Pop star Michael Jackson took off his glove Tuesday and told an audience at Oxford University in England that he forgives his father for not loving him.
"He was scared of human emotion," Jackson said of his disciplinarian father, Joseph Jackson. "But he did know doughnuts."
In an astonishing confessional flavored with references to his best friend, Elizabeth Taylor, and an unremitting attack on father Joe's habit of leaving glazed doughnuts in the kitchen for his nine kids, Jackson said he's trying to be a better father to his two young children.
Of his son, Prince, 4, and his daughter, Paris, 2, the singer said, "I hope that my children will not judge me unkindly and will forgive my shortcomings."
The 42-year-old performer, his leg in a cast after he broke a foot at his Neverland Ranch in California last week, went to the hallowed campus 90 minutes south of London to address the Oxford Union, home of the world's most famous debating society. Rather than debate anyone, Jackson said he was there to launch his new children's crusade, Heal the Kids.
And having forsaken his trademark white glove and military epaulets in favor of an Oxford tunic, Jackson devoted much of his speech to beating up on his father.
An unsettling moment came when Jackson, overcome with emotion, recalled his father's "great difficulty" in communicating with him.
"If I did a great show, he would tell me it was a good show," Jackson recalled. Then, with tears in his eyes and pausing to ask for a tissue, he added: "If I did an OK show, he would say nothing."
After a two-minute pause, Jackson continued with his half-hour talk that drew cheers at the beginning and the end.
Joe Jackson was "a managerial genius," the singer said. "But what I really wanted was a dad. I wanted a father who showed me love and my father never did that. He never gave me a piggyback ride, he never threw a pillow or a water balloon at me.
"I am the product of a lack of childhood. When I was young, I wanted more than anything else to be a typical little boy. I used to think I was unique in feeling that I was without a childhood."
He told of meeting Shirley Temple Black, the great child star of the Depression, and how the two broke down together and sobbed.
"We simply cried together," Jackson said. "For she could share a pain with me that only others like my close friends Elizabeth Taylor and Macaulay Culkin know."
But Jackson said he was at Oxford to speak for the world's children "Generation O," as he called them.
"The 'O' stands for a generation that has everything on the outside wealth, success, fancy clothing and fancy cars, but an aching emptiness on the inside," he said.
His message is forgiveness, the entertainer told a select crowd of 500 gathered in the venerable Oxford Union inner debating chamber.
"As an adult, and as a parent, I realize that I cannot be a whole human being nor a parent capable of unconditional love until I put to rest the ghosts of my own childhood," he said.
Jackson made no reference to a 1993 suit brought by the parents of a 13-year-old boy who claimed he was sexually abused by the singer, then dropped the charges after an out-of-court settlement rumored to be $26 million. But spectators did.
A 13-year-old Oxford girl, Selvi Davis, held high a poster reading "Michael Jackson Sex Abuser" as she waited with hundreds of others for the special guest to hobble in.
"Some people really like Michael Jackson," added her friend Miranda Shaw, also 13. "Some people think he's a sex abuser."
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