Like Me

by Chely Wright

  I had a great time that week in New York. I also went down to Washington, D.C., for a day to do more interviews. I came to know another journalist, named Tony Snow, during that time and I was a guest on his radio show as well. Tony and I hit it off, and I feel lucky to have had a nice friendship with him in the years that followed. We saw each other on occasion, had lunch, attended the same events from time to time, but mostly we kept up with each other by e-mail.

  I found Tony to be one of the more reasonable people in his field, and although we certainly did not agree on most things regarding politics, we did agree that there was a need for more civilized, informed discussions in the world. I received a note from Tony before he lost his fight with cancer. He said, “My friend, I’m listening to your CD today. Keep on keepin’ on.” I had a heavy heart the day Tony died.

  A few weeks after my appearance on Sean Hannity’s radio show, I was scheduled to head back to New York City to appear on the Hannity & Colmes television show on Fox News.

  The show’s taping was scheduled for evening, and I believe that my segment of singing and the brief interview was to be shown during the next night’s program. I did a quick sound check, sang my song, and then was seated between Sean and Alan to do the sit-down interview. I’m not sure if Sean was pushing me or if I was pushing him, but we quickly came to a point at which we were “sparring” a bit. It was in good fun, I thought, but perhaps it wasn’t the kind of banter that they’d hoped for. Maybe Sean relies on his country music friends to be well-behaved Republicans and to side with him on the issues.

  My opinions on the few issues we did discuss that night put me more in line with the thinking of the left-leaning host, Alan Colmes. I did my best to inject humor into the situation. After all, I’m not a political analyst, a policymaker, or a professional in the field of politics. I wasn’t combative or looking to be adversarial. I’m not certain what happened after I left the Fox News studios that night or the next day, but that segment never aired on the Fox News Network. Furthermore, I have never heard from Sean Hannity again. I don’t wonder why.

  Love Everybody

  I met John Rich at Opryland in 1990. We performed in the Country Music USA show for several years together. Dean Sams, another cast member, started a band during that time, called Lonestar, and asked John to join his band. Lonestar and I would eventually land our first record contracts around the same time. After years of hit records and touring, the band made a change and replaced John. Lonestar’s fame continued to rise and they celebrated even more success. John was trying new things and had hopes of having a career as a solo artist. He and I wrote a couple of songs together while he was trying to get his next record contract.

  I headed out on the road for a year or so and didn’t see or talk to John for a while, but when I did make it back to town, I caught up on the latest Music Row news. I learned that John and his pal Big Kenny had started a duo called Big and Rich. I thought that was clever and seemed to make sense. They really were friends and collaborators, and that type of situation usually works best for a band or duo dynamic. It has a better chance of being successful if it is authentic.

  I also heard that John and Big Kenny had created a club made up of unique performers, mostly musicians, who were banding together to support one another’s art. They were calling themselves the Muzik Mafia. Initially, they would gather at a club, play music, and hang out. The members were artists who’d been kicking around the Row for a while but for one reason or another hadn’t had their big break.

  They had a mantra: “Love Everybody.” I liked the idea, in theory. John was the only one of the bunch that I knew. “Love Everybody”? I never bought into it, at least not from John. I believe the others in the club operated in the spirit of their mantra, but I knew John too well. John does not love everybody. It was always my opinion that John was exploiting certain people and capitalizing on the hopes and good intentions of others. The Muzik Mafia was all anyone talked about for a couple of years, and when asked about it, I was diplomatic in my response, if I commented at all. I was invited a couple of times to go to their parties, but it wasn’t difficult for me not to show up; I could get away easily by blaming it on my schedule.

  John and I made plans to get together one night in March 2005. We were both working near Music Row and when I finished my work, I headed over to Blackbird Studio, where he was working. I made small talk with a couple of the guys up front, then made my way back to the room where John and Big Kenny were mixing. They played a couple of tracks they were working on and I was excited by the music. One of the songs was called “Holy Water” and I thought it was a stand-out track.

  John had just bought a new house ten minutes away and he asked me if I would go over and see it. I would never ask a friend to come to my house. Julia was there, and as a general rule we just didn’t bring people into our home. I accepted John’s invitation, and as we left Blackbird I headed to my car. Before I could get in it, John asked me to ride with him. I’ve always avoided riding with people. I never know what someone has had to drink, and I tend to feel kidnapped. I like to exit a place when I want to leave, not when someone gets around to giving me a ride. John asked me again to ride in his new Corvette that Chevrolet had given him. I’m not interested in cars, but John was proud of it. “All right,” I said. “I’ll ride in your ‘look-at-me-I’m-a-star’ car.”

  John drove too fast and too recklessly for my liking, but we arrived safely at his house. He showed me around with great excitement, and I loved seeing my old friend in a brand-new place. There is something cool about having started out with someone at the same time, being starving artists together, and then seeing each other enjoy success.

  At John’s home we watched basketball, drank cold beer, played guitars, and talked about our current and future projects. After the game, I told John it was time for me to head back to my car. He asked if I wanted to drive his car and I laughed and said no. We were back on the other side of town in just a few minutes and as we pulled into Blackbird’s parking lot, John said, “Can I ask you a question?”

