"And that was the experience I was having in the closet. "If you try to find your life's mate in a dark, small closet, you tend to find a lot of unhealthy people," Wright said. Wright even briefly considered switching genres but decided to stick with country, saying "I've got to face my artistic self" and "if fewer come to the party than ever did before, that's OK." Wright said she knew what the stakes were and had no regrets about coming out, noting that she met her spouse soon afterward.
She said venues that booked her in the past told her agent and manager, "We don't have a problem with her being gay but we are afraid her fans will." But since coming out, her latest album has sold just a third of the copies that her previous record sold. If there were people were like me, they were certainly hiding it."Īt one time, Wright was one of country music's darlings and was romantically involved with country star Brad Paisley. "When I moved to Nashville, I scoured my industry for people like me. "The essence was I looked and looked for people like me," Wright said. The new centre, which will be called the LIKEME Lighthouse, is the most ambitious project undertaken by the LIKEME Organization, whose name is a play on the title of her memoir, "Like Me: Confessions of a Heartland Country Singer." The book and her seventh "Lifted Off the Ground," were released when she came out in May 2010. "That would have meant everything to me had I been a kid growing up in Wellsville, knowing that there is a beautiful facility in our major city, that that was OK. "This just gives so much hope to these outlying areas, that your major metropolitan area has a gay and lesbian centre," said the 41-year-old Wright, who married LGBT activist Lauren Blitzer last summer. The location was chosen, in part, because Wright grew up 40 miles away, in Wellsville, Kan. LIKEME Organization, a non-profit group Wright started, is opening a community centre in Kansas City this weekend that will serve as a place for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people and their families and friends to meet up. When country musician Chely Wright came out as a lesbian, radio stations stopped playing her songs, record sales dropped and venues stopped booking her.ĭespite the challenges she's faced over the past two years, the performer known for her hits such as "Single White Female" and "Shut Up and Drive" has no regrets, and she wants to help others facing similar challenges.
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