evan Chandler had been prepared to accept that his son, who he suspected may be gay, might be having a sexual relationship with the singer. But Jackson's infatuation with Jordie (and Jordie's with him) had become almost ruthlessly exclusive; Evan increasingly felt ignored, dismissed and radically shut out of his own son's life. After consulting one of the numerous (and proliferating) child abuse gurus in the Land of the Free, Evan revised his former liberal stance. The 'expert' - psychiatrist Dr Mathis Abrams - had told him that such adult-minor liaisons were inevitably abusive and invariably prove highly damaging for boys in the long-run.

By now, Evan was motivated overwhelmingly by the hurt and fury he felt in relation to Jackson, who was, it appears, completely unconcerned about his feelings as parent. Any intelligent scepticism he might once have held in response to the good psychiatrist's assertions were swept aside - he wanted ammunition to hurt Jackson back, to take him down, even if it meant hurting his son and destroying his own relationship with the boy permanently.

He bullied Jordie relentlessly for several hours after conducting a dental procedure on him (Evan was a dentist), finally extracting a description of sexual acts between Jackson and his son, who relented only after Evan had promised to keep his admissions confidential. Of course, Evan betrayed his word - and his son - and the rest is history. Jackson eventually agreed a multi-million dollar settlement before the matter went to criminal trial, but his relationship with Jordie was permanently severed, as indeed was the relationship between Jordie and his father, effectively.

Jordan Chandler has never spoken since of his relationship with the singer and was adamant even in 1993 that he did not wish to give evidence in court; the evidence presented by Toms, however, is compelling that the relationship, which was almost certainly sexual, had been loving and mutually rewarding. Insofar as any abuse by Jackson can be said to have occurred, it was undoubtedly to the boy's father, who paid a very heavy price for betraying his son. On 5th November 2009, Evan Chandler, embittered, ill and alone, took a gun to his head and committed suicide, leaving this earth just four months after Jackson himself had died of a medically-administered drugs overdose. Running to the authorities and crying abuse, it would seem, is far more likely to end in tragedy than in justice.

Touching the void

Toms' four-chapter account of Jackson’s 2005 trial following Martin Bashir's sensationalist (and mendaciously edited) 'documentary' is written with such alacrity and dramatic verve that the pages simply beg to be turned; readers will simply be unaware that they have just ploughed their way through 129 meticulously documented pages, so riveting is the prose and so compelling the sheer drama of the events described. Jackson - thanks largely to his brilliant though ruthless lawyer and to the hopelessly transparent money-grabbing instincts of his accusers - was acquitted.

But it seems clear now that he never recovered (he had dropped in weight from an already over-lean 120 lbs to an alarming 90 lbs during the trial), as indeed did no one involved in these events. The inquisition which had ruptured their lives so pitilessly in the name of justice and child protection inflicted such gaping wounds of treachery and betrayal that no one would walk away unscathed.

Five years later, of course, Jackson was dead. The boys he had had his dangerous liaisons with - including, it seems obvious, his last accuser, young Gavin Arvizo (whose accusation had almost certainly been heavily orchestrated by his mother) - had adored him and treasured their time with him. They must now forever live with the actions that horrified, vindictive and purely opportunistic adults forced upon them against a man they had loved.

The legal process left a trail of needlessly damaged lives in its wake; Jordan Chandler became permanently estranged form both his parents. His father, as we have seen, committed suicide just a few months after Michael himself had gone; and Gavin Arvizo has returned, so far as we can tell, to a life of impoverished obscurity.

Toms' argument - that in a secular age, human sexual expression should be freed from the insane Old Testament prohibitions and superstitions which underpin our Western penal code - comes from the very edge of what Badiou would call the dominant sexual order's 'void': the place where it attempts to permanently inter the truths its coercive pieties are fashioned to obscure. But truths can never be interred permanently, and instead constantly threaten to erupt into a revolutionary 'event' which will topple the ruling order. No wonder our authorities are so paranoid, with everything they have to sit on.

Toms has achieved a remarkable feat: touching the void our sexual authorities are obstinately blind to, he has produced a sane and enlightened manifesto for resistance to the God of manipulated public opinion and to the State's tyrannical (and destructive) intrusions into the erotic lives of its citizenry. He deserves to be read.

Read Ben Capel's book Notes from Another Country.

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