Michael Lovesmith, former fellow Motown recording artist, 70s
“Don’t believe the nonsense about Michael being gay and stuff. When there were girls around he’d talk about them to the guys and run around pinching their asses and then run away. He was a real funky street dude, know what I mean?”
- Nelson George, Conversations on Michael’s Black America, June 4 2010 (@86:00)
“You know it’s funny… Michael was a big sex symbol. Which has kind of got lost in the thing, but Michael was a huge sex symbol and… I’ll tell a story that’s not in the book because I actually didn’t have the right framework for it but in talking to LA Reid and talking to Teddy Riley, guys that spent a lot of time with him, they both told me stories about these women in the studio. It’s an interesting thing, everyone has their perceptions about what Michael was about, but I’ll tell you what… LA Reid is a guy I know very well, I know Teddy Riley very well, these are very straight guys. And they’re telling me that Michael had fine-ass women in the studio, you know, hanging out with him. I believe them. But also, the other thing he said about that was that he… would not… this is another story, another story, another friend of mine, a giant Michael Jackson fan, befriended him, I guess it must be around the turn of the century. So he goes to a party with Michael, Michael’s asking him, “Where’s Beyonce?” ‘Cause he’s never met Beyonce at this point, ’cause he wanted to see her, he made a reference about her derriere. And he goes, “I want to see the girl with the…[derriere]” So he introduces him to Beyonce.
And Michael sees a woman in the crowd, and gets them to bring her over, Michael chats with her, Michael does not take her phone number. As any well known star knows you never take the phone number, your man takes the phone number. So this guy ends up getting the number for Michael. So it’s interesting that there’s this whole narrative about Michael as a heterosexual male, hanging out with guys I know who are very heterosexual male, but there’s something interesting… he himself, would never consciously publicly… it was like he had this whole thing… he was selling the innocent, magical thing.”