by Chely Wright
There were times when I just plainly and simply needed affection. I have so many memories of failed attempts to get hugs, but one memory has always represented the entire library of denial.
I must’ve been about five years old. Chris and Jeny were at school, and it’s likely that I was upset because I wanted to be there too. I sat in the big bay window of the dining room playing with the homemade Raggedy Ann doll my mom had recently made for me. She did thoughtful things like that for all three of us, but those acts were sporadic and never made much sense to me. I remember thinking that even though the shades of red on my doll didn’t quite look like those on the real Raggedy Ann doll, otherwise my doll did look a lot like the real thing. My mother was talking on the kitchen telephone. I waited until I heard the clunk of the receiver as it rattled back into place, and I dragged my stocking feet over hardwood then linoleum to get to her. She was standing in the middle of the room and just as I hooked my arm around the top of her good knee and pressed my right temple to her outer thigh, she reached down and pried me off of her.
“No,” she said. “I hurt.”
I wouldn’t realize until I was much older that my mother suffered every day from chronic pain, as a result of her polio and from the dozen or so surgeries performed on her legs.
I adored her so much when I was young, and my love for her has grown up in the ways that I have grown up. I have convinced myself that I haven’t completely lost her—that we’re still hanging on by a thread. If I tell her I’m gay, I worry that a definitive laser beam of disgust and rejection will zap that thread in two, with such velocity that there won’t even be smoke or fire, no evidence of a burn—just a cold, freezing cut that will send me spiraling down, looking up at her like I did when I was five years old.
We Found a Way
Not long into Julia and Phillip’s marriage, shortly after I’d been signed to MCA Records, Julia and I rekindled our relationship. She wasn’t sorry that she had married him, and in fact I wasn’t sorry either. The three of us spent a lot of time together, and over the years I came to consider Phillip as close as a family member. I wouldn’t say that they had an open marriage, because my understanding of that type of relationship is that the married couple continues to be intimate. Along those lines, we weren’t what they call “swingers” either. My relationship was with Julia and Julia only. They seemed to be happy living in the same house, being the best of friends, and spending time together when they chose. She and I did everything together. We took vacations, often to remote cabins located in state parks. We loved to hike and explore together, but we also appreciated the privacy that we could find in a little log cabin in the woods. Phillip always encouraged our time together, and when we’d take off on a trip or if I were around, he’d say, “Yay, C’s here. I can go play now!”
Mostly, he was joking when he’d say that, but there was a part of him that wasn’t. He often said that Julia was simply happier when I was there. He claimed that the weekends when I was on the road were tough on him because she missed me so much.
I bought a house about five miles from their house, so it was easy for us to be together. On nights when I was home in Nashville, we’d sleep either at her house or at mine. We had a routine that worked for us, and the effort it took to make it happen was worth it to both of us. I was actually glad on so many occasions that Julia was married, because it provided us with a certain cover under which we could hide. Her marriage to Phillip was never part of a scheme to camouflage the existence of our relationship, but it certainly added an element of disguise for which I was thankful.
All-American Girl
I’m called a hard worker. I think I’m known as a nice person, too—a lady, with good manners. This is important to me, to be ladylike. I’ve been amazed at some of the behaviors of women in the entertainment industry, on all levels.
There are women in every position of the entertainment business, and I am aware that this didn’t come about easily. I know that there were females who carved a path for the rest of us to get to do what we do, and it is a little easier on each passing generation of women. These women who were pioneers were forced to prove themselves in a man’s world.
I’m not suggesting that sexism and inequality don’t still exist in the country music industry; they are very much alive, but some progress has been made. I suppose that early on, when women were first starting to have solo careers and were actually working behind the scenes in the entertainment world, they had to play tough. I’ve heard legendary stories over the years about women and how they were faced with a decision of how to approach their careers. One path was to use their sexuality to advance their position. Even when they were simply going along with it, they were perpetuating an archaic role for women. I do understand that in many cases, had these women bucked the system, they would have been fired or somehow squeezed out.
Another way was to toughen up, be one of the boys, and play a macho game, and that is still happening today. I knew all of this early on in my career and was confused as to how I would fit in. I wouldn’t take that path as a straight woman and I didn’t do it as a gay woman. It wasn’t an issue of sexuality for me. It was not in my personality to play tough, act macho, and be one of the boys in that regard.
Loretta Lynn is the greatest influence on my music, and I still get nervous when I’m in her presence. She called me personally to invite me to a party celebrating her Grammy nomination for the Jack White-produced album Van Lear Rose in 2004.
When I was growing up, Buck Owens was one of my musical heroes. Once I got to know him on a personal level, he became an even greater hero. We were very good friends. I learned so much from him, not only about music but about the business. 1996.