  With great trepidation I said, “Yes.”

  “You know, people talk about you,” he said. “They wonder if you’re, you know, gay or something like that.” He wasn’t asking me a question, and I just sat there and tried not to show my panic. “You know, that’s not cool, if you’ve chosen to live that kind of lifestyle. Fans won’t have it. This industry won’t allow it. This is country music. It’s about God and country and family. People don’t approve of that kind of deviant behavior. It’s a sin.”

  He wasn’t looking at me. He was fidgeting with buttons and knobs on the dashboard. I was staring out his windshield, looking at the back of my vehicle, wishing I were in it and driving away from this conversation. John seemed to be okay with my nonresponse and just kept on with his rant. I’d heard John say disparaging things about gays before, but now he was directing those words at me, and I was rattled.

  He said he felt strongly that the speculation that I might be gay had damaged my career and that it was critical that I clear up the rumor. “I can help you. I’m in a great spot right now. Warner Brothers has basically written me a blank check to make any record I want, but I can’t help you out if you don’t take care of this crap.”

  I’d never implied that I needed or wanted John’s help.

  “The fans and radio love you,” he said. “You could be a lot bigger than you are right now, but you gotta hit this gay thing head-on. You need to take out a press release or something and clear it up, let everybody know that you’re not gay.” I let out a nervous and defensive burst of air. He turned toward me in his driver’s seat.

  “You’re not gay, are you?”

  I took a deep breath and said, “No, John, I’m not gay.”

  “Good!” he said.

  I told him that I needed to go. I got in my car and drove home. I was shaking and felt lightheaded. As I drove toward my house in West Nashville I was overcome with frustration and s
adness. My situation was getting more and more difficult. Until that night I had never actually been put in a position that caused me to have to answer yes or no about my sexuality. Until that night I had never directly lied about it. I was ashamed of myself—not for being gay but for lying. I wondered just how complex my life would become, how much energy it was going to take to maneuver in my new level of dishonesty.

  It took me a couple of days to tell Julia what had happened. She knew that I was bothered by something because I couldn’t eat or sleep and I was agitated. She was concerned about how scary John was, but mostly she was concerned about how it was affecting me.

  An added tragedy of the matter was that I knew that John was not alone in his disdain for gays when it came to the industry and fans of country music. John’s rant played a part in validating my fears of being outed, and more than likely it influenced some of my decisions in the short term. Julia and I were having some trouble at that time. I was frustrated and hopeless about our chances of working it out or making it in the long term, and a week or so after my evening with John Rich, I began to look for a different house to live in. I had a crazy fantasy that even if Julia and I did make it, we would have to do it living separately.

  The only person I told about that night was, of course, Julia. After I came out to my best friend, Chuck, a few months later, I told him about what John had said. We all agreed that it would be best to keep what we knew about John Rich’s feelings toward homosexuals between us. As it turned out, it wouldn’t be long before John himself would make his position on the topic a public issue.

  John was a guest on a conservative radio talk show shortly after our “talk” in his car, and when asked about his stance on gay marriage he said: “I think if you legalize that [same-sex marriage], you’ve got to legalize some other things that are pretty unsavory. You can call me a radical, but how can you tell an aunt that she can’t marry her nephew if they are really in love and sharing the bills? How can you tell them they can’t get married, but something else that’s unnatural can happen?”

  There was such an uproar across the nation and on the Internet that John issued a statement to the press the very next day that said:

  My earlier comments on same-sex marriage don’t reflect my full views on the broader issues regarding tolerance and the treatment of gays and lesbians in our society. I apologize for that and wish to state clearly my views. I oppose same-sex marriage because my father and minister brought me up to believe that marriage is an institution for the union of a man and a woman. However, I also believe that intolerance, bigotry, and hatred are wrong. People should be judged based on their merits, not on their sexual orientation. We are all children of God and should be valued and respected.

  Suffice it to say that, in my opinion, John Rich and the notion of equality and “Love Everybody” have never met.

  Moving Out

  When Julia and I broke up, it was a difficult and sad time for both of us. Although couples therapy had proven to be good for us, we were tired of fighting an unwinnable war.

  Even after we broke up and moved out of our home, we continued to go sporadically to couples therapy. She finally admitted to me in therapy that for years whenever I’d have a record that struggled on the charts, she’d be overjoyed inside. She told me that she used to pray that my singles would fail and that MCA would drop me. I know it was humiliating for her to admit it after I’d been accusing her of exactly that for years. In her defense, she knew that as long as I did that job there would never be a place for her in the way she wanted and any kind of success might take me from her. Acknowledging each other as partners would have been a step toward being a healthier couple, but I couldn’t risk it and we both knew it.

  When you’re gay you realize that, for the most part, a lot of the world hates you without having ever met you. It’s unsettling. At times I was able to let that go, but it caused a tremendous strain on our feelings for one another.

