#41: Clay Aiken Makes His Triumphant Return!

[luckiest1]

From CH:

Scans of People

cover

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3

4

5

6

OMG the pictures are to die for! And Jaymes is pictured, and quoted.

I just printed the whole thing and took it into the bathroom so I could read it undisturbed. Wow. Wow. Wow. What a man.

[claytonic]

Crap, I miss everything! His post.....People online....the GMA thing....IT won't play either!! Probably overwhelmed, hopefully it'll work later.

I hate having to work for food at moments like this.

But I LOVE Clay.

Obviously my requests are falling on deaf ears, but I'll ask again..

..could anyone bring over the text of the People interview?

Gawd, it's gonna take me two weeks to catch up when I get home!

DITTO on my request for a link to a suitable American radio station that I can listen to on my PC.

[Scarlett]

2

Guh!!! Why oh why couldn't I have missed my flight home?

Cindilu2, please send him our love if he's at the stage door tonight!!!

[luckiest1]

#2 is my new desktop picture. GAH!

[Bella19]

OMG the pictures are to die for! And Jaymes is pictured, and quoted.

I just printed the whole thing and took it into the bathroom so I could read it undisturbed. Wow. Wow. Wow. What a man.

Thank you SO MUCH for bringing the scans here! That's a fantastic interview with everyone and boy, is Parker ever sweet!

My co-worker and friend, who is doing the UW presentation here in half an hour, is also a huge Clay fan. I didn't think she'd heard this news story, so I showed her the People.com article and her reaction is the same as mine. Neither of us cares what anyone thinks, just that he keeps singing to us and entertaining us.

I also talked to the clerk who's my backup person - what a sweetheart! Her reaction was "Good for him! It must have been difficult to make that decision."

[ldyjocelyn]

FromClaygary, I posted the text earlier. It's also in the Fast Forward News section now -- it's the one piece of publicity (so far) that I've put in there.

claytonic, there are TONS of radio stations that stream here in the US. The problem may be if you are "allowed" to get to them via Australia. It would probably be good to know what kind of music you want to hear -- top 40, easy listening, R&B, etc. Radio stations are sooooooo divided like that, it's not funny.

Oh man. Those scans. Amazing. The pictures are amazing, the article is amazing.

He's definitely a keeper.

[Cotton]

From CH:

Scans of People

cover

1

2

3

4

5

6

OMG the pictures are to die for! And Jaymes is pictured, and quoted.

I just printed the whole thing and took it into the bathroom so I could read it undisturbed. Wow. Wow. Wow. What a man.

Thank you so much!

I feel better. I feel so much better. See? That's what I needed. To hear from Clay and Jaymes and see the three of them together.

He is a brave, brave man.

[Couch Tomato]

That was respectful and beautiful and candid. I can't believe Parker need surgery. Sigh. I'm glad he's ok.

I love the info we got on Jaymes. I feel strongly that they will make this work and will be great parents.

I'm all schmoopie.

[ldyjocelyn]

Just checking my new avatar...

*sigh*

[Gibby]

What a fantastic article! Great questions, and Clay was so honest. I loved reading about the details, and hearing about the arrangements with Jaymes.

And those pictures are to die for! Beautiful. Beautiful baby, beautiful man.

Thanks for bringing the scans over, lucky.

[ausdon]

Gee, what a day!

I have 5 11yr old boys having a sleepover in my lounge room but the noise is dying down ( Its 12.20am). I don't want to leave but I have to try and get some sleep!

The People article was nice, a bit I dunno...surreal? maybe?.......but nice just the same. Nice isn't the word I'm looking for, maybe positive? Reassuring that he's ok and at peace with his coming out? And prepared for whatever reactions come his way? Thats what I get from it anyway.Also that crazy anxious in love thing you get with new babies!

[muskifest]

So does this mean I can buy People at the airport? Huh? Huh?

I've never heard Clay refer to himself as a "born again Christian", have you guys? I wonder if during this whole process of the last five or so years, he's reaffirmed things 'officially' in his faith.

Love the pic of him standing in the baby's room, holding Parker. Love it.

I want to read it but I want to read it in the magazine...while I'm drinking my latte in the airport waiting for the plane. I bet this issue is a best seller. :smiles_141:

[Scarlett]

*pouts at continental.com* Airfares are over 1K for this weekend. Yuck!

I take back what I said last night about his knowing the fans... he must have been very concerned about how we would react.

I so want to fly over there to show him this huge, huge beaming smile on my face right now. Sigh!!!

::XOXOXO Clay:: 500X

[claytonic]

[

claytonic

, there are TONS of radio stations that stream here in the US. The problem may be if you are "allowed" to get to them via Australia. It would probably be good to know what kind of music you want to hear -- top 40, easy listening, R&B, etc. Radio stations are sooooooo divided like that, it's not funny.