I don’t lead with sex, hetero or homo. I don’t swear in public, seldom in front of men. I don’t tell off-color jokes in mixed company, and if an off-color joke is being told in my presence, I try to slip away. I just remove myself from the situation. I have found in my career that one sets boundaries early on to one’s peers and associates. I guess I let people know in the first couple of years of my career who I was and how I wanted to be treated. I wanted to be treated with respect, and I wanted to be treated like a lady. I have seen many females in my business try to take a shortcut to fit in or to become successful, either by becoming a sex object or by taking on the role of “one of the boys” only to later feel frustration that they weren’t being shown respect as women. I’m not a tough girl. I have manners, I am ladylike, and I am gay.
I’m known as a good American. I hear it so often, but I wonder what it means.
I began spending time with people in the military and veterans very early in my life. My grandfather Harold Henry had been a sergeant in the Second World War. After I declared to him at a young age that I had dreams of performing country music, he encouraged me to go play for guys at the VA hospital. From about age nine, I would travel once a month with Wellsville’s local American Legion members up to the VA in the city. I had no fear or hesitation in getting to know these old men and hearing their stories of service and war, which at times would be very tragic. There were stories that were carefree as well, detailing accounts of travel to exotic destinations and of people who sounded nothing like the people I knew. All of that led me to develop a deep appreciation and understanding of what they’d done for our country, not to mention giving me a glimmer of comprehension of how big the world really was.
Furthering my associations with the military, once I began to play the trumpet in the junior high school band, I gladly took on the duty of being the official bugler for the American Legion. During Memorial Day programs in my school or in my town, I would be the one to play taps. I also took my trumpet to military funerals and burial services. I would stand in the distance and play as the family members of the deceased veteran were given an American flag perfectly folded into a triangle. The ceremony is sacred and emotional, and in a perfect world every veteran would have a live bugler at his or her burial service. Taps
is a powerful melody, and there is nothing like that sorrowful tune as it cries out of a live brass instrument. I was the bugler from seventh grade until the day I packed my car and headed to Nashville. My grandfather had asked me during my time as the bugler if he could count on me to play taps for him when that day should come. He died a little more than a year after I moved to Tennessee. Grandpa and Grandma had just spent a week with me in Nashville and had seen me perform live, for the first time in my life, on the Grand Ole Opry stage. I traveled back to Kansas with my trumpet. It was the last time I ever played taps.
I started going overseas to entertain the troops in the mid-1990s. My first international trip was not military in nature, though. It was a huge outdoor country music festival in Japan. I was a backup singer in Porter Wagoner’s band, and every show he’d invite me up to center stage to sing a few songs on my own and to perform a duet with him. Porter, his band, and I traveled to Kumamoto, Japan, and I was instantly enamored of the experience of international travel.
The show was at the base of Mount Fuji, and there were about forty thousand people in attendance. It was the day of my twenty-first birthday, and at one point the host of the show, Charlie Nagatani, led the enormous crowd of Japanese country music fans in singing “Happy Birthday” to me.
The promoter of that show was a woman by the name of Judy Seale. I found her to be very good at her job, and even though I was just a lowly background singer for Porter, she treated me with a great deal of respect and friendliness. She had multiple acts on the show and still had the graciousness to be so nice to me. The Forester Sisters, the Texas Tornados, Porter Wagoner, and all of us were in for a treat, because this Japanese crowd was more excited than any crowd I’d ever witnessed. I couldn’t believe how the locals knew every word to every song sung on the show, even though they really didn’t understand the meaning of the words.
Judy had tried to tell me that this would be the case, and she was right; the crowd was insanely into country music. On that first trip to Japan, I soaked up the foreign culture with great appreciation and wonder. In the years that followed, Judy would become one of my dearest friends and we’d travel the world together.
Over the next couple of years, I not only toured all over the United States, but I saw Switzerland, Norway, Canada, the Netherlands, Germany, Brazil, and England. I couldn’t get enough. I was fascinated with my reality. I still could not believe that I could be so far away from my small Kansas town, doing exactly what I’d dreamed of doing since I was a little girl. The thing was, when I imagined my life as a country music star, I envisioned traveling across the United States. I don’t think that I ever visualized world travel. I felt as though I was in a movie that didn’t have to have an end.
There is something so thrilling about flying halfway around the world and singing to people who actually know your songs and sing them back to you. Yes, I enjoyed the shows, but my favorite part of international travel was experiencing the way other people lived. Seeing what they saw, eating their cuisine, although many times I wasn’t sure what I was looking at and I was tentative about what I was putting in my mouth—it was always an adventure.