  I wanted to be able to be myself. I was one-half of a fully committed relationship and I had to hide that. Then I found myself, even in the privacy of my own home, having to omit certain parts of who I am. Like it or not, I was a well-known country music singer. I’d worked and dreamed my entire life to achieve that, and Julia simply did not like it. So, because I loved her, I left my work outside of our home. I wanted her, I wanted us to be together, and I did what I had to do to make it work. A part of me also felt like I didn’t deserve to have it all. I don’t believe that today.

  Kristin

  I never imagined that I might develop a relationship with someone else. But I did. I had gone to great lengths, by moving out of my home with Julia, to re-create my world and present myself as a straight single woman. The last thing I needed was to have a new person in my life. I’d just have to hide all over again. Nevertheless, I became involved with someone new. I wondered how long Julia and I would last, not being together. I was convinced that we just needed that time apart, to throw people off, and then we’d find a way to get back together.

  I had a new record out and was doing the things asked of an artist by a record label—promotion and touring. Being out on the road at that time provided a nice distraction for me. I was numb from the breakup with Julia, but mostly I was consumed with the logistics of it all. We had to sell the house and we each had to buy a new house, all the while still living under the same roof. We’d been sleeping in different bedrooms for quite a while, but there was still a tension that lingered in the house until we finally went our separate ways.

  I was working with a woman involved in the release of my current record at that time, and we soon became close. Several months into knowing one another, Kristin told me that she was attracted to me and that she couldn’t stop thinking about me. She confessed that she’d never been with a woman other than kissing her girlfriends when they were drunk. However, she said, she was cool with same-sex relationships—“chill” with it, to use her word. I was flattered but cautious.

  At first she was fun and easy to be around, and that was refreshing to me. But there were moments early on where I saw things about her that I knew would be a challenge. One evening we went with a couple of other folks to the Nashville Sounds minor league baseball game. As we were walking out, a man was randomly handing out literature about Christianity. We each had the pamphlet in our hands as we talked about the game. “Isn’t that ironic,” she said, “that that man happened to randomly give all of us that literature—the four people at the stadium who don’t believe in God?” She said that she wished she’d told the “Jesus freak” to buzz off.

  “Kristin, I very much do believe in God,” I objected. “I always have.” I had told her I wasn’t a member of a religious group or a church, but that didn’t mean I was a non-believer. I didn’t like the way she arrogantly scoffed at and belittled people who believed in God. Why would I even consider having a girlfriend who was not spiritual? My faith in God was part of me.

  Kristin could be unpredictable and erratic. She would profess her love for me and then disappear for days at a time. She would say that she would be at my house by 6:30 p.m. to have dinner and not show up. Then she would text me three hours later and ask me what I was doing, as if nothing had happened. I understood the push and pull of being a closeted person in a gay relationship, but I sensed it was something more serious than that.

  Kristin liked, as she put it, to get “hammered.” She told me stories about her ex-boyfriend Bobby, who was a recreational drug user and a heavy drinker. She admitted that she drank heavily to cope with the sexual part of their relationship and she sometimes blacked out.

  Kristin spent a lot of time getting drunk. The more she drank, the more she seemed to crave male attention. She was attractive and didn’t have to work hard to get it. Often I’d end up babysitting her, trying to get her to eat something so she wouldn’t vomit. I suspected Kristin’s drinking problem was related to her problems dealing with her sexuality. I knew her drinking was dangerous for her, but one
night I realized her drinking was dangerous for me.

  Kristin and I flew to New York to spend time with my friends—a tradition, to meet in New York City and attend a holiday party. We arrived at the party, which was beautifully catered, with several bars and a dance floor in the tent area out back. Although Kristin was my girlfriend, we weren’t out to anyone but Chuck, the only one of my friends who knew I was gay, so I mingled at the party as if I was there as a single person. I was used to doing that in public. At one point in the evening, I realized I didn’t know where Kristin was and I asked my friends if they’d seen her. Someone said she was having one hell of a time.

  Not a good sign.

  I soon discovered Kristin gyrating on the dance floor by herself while a crowd of men watched. I stood by, drinking bottled water, and watched her invite two men to dance with her. By the third song, one man was on her front side and another behind her. She was straddling the leg of the man in front, while the man behind her was grinding his pelvis into her backside. She was laughing and yelling. I wasn’t jealous; I was just mortified.

  I finally caught her attention and asked her to sit down and have some food with me. She ate two pieces of shrimp before she stood up and said that she needed to use the restroom. She never came back. About half an hour later, I found her doing shots with more men neither of us knew.

  Later, Chuck and I were talking when a friend approached us and grabbed each of us by the forearm. Her eyes were wide and frantic. “We’ve got a problem,” she said. “Kristin’s a lesbian and she’s in love with Chely.” In hushed tones, Anne Marie told us how Kristin, in her drunken state, had pulled her aside and told her.

  Instead of discussing it further, the three of us searched the house for Kristin. We finally found her and pulled her into a bathroom. She was wasted. “Don’t break up with me ’cause I got too drunk again,” she kept saying. My friend’s jaw dropped to the floor. There was no way to talk myself out of this situation. I told Anne Marie that I was gay and that Kristin was my girlfriend.