’90s country star says what she had to ‘let go of’ after coming out as gay

Country singer Chely Wright in 1999. (Photo by Sherry Rayn Barnett /Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images)Getty Images

Chely Wright recently told Variety that coming out as country music’s first openly gay singer is “the thing of which I’m most proud.”

However the country singer, who first rose to fame with hits such as “Single White Female” and “Shut Up and Drive,” knew her decision to come out would come with some sacrifices.

“The outcome that I was going for was telling the world who I was, all the pieces of me — this person of faith who toured in support of the troops and was from the Midwest who loves the Grand Ole Opry and loves country music and loves Connie Smith and Loretta Lynn and also happened to be gay,” Wright, who publicly came out in 2010, told Variety.

“Beyond that, I had to let go of people liking me. The goal, as a country music, is to make sure that as many fans like you and like what you’re doing as possible. And wanting everyone at the end of this to be so delighted with me was a hard thing to throw out of the basket,” Wright continued. “But once I did, everything got easy.”

Wright decided to come out after contemplating suicide in 2006. The singer told PEOPLE that she felt like she “did not have a choice” and “had to come out or I wasn’t going to make it.” Wright also grappled with the thought of losing her career entirely if people knew she was gay.

“I knew that at any moment that my career could be gone like that if I were found out. So I did spend a good deal of my time holding on really tightly to that identity and hiding,” she told Variety. “You spend a lot of your energy when you’re in the closet staying in the closet. I did think about what would I do if this career were taken from me.”

With no major country star having ever come out, Wright had to look to other queer icons in the entertainment industry for help. She credits Rosie O’Donnell, Ellen DeGeneres and Melissa Etheridge for inspiring her to share her truth.

Wright then spent four years preparing for her coming-out moment. At 39 years old, she came out in her 2010 memoir, “Like Me: Confessions of a Heartland Country Singer.”

“I was very measured and very strategic in how I came out. I took a lot of flack for that, by the way, but I wouldn’t change a single thing about the strategy and thinking ‘How do I do this and how do I do it well and how do I control it?’ That was business thinking,” Wright told Variety.

Despite initially getting death threats, hateful messages and a New York visit from someone who said “they were gonna do whatever they were gonna do to me,” Wright soon started getting “opportunities to do culture work, belonging, DEIB work with corporations and higher-ed and faith communities,” she told Variety.

“I actually had more of that work than I wanted to do. I kind of kept it at 30% of my work, and the rest was music,” she said. “There’s no reason I couldn’t have gone 70/30 (in favor of the culture work), but I was still holding on so tightly to who I thought I was and who I thought I should be. I was having an identity crisis, because if I’m not 70% a touring musician, who am I? You know, I didn’t want to feel like anything was taken from me. So that opportunity became more and more real to me, and viable, and fun and gratifying, and certainly lucrative. And then when I was on tour, when COVID hit, all of that (music performance) went away — and the next week my clients were calling for virtual events. I took on new clients, so that went from 30% to 100%. It was there all along, but I didn’t wanna hear it. I didn’t know what that said about me as an artist.”

The 54-year-old has since left the music industry. She now serves as Senior VP of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and New Market Growth for North America at ISS, a facility management company that has 320,000 employees around the world.

When asked if she was completely done with music, Wright replied with, “I’d be surprised if that were the case.”

“I am still every day jotting down lines and humming into my voice memo melodies,” she added.

Wright is actually working on a musical inspired by her memoir, to which actress Jean Smart acquired the life rights.

“It’s just cool to even know Jean Smart, frankly. So that project is really fun to be working on,” Wright told Variety. “I also believe in my bones I’m gonna make another album, if not several. I don’t think that could ever not be part of who I am.”

Wright has released eight albums since 1994. Her last album, “I Am the Rain,” came out in 2016.