Chely Wright - no one knew she had moved from Nashville to New York in 2008

[Betty Lowell]

http://blog.gactv.com/blog/2010/05/13/chely-wright-opens-up-to-gac/

Chely Wright Opens Up to GAC
By Tom Roland

Chely Wright's 2010 CD, Lifted Off The Ground. Photo courtesy of
Vanguard Records.

Falling in love is such a wonderful, exciting experience that
songwriters devote vast amounts of time reminding fans how special it
is. When Chely Wright fell in love, she feared it could cost her the
job she’d always dreamed of doing. So she kept it to herself and
covered her tracks. Her joy produced a huge amount of fear.

Breaking up, on the other hand, is a traumatic experience. But like
falling in love, it’s a drama that songwriters feel compelled to write
about. When people lose a relationship, they often have to share it —
ad nauseum — with their very closest friends. When Chely broke up, she
had to endure the pain in isolation. Her friends, family and business
associates weren’t supposed to know about the relationship in the
first place. She certainly couldn’t share her heartbreak.

That’s the mess in which Chely found herself in January 2006 when she
came close to killing herself. She had split with a girlfriend, was
broken-hearted and unable to share it. She was essentially a hermit
with a fan club. It was a lonely, frustrating experience —
particularly because she felt like a phoney. It’s why she announced
she was a lesbian last week, finally breaking the chains that kept her
from connecting authentically with the people around her.

“If you were to ask a fan why they love country singers,” she writes
in her autobiography, Like Me: Confessions Of A Heartland Country
Singer, “their answer would likely be ‘Because they are so real.’
Every time I heard a fan say that about me — and I did so often — it
made me sick to my stomach. I was hiding a big part of myself from my
fans, and I feared that most of them would not understand or approve
of who I really was.”

Chely endured a lot of criticism for her public admission, which made
her the first openly gay artist working in country music. Cynics
accused her of trying to capitalize off her lifestyle. Others took her
to task for making them consider the issue: “Why,” wrote one GAC
reader, “must gays make a big deal out of it? Straight God-loving
people don’t run around saying, ‘Look at me, I’m straight. So why do
gays?’”

Straight people, however, have other ways of announcing themselves.
They put a wedding band on their left finger, a not-so-subtle message
that they have a partner. Chely’s fellow country artists routinely
talk about their spouses, children and romantic attachments, another
form of announcement.

Like it or not, Chely is finally giving herself permission to do the
same. It was a risky act of courage. Those who were close to her that
didn’t know might sever all ties. Her fan base could possibly dry up.
She had no way of knowing in advance how people might react.

“It’s the hardest thing in the world to tell the ones we love that
we’ve already built up relationships with,” she told me after the
book’s release. “Those are the ones who can hurt the most by rejecting
us. That’s what… writing my book was all about, putting a face next to
the word gay to people who already gave me their stamp of approval.”

So how sheltered had Chely made herself? In June 2008, she packed up
many of her possessions and moved to New York, removing herself from
the life she knew so that she could finish writing her book and begin
to contemplate the new life she was creating.

“No one really knew I left,” she noted, “and that should show you how
detached a person in hiding gets from others in their life. When you
move away from the city and nobody knows you’re gone, what kind of
friendships do you have? Only a few people knew that I was gone.”

Chely’s new album Lifted Off The Ground, released in tandem with the
book, is her most personal to date. Six of the 11 songs were written
during the month that she thought about suicide. The titles alone —
“Broken,” “Damn Liar,” “Notes To The Coroner” — are clues to her pain,
and she knew she needed to be able to explain the album’s origins when
she released it.

The judges on “American Idol” frequently push the contestants to be
true to themselves in picking material and performing it on stage.
That is, in essence, what Chely did in recording her album and writing
the book. And in coming out.

Not everyone is happy with the results, but real artists don’t do
things just to make other people happy. Everyone has skeletons. Real
artists use their skeletons to inform their work. Chely’s coming-out
event was “a spiritual, emotional, cerebral, creative experience,” she
said, in part because she lived out that old adage that the truth
shall set you free.

“As my friend Mary Karr, the famous poet and memoirist says, ‘Anyone
who writes a memoir worth a crap cracks themselves open and really
writes it.’”

The best part of it all for Chely: She moves forward as the real Chely
Wright, not as the image she thinks others want her to be.

[*USA*]

Not many people know who she is. Who is she?

[Manny Morgan]

Post by *USA*
Not many people know who she is. Who is she?

It's like a big scam. Some singer that no one has ever heard of, gets
all this publicity for 'announcing' they are gay. No one has ever
heard her sing or knew what she looked like before.

It's like the (fake) Chris Gaines thing all over again!
Arrggggghhhh!

[Gutless Umbrella Carrying Sissy]

Post by Manny Morgan

Post by *USA*
Not many people know who she is. Who is she?

It's like a big scam. Some singer that no one has ever heard
of, gets all this publicity for 'announcing' they are gay. No
one has ever heard her sing or knew what she looked like before.

You obviously don't listen to country music. She's not exactly a
superstar, but she's been on the radio on and off over the years.

Your insular homophobia doesn't make the whole world the same as you.