Well, you already know my taste in music .. kinda? LOL

I am interested in a radio station that is newsy, talk-back stuff. I know that I can't access some things because of my IP address, but I thought perhaps a radio station could be okay. I've been meaning to ask about this since the nominations for Presidency were announced. But nothing to heavy otherwise it will go over my permanently aiken-fog head.

Thank luckiest for bringing over those scans. They are simply gorgeous... how is it a baby can go from blob to beautiful in just a few short weeks? He looks so alert and he's only 6 weeks old!!!

[Cotton]

One of my cousins had pyloric stenosis. And ended up with lots of allergies like Clay. I'm wondering if Parker will have those issues, too.

Although the article didn't link the two, I thought in my cousin they were linked somehow.

He's all grown up now with a baseball playing youngun of his own!

My aunt was a nurse and she really had to "get after" the docs to make them understand that she wasn't just being an over-protective mother!

[muskifest]

Wow...in the middle of the night I wrote an email to my friend and colleague at work, who's a hawt gay man whose married with a daughter. He grew up in Utah--a Mormon! And didn't come out until he graduated college. (about the same as Clay, actually)...I wrote that I had thought of him when Clay's news showed up and then talked about how I know it must have been even harder for Clay to come out because of his celebrity.

This was my friend's reply this morning:

Wow. This must be pretty big news in the Clay community. I always

thought that if he were gay that he wouldn't come out ... just too hard

and too much publicity and attention as you describe. Good for him

though - as an out gay man I know that it makes a difference when people

come out. It humanizes the individual and helps the larger society gain

understanding and acceptance because it's harder to discriminate against

someone when they're nameless and faceless.

In any event, I wish Clay well.

This man is my "Clay" in real life....heh. I lust after him, too. and

[Couch Tomato]

Oh I don't know if he ever said I'm a born again Christian but I certainly understood that to be the case.

And shout out to Kim for keeping his secrets. Yeah they had a falling out. I've had falling outs with my friends and I hope they have already patched things up. And I hope she is the first one to pick up the phone and give him a virtual hug.

Jenna..I love you and have really missed your wise words around here. And someone so young, and gorgeous, and skinny. I should be hatin'

[JennaZ]

The People article was nice, a bit I dunno...surreal? maybe?.......but nice just the same. Nice isn't the word I'm looking for, maybe positive? Reassuring that he's ok and at peace with his coming out? And prepared for whatever reactions come his way? Thats what I get from it anyway.Also that crazy anxious in love thing you get with new babies!

I know what you mean, ausdon. It is a good piece, but it does still feel strange to hear it directly from him.

Apparently, he has known for some time. I suspect that will hurt some fans, but I can understand how difficult it must have been for him to declare his sexuality publicly, especially when he was just starting his career. That Rolling Stone article, which was really his primary statement that he was straight, was done right after the finale of American Idol, when he seemed headed for teen idol status. (Remember all those teen magazines? TRL? Seems so long ago.) It must have been very scary to risk losing so much just when things were coming together. However, after that interview, he was never quite so definitive, and in recent years, he's just tried to take the question off the table. If he really wanted to lie, he could have continued to tell the many interviewers who asked, "No, I'm straight."

I really believe that he never really meant to deceive anyone. If anything, he mainly let people believe what they wanted to believe. And so many of us, I think, really did want to believe he was straight, even if we knew we'd love him if he weren't.

I realize it may take a while, but I hope most fans will be able to come through this on his side. He's a good man, but a human one.

[playbiller]

I am still in the place with a mish mash of emotions. I feel he has done this backwards. I wish he could have come out with OMWH, then announced the baby, then whatever. I think it would have made a great deal of sense to combine the announcement with the new album and it would have been an easy go with the flow for me. I feel resentful that I had to go through months of shipping with Jaymes, and I fully expect to hear about new shipping with every guy in Spamalot. I really dislike shipping in general, except maybe with Parker because we know that is a real relationship.

I am just not comfortable with combining this announcement with the baby pictures. For some reason, it really sits wrong with me. And I hope this is not the offical promtion phase II. I will work through this, but right now it annoys me for reasons I don't exactly have a handle on beyond doing it in the wrong order as defined by myself.

Of course, it also makes me think about all the vitrol pointed at Kim Locke by many fans and how even under distress, she kept it secret, even through her interview with PH. Though Clay did not lie directly to us, many many of his friends did, especially Kim over and over and over in interviews where she was supposed to be promoting herself. I am not sure how that works for her now and if other fans will resent that or will give her a little more slack, not that they have to become fans.

Well, off to make a huge salad and clean up the place again - now that I have all this crap here in the trailer, there is less room for me and Holly, Holly who wants her 7 walks a day at the beach and so far we only had one.

