Coming Out Tour
American Idol has come up in many of my conversations this week. I mean, it often comes up in my conversations. I am what I am.
Regardless, I wanted to share an essay with you that I wrote a few years ago, lightly edited, about Adam Lambert and my coming out (they’re related, if loosely).
This may or may not be inspired by the fact that I’ve been scouring the internet for more footage of him playing Fiyero in the LA production of Wicked. Shut up, whatever. Read David’s latest on (I’m not) that (girl) here. Happy 20th to the big W.
I hope to share some new things with you soon, so if you care to find me, look to the— I apologize. But in the meantime, you should follow my comedy Instagram. I’m doing stand up and happily accepting fans, friends, and hate-follows.
In 2009, Adam Lambert and I were both gay, but only one of us knew it.
America was abuzz with debate over the then-27-year-old singer’s sexuality, poking at the thin, smudged kohl pencil line between “gay” and “androgynous-but-straight rockstar.” Adam, nor reps from American Idol, commented on the subject during his triumphant blaze to the finale. It wasn’t a secret, but there was a televised singing competition to be had.
Once the season wrapped, Adam would set sail on a bizarre, years-long coming out tour. Contestants on Idol were barred from doing interviews until after the show to keep things fair, but that didn’t mean there weren’t dozens of headlines speculating and journalists ready to talk. The question on everyone’s lips was about something he’d been completely open about for nearly a decade. Is that Adam guy a little, you know?
In middle school, a lanky, freckled boy on my Cross country team approached me in an emptying hallway to let me know that he would’ve asked me to the dance, “but I heard you were a lesbian, so I didn’t.” It felt like a death sentence. I quickly told him no, the word thrown like a hot potato. I said I liked boys because I did. I liked boys because I wanted one to like me. For too many years, these were indistinguishable feelings.
Pictures of Adam kissing his ex-boyfriend surfaced while the season was airing. Producers on The O’Reilly Factor censored the photos by cropping them just above the mouth. Bill O’Reilly called them “embarrassing.” What it was for straight people to hear Adam confirm their suspicions about his sexuality, I’m not quite sure, but in an eventual 20/20 special, he explained that he wasn’t repressing himself or willfully hiding it from anyone. He was instead focused on being a performer in the public eye first, as any Idol contestant would.
After a performance during Hollywood week, judge Kara DioGuardi critiqued Adam’s performance. “It’s so dramatic, it’s not touching me here,” she says, gripping her chest. He’d been accustomed to performing theatre for crowds that required larger, more emphatic movements. It was also a part of his charm. A few of the judges often criticized Adam for his flamboyance and encouraged him to dampen it if he wanted to win the competition, and moreover, become a successful recording artist.
In retrospect, a lot of the ways Adam was instructed to shrink himself were driven by homophobia. Where Taylor Hicks might have been criticized for coming off cheesy, Adam was critiqued for being Broadway. It was coded language. My subconscious took notes. Before I could even gain the awareness that I was in a closet, the exit disappeared even further out of reach.
As a young teenager, I instinctively hated almost everything about myself. My acne-covered face, my incorrect body, the way my voice sounded played back on a cellphone video — but I loved the way a powerhouse singer could make all the hair on my not-right arms stand at attention, their voices cracking open the sky. Despite the judges’ critiques, Adam rarely toned himself down, only chameleoned his look to fit within a theme. So many things I was afraid to step into and claim for myself coalesced in how Adam Lambert got onto that stage, in front of millions of Americans, and spun a song into an experience.
He performed Tears for Fears’ “Mad World” during a week where the remaining 8 contestants were tasked with selecting a song from the year they were born. I sat mesmerized as the usually blinged-out and over-the-top rock star began a song I had never heard before, seated, and shrouded in a bluish light. He earned a standing ovation from Simon Cowell, the only judge afforded a moment to speak as the live production ran 9 minutes over time. When the end credits sped across the screen and the opening warning for the next show being intended for mature audiences droned, I sat in awe of what I had just seen. It was a moment where, in all its abstractness, the witnessing of an “artist” made a mark on me - a star was born, and born again, week after week - it was a magic I can barely explain.
Being called a lesbian by my teammate was stomach-twisting, the word lesbian itself so unexplainably nauseating. I immediately snuffed out the question of my sexuality and let it die like the moth trapped in Virginia Woolf’s windowpane. Unlike Virginia, I turned away. There was not a single elegiac thought to be had. To entertain one would mean I’d acknowledged that there was more to consider. I refocused all of my attention on winning over the affection of one boy. When I briefly dated a different one and felt nothing, and even worse, sick at the touch of his fingers interlacing mine, I chalked it up to him not being the other boy.
