\t\t\t\t\t \t\t\t\t\t \tClay Aiken says he lost \u201c50 percent\u201d of his fans after he came out as gay in 2008.<\/p>\n
\tThe singer \u2014\u00a0who got his big break in music in 2003 as runner-up on Season 2 on American Idol \u2014\u00a0revealed he is gay in a People cover story in 2008. In a new interview with the magazine, he revealed that his career took a big turn after he made his sexuality public. <\/p>\n
\t\u201cBack then it was a big deal,\u201d he said, referring to how times have changed in the last 16 years.<\/p>\n
\t\u201cWe are in a very different time,\u201d he added. \u201cI lost maybe 50 percent of the fan base.\u201d \t<\/p>\n
\tWhen Aiken came out, he was starring in Spamalot on Broadway, and he said his revelation had an impact on ticket sales.<\/p>\n
\t\u201cThe first four months that I was in [Spamalot], the show was selling out, standing room only,\u201d he said. \u201cYou can actually look at the ticket sales the week after that cover came out. It went from selling very well to the week after the cover came out, the ticket sales dropped. Spamalot ended up closing a few months after that.\u201d<\/p>\n
\tAiken, who is now 46, decided to come out shortly after his son was born. He was 29 at the time.<\/p>\n
\t\u201cIt was the first decision I made as a father,\u201d he said. \u201cI cannot raise a child to lie or to hide things. I wasn\u2019t raised that way, and I\u2019m not going to raise a child to do that.\u201d<\/p>\n
\tHe stands behind that decision today, saying he doesn\u2019t regret coming out when he did.<\/p>\n
\t\u201cA lot of people who come out now end up having boosts in popularity because of it. \u2026 That\u2019s mind-blowing to me because it\u2019s the opposite of what happened when I came out,\u201d he said. \u201cBut it means that there\u2019s progress and it means that as a country, we\u2019re headed in the right direction.\u201d<\/p>\n
\tAfter more than a decade away from music\u00a0\u2014 which included two unsuccessful runs for Congress \u2014 Aiken recently released a holiday album, Christmas Bells Are Ringing.<\/p>\n
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Clay Aiken says he lost \u201c50 percent\u201d of his fans after he came out as gay in 2008. The singer \u2014\u00a0who got his big break in music in 2003 as runner-up on Season 2 on American Idol \u2014\u00a0revealed he is gay in a People cover story in 2008. In a new interview with the magazine, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":21880,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-21878","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/movieetv.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21878","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/movieetv.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/movieetv.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/movieetv.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/movieetv.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21878"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/movieetv.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21878\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/movieetv.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/21880"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/movieetv.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21878"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/movieetv.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21878"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/movieetv.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21878"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}