Clay Aiken lost ‘50% of his fan base’ after coming out

When you really think about 2008, like you think about the time when you spent hours calling American idol reblogging GIFs on Tumblr makes me feel like I’m living in another timeline: none of these things exist in their original form anymore! No one feels the difference of several decades more than American idol Second season runner-up Clay Aiken rose to fame after his time on the show, but lost much of his fan base, the Claymates, when he came out as gay after the birth of his son. In a retrospective interview with PeopleClay Aiken returned to his 2008 cover story, in which he claimed to have lost “perfect 50 of (his) fan base,” leading to a drop in ticket sales for Spamalot on Broadway. “The first four months I participated, the show was sold out, it was standing room only. You can actually look at ticket sales the week after this cover comes out,” Aiken explained. “It went from selling really well to the week after the cover came out, ticket sales plummeted. Spamalot ended up closing a few months later… We are in a very different era. I lost maybe 50 percent of the fan base.

It also celebrates the new world we now live in, where stars are celebrated for being gay. “A lot of people who come out now end up gaining popularity because of it… It’s mind-blowing to me because it’s the opposite of what happened when I came out,” Aiken explained . “But it does mean that there is progress and that as a country we are moving in the right direction.”