Man With Skin Disorder Credits Jackson For Focusing Attention

When Reginald Starkey closes his eyes, sometimes he imagines his skin is still the milk chocolate brown it once was.

Starkey's soulful brown eyes now peer out of a face nearly totally white. A trace of his color remains on the edges of his face, extending like sideburns from his curly black hair.

Starkey, 31, has vitiligo, a skin disorder that erases pigment in small areas, sometimes spreading to larger ones. One day last year, Starkey rubbed off for the last time the dark facial makeup he had worn for several years.

"I just woke up one morning and said, `I'm not going to wear it today,' " Starkey said. "I got up, I got dressed. I noticed the stares. I got on the bus. People were still staring at me. Then I went to work."

Instead of changing himself, he decided he wanted to try to get other people to understand the skin condition.

Maybe fewer people would stare. Maybe fewer children would say he was strange-looking or ugly. He figured the more people know about vitiligo, the more they will understand him.

Starkey has always been a fan of Michael Jackson's moves. But the one he admires most is the push Jackson gave Starkey's cause during a television interview with Oprah Winfrey last month. Jackson has been criticized for trying to look white by cosmetically and chemically altering his facial features and skin. During the interview, he said a skin disorder had turned his skin white. Later, Jackson's doctor confirmed that the star had vitiligo.

After the show, Starkey left a message at Winfrey's Chicago studio. Starkey said at first he didn't believe it was Winfrey on the phone when she called him back at work the next day. Winfrey talked about inviting him on a future show about vitiligo, Starkey said.

"Michael Jackson raised the prospect of vitiligo," Starkey said. "I want to build that into understanding. If you are just an ordinary person, you don't matter, your feelings don't matter. If you are a megastar, people will listen to you."

Sitting relaxed in the short-sleeved shirt he wears to his food service job, Starkey's hands and most of his arms are white. Pigment freckles his upper arms with the color he used to be.

White spots the size of a dime first appeared on each of Starkey's elbows soon after he turned 16. Within a few weeks, the spots on his elbows inflated to a quarter. His fingertips and eyelids turned milky in his senior year at Federal Way High School; his lips lightened a shade of pink.

Starkey remembers his terror as he first watched his skin shade disappear. Some of his friends were direct: "Are you trying to turn white on us?"

Many gossiped about what he had done to lighten his skin.

"People have said some strange things like, `Is your father black and your mother white and is this what happens?' " said Starkey, whose parents are both African Americans. "A lot of people think I purposely or deliberately did this to myself. I didn't call up God and say, `Would you grant me white spots.' I didn't have a choice."

Vitiligo occurs in a small percentage of people from all races, but in many cases it remains a small, often concealed patch of skin, said Calvin L. Treger, a Seattle dermatologist at the Polyclinic. For people with white skin, the color difference is less easily detected.

The skin can be chemically dyed through an expensive, long drug technique that succeeds in about 65 percent of the cases, with some side effects. Vitiligo is also treated by chemically bleaching the remaining pigment, leaving the skin ultrasensitive to the sun. For 20 percent of people with vitiligo, a condition dating to biblical times, other family members are affected. Starkey's sister also has vitiligo. The disorder is not contagious.

"It can be a devastating disorder particularly for darker-skinned people," Treger said. "When a white person gets it, it is not as much of a problem."

Starkey decided he wants to start a support group for people with vitiligo. He wants to share what it feels like to lose the color of your identity, to suddenly look different from other people.

Starkey has studied modern and jazz dance, but shied away from auditions after the vitiligo spread. The stares are often constant for people who look different, and can be emotionally crippling. He began to see his appearance as a handicap.

When he was 21, Starkey lost a job as a flight attendant - after making the final cut - because the interviewer told him the patches of white on his skin resembled burns and may frighten passengers into thinking he'd been in an airplane accident.

"I cried," Starkey recalled. "I don't cry easily, but I cried."

Recently, a woman in an office he passed by called him in. "She said, `You have vitiligo. I have a brother who has it. He is 65 now, and he hasn't left his house since he was 21.' "