Scarlett, check airfares on weekly specials - they often have weekend specials between Newark and Texas, heh, for like $99. Or Newark and North Carolina, but you can't plan on seeing them, they just pop up.

[djs111]

How I feel about the "he lied to us" thing is that no one actually had a right to ask the question. Clay did request that we not respond to that stuff, he did not ask us to defend him.

Honestly, if almost anyone in the universe asked me about my sex life, I would quite cheerfully lie to them. They would deserve it, and I would be quite unrepentant.

play, I do think the timing is perhaps awkward, but then again - ya can't really know when a baby will actually arrive, and also it really was best to wait until Parker was here and all was well, I think. Thinking about other things, maybe timing this to occur when Clay is back in a warm and successful working environment is a great idea, too. If he had done this when OMWH was released, poor sales would perhaps have been blamed on it, and affected his decisions about staying in the entertainment business, maybe.

[playbiller]

I don't think he ever lied, but I do think his friends did. Just an observation.

ETA - in my love of sea chanties or maybe the experience ofthem when I needed some odd distraction in my life, it has taken me to odd places in reading about the origin of many of the songs and following Oscar Brand. It meant I learned a lot more about "blue" history than I had any need to know and one thing it sort of convinced me of is that there are all kinds of love in all sorts of weird forms and that monogomy is more or less a modern thought forced by governing organizations - long ago orgies had everyone one doing everthing in no specific order and with a combination and permutations of people and other stuff which altered my way of looking at sexuality a long long time ago, for other people, heh. In a funny way, even reading about the wild live of pack animals (OK, it was mostly a dog book) seemed to fit right in. Clay is way boring compared to reading that stuff.

I just don't want to hear from Adric or what ever his TWOP name was. Doesn't matter if he was right, he was annoying.

[djs111]

I do't think he ever lied, but I do think his friends did. Just an observation

I don't they should have been asked, either. They did the best they could with invasive questioning.

It was not theirs to tell, and just saying no comment would have been regarded the same as saying yes.

If I knew a personal secret about you, that you didn't want to be general knowledge, I would not hesitate to lie about it, if someone was rude enough to ask me about it.

monogomy is more or less a modern thought forced by governing organizations

I think that the monogamy and marriage stuff also was more about passing on estates and keeping people in their places and inheritance issues and such.

The only person that I know who actually said he wasn't gay - I think - and am not even sure of that - was Kelly - and maye she just didn't know.

See, she should not have even been asked, it is too personal of a question, to me.

I worked with a guy for years and years who was rumored to be gay, and he finally told me and another co-worker that he was, while partying in Tokyo, he said he was not comfortable talking about it back home.

When we all got back home, I was asked if I had seen any "evidence" and I said no, because one person's curiosity does not trump another person's wish for privacy.

[Couch Tomato]

I don't think he ever lied, but I do think his friends did. Just an observation.

Playbiller, if Brett only found out 3 years ago, and his mom 4 years ago - and if I read that correctly the first person he told was Kim, which was during Idol - I don't know how we can say his friends even knew. How much has his friends talked about Clay since his intitial run on idol - especially his sexuality. In fact, there has pretty much been complete silence as far as I can tel and certainly no big public statements. I think the fandom has bemoaned the lack of "supportive" statementsl. I don't follow the friends things that closely but I'm just not sure who you are referring to. The only person that I know who actually said he wasn' tgay - I think - and am not even sure of that - was Kelly - and maye she just didn't know.

[ldyjocelyn]

I think this one is my new favorite picture of the moment. Love the emotion in Clay's face...

I know in many ways I shouldn't be doing this...but it's hard to not listen to the album OMWH without considering this news. Case in point: OMWH hasn't left my CD player in my car since I got it in May. I generally have time for one song between home and work (I live REALLY close to my job). The song that came up this morning was WOTW. To think, that he really was having to live with the weight of the world for this time...I started bawling like a baby.

I'm fascinated by everything that is going on in the fandom at the moment, and I'm definitely still fascinated by Clay.

[Cotton]

That there never should have been the question was my point last night.

He should never have had to come out of the closet because there shouldn't BE a damned closet! I hate the term 'coming out'. I hate that Clay has had to address it at all.

That said, I'm glad he has put the question to rest. In his time. On his terms.

It's just that it's nobody's damned business and I don't understand why people want to know, or guess, or speculate about anybody's sexuality unless they want to ask the person out on a date.

I've had one email about this. A young woman I worked with whom I had a 6 sentence conversation about him once. I don't understand why she felt the need to email me with a link to the story. I think it's only the second email I've gotten from her. It's just odd.

ETA:

I also never understood why some people, when they learned I was a fan, felt that had to say to me, "Oh, Cotton. He's gay!" or "He's so Gay."

I mean, really. Why did they feel the need to - and they were - cast aspersions on someone I obviously liked??!!