With all that was going on in my teen world, one where being gay wasn’t on the table, it was easy enough to have an unrequited crush. It was just as easy to watch (and rewatch) Amanda Seyfried make out with Megan Fox in Jennifer’s Body as a casual observer. Despite a consistent attraction to women, the language to describe it felt wrong in my mouth. I was able to accept conflicting thoughts without interrogating them - the surface of my identity, a gleaming, newly minted coin waiting to be scratched.
Knowing, or at least feeling, that I was not comparably attractive to the girls around me, I leaned into the misogynistic, I’m-not-like-other-girls narrative perpetuated and tirelessly championed by the music of the time. I could lean on my intellect, bury my head in a book, and feel superior to those who ran around with boyfriends. Pop-punk, P!nk, and Taylor Swift were all enablers in their own right: I didn’t want to be a stupid girl, one who wore high heels and short skirts. In Paramore’s “Misery Business,” the implicated ex-girlfriend is written as one of the millions of girls who manipulate men by presenting themselves as “innocent.” It was something I refused to do, too, Hayley Williams.
The truth of it was, I was jealous of “other girls.” From the obstructed outside, they seemed carefree and naturally magnetizing male attention, which translated into an incredible amount of worth. Subconsciously, I was shielding myself from discovering anything that would impede my ability to get out of my hometown unscathed. Instead, I stewed in self-loathing and projected my loneliness and insecurities onto girls who were being kissed with too much tongue by boys who didn’t floss.
Adam Lambert came out to his mother in the car. He was 18. The two were on their way home from a speech and debate competition where they heard a dramatic piece in which a gay son suffers from his relationship with homophobic parents. Adam’s mom asked him if he had a girlfriend. He said no. She asked if he wanted one. He said no. She asked if he wanted a boyfriend. It was as simple as that. They stayed up late into the early morning talking about all the ways he’d exhibited behaviors or clues.
I came out to my mother on the phone. I had been out of college for 2 years. It went well, but she was surprised. When I asked if she knew, she said no. I had staged my song and dance so well for so long that she actually believed I had been quietly dating my friend, a gay man, for several years, though she never asked me to confirm. Belief is a malleable construction. Performing the self is an endless, exhaustive show. Week after week America dials in to vote.
For most of college, I identified (somewhat off the record, in varying degrees) as queer and bisexual, but I was so deeply entrenched in the defaults set by compulsory heterosexuality, that (to my mother’s credit) when I did finally come out as a lesbian, the most surprised person was me. When I went out with men from dating apps and knew I wanted to leave the moment I saw them wave from across the street, it was always because he wasn’t the right guy. When I removed them from my view on those apps, I didn’t think too hard about what that meant, only that I was tired of the endless stream of “6’2” if that matters” and photos showing off caught fish.
When I inevitably hooked up with men, I was often drunk, and they were often gay and drunk. Even when they weren’t, what I was actually in pursuit of was feeling wanted for one sparkling moment — the promise of it transforming me into someone special always one slip of tongue away. On the flip side, when I kissed women in house party basements, no rainbow confetti exploded behind my closed eyes; the desire and the desire to be desired, both cut from the same cloth and knotted into a thick braid.
My preoccupation with male attention and validation was so persistent, like a 2009 tabloid reporter prolonging a headline. Is she bisexual? A lesbian? Or just confused? I was afraid to give it up and afraid to be wrong. If Virginia Woolf could observe me, flittering helplessly around from corner to corner, perhaps she would write, “just as life had been strange before examining her sexuality, so accepting it was now as strange.”
After over a year of private, deferrable contemplation, I wanted to come to a decision. I wanted something to click into place, for a sign from the universe to stop me in my tracks. Adam Lambert was at Burning Man, having a “psychedelic experience” and looking up at the clouds when he realized that we each have the power to make our own realities - and so, he auditioned for American Idol. Without the means to replicate that atmosphere, I spent a long night talking it out instead. When asked, “Do you think you’d ever marry a man?” I confidently said no, though I still felt conflicted. It was decided that I’d say “I’m a lesbian” out loud when I woke up the next morning and see how I felt. This sounds ridiculous because it is.
At the end of Adam’s Idol journey, judge Paula Abdul, a superfan from the start, tells him, “I know with every fiber of my being that you are going to be iconic.” Despite my inability to recognize it at the time, Adam was like my gay Virgil, a guide by example in glittery, glam rock platform boots. Whatever awe I experienced while watching him perform remains inextricably linked to witnessing a visibly queer person owning every ounce of an actualized, uncompromised self. A piece of him remains forever embedded in me; the prefix of the bygone phone number to vote on the tip of my tongue, reverently memorized and ready for recitation like a prayer.
I prepared myself for an audience of one and delivered my line. The word that previously curdled in my mouth now fit, rang true. Perhaps because it was the first time I allowed myself to agree. Who knows? Transfixed by the simplicity of how a switch had flipped, the feeling that ran through me was not unlike watching Adam Lambert perform “Mad World” for the first time.
Such familiar, dumbfounding magic.
Big love,
kaylasomething