Once I landed at my destination, there would be a van ride, bus ride, or car ride to the town where the show was to be. These rides would profoundly affect me—I was slowly coming to understand that the rest of the world did not live like we do in the United States. I’d always heard that—that we were privileged to be Americans. Yes, it was true that I grew up with very little by American standards, but I was seeing people and places on other continents that didn’t have it nearly as good as I’d had it.
Everything I saw was different—the architecture, the terrain, the cars, the trees, the grass—sometimes the only things I recognized were the sky, the moon, and the sun. It made me feel so alive. I knew it had been out there, a different and bigger world. And during those moments in cars and on buses, I thanked God for giving me my ticket to see the world. Music, sweet music.
About a year into my touring, my agent mentioned to me that a promoter had contacted him about some international concerts. When he said that the promoter’s name was Judy Seale, I smiled and told him that Judy was an old friend whom I’d met years before on a show in Japan. The tour dates worked out, and during that trip Judy and I realized that we shared a respect for people who serve in the military. She asked me if I wanted to go overseas and do shows just for the troops sometime, to say thank you.
My first trip overseas to perform for the military was to South Korea. It was a ten-day trip. I had had a marginal knowledge about the ways of the military, as most Americans do, but I got a crash course on protocol and procedure in those first ten days. I remember thinking that I was well suited for it, this military life. My folks had run our household much like a little boot camp anyway, so this first trip to Korea wasn’t a shock.
We didn’t even allow ourselves time to recognize the jet lag. Judy talked us through some of her tricks to avoid fatigue before we got on that long flight. She had suggestions about how much water to drink on the flight, what to eat and not eat, when to sleep on the plane and when to force yourself to stay awake. She is the most traveled human being I know, and if anyone has tricks, it’s Judy.
We were welcomed at Incheon Airport in Seoul by no fewer than a dozen military escorts. They were professional, friendly, informed, and impressive in their skill at getting us safely and happily from Point A to Point B. When touring for the troops, we often slept on the bases, and the base quarters were just fine with us. I thought it was really cute how our sharply dressed and well-mannered escorts continued to apologize that the accommodations they’d arranged might not be up to our standards because we must be so used to fancy hotels and such. I tried to explain to them that we spent most of our time crammed into a tour bus and that we were used to existing with very little glamour at all.
We all slept just a couple of hours, then headed off for the day. Judy told us to take everything we would need, since we wouldn’t be returning for almost twenty-four hours. The plan was to go to several different locations during the day and end up at the venue for the show that night. I must’ve signed autographs in five different places that day. We visited the men way out in the field who were doing training missions and wouldn’t be able to attend the show.
The shows for the troops are always high-energy events, both from the stage and from the audience. Much of the crowd knows me or knows my music, but there are always folks who have never heard of my songs who come out to the show anyway. They are just so happy that anyone would travel all that way to sing for them. After the show, as on any and all Judy Seale military dates, the artist signs autographs and meets people until the last person is gone. Although this policy can be painful and almost impossible at times, it is the reason why I love to play for the troops—having the opportunity to talk to them. And just as important as that, it’s why I love to do military shows with Judy. She will not settle for the troops’ getting less than everything the artist has to offer. I’ve known her to scold some of the biggest stars in music today if they whine about not wanting to endure the autograph sessions. “Yes, I know it’s hard,” she’ll say. “You think their jobs aren’t hard? Now get your Sharpie and go sign.”
That first day of the South Korea tour proved to be as long and busy as Judy had warned us it would be, lasting about twenty hours. When we finally made it back to the barracks, we slept another couple of hours, then got up and did it all over again, for seven more days.
We flew in helicopters to some of the most faraway camps to see the troops who seldom got a visit. On many of those days, there weren’t adequate situations to set up a stage to have a show, so we’d take a couple of guitars and wing it. My drummer, Preston, played many a show without a drum. He’d bring his drumsticks and he’d figure out once we got to where we were going what exactly would be his makeshift drum for that show—a cardboard box, a five-gallon bucket, a table, or a board. He was always a trouper.
“But Didn’t She Date What’s-His-Name?”
I never dated a man for show. Some people in entertainment do that—date someone to throw people off track so others won’t know they’re gay. It’s been going on for years in Hollywood. I have dated men but never for the purpose of fooling anyone.
In the fall of 1998, Julia and I were trying to figure out a way to exist. We were deeply in love, but the reality of our being together was scary and seemed impossible. She was married to Phillip, and they had carved out a life that was routine but separate. We tried on many occasions to quit one another—we’d usually try to go “cold turkey.” It was torture knowing that our objective was simply to get through the day without communicating. We’d decided that it would be difficult at first, but we thought that as the days, weeks, and months passed, we surely wouldn’t miss one another quite so badly. I thought that it would get easier—but it didn’t for me.