The Deal with God: Chely Wright

Country music star Chely Wright spent years building the life she had dreamed of while hiding a truth she feared could cost her everything. This episode of The Secret Is OUT tells the story of what that secret cost her, and what happened when she finally decided to tell the truth.

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References
Wright, Chely. Like Me: Confessions of a Heartland Country Singer. Pantheon, 2010.
The principal first-person source for Chely’s childhood, faith, sexuality, relationships, career, suicidal crisis and decision to come out.
AfterEllen, “Interview with Chely Wright,” 2010.
Useful for Chely’s account of “Julia,” the L Word DVD story, her relationship with her mother, and the sequence in which she came out to Rodney Crowell and began writing Like Me. AfterEllen interview (https://afterellen.com/interview-with-chely-wright/?utm_source=chatgpt.com)
Out, “In Her Own Wright,” May 4, 2010.
Long-form interview published as Chely came out publicly. Particularly important for the January 26, 2006 crisis and the years preceding it. Out interview (https://www.out.com/entertainment/2010/05/04/her-own-wright?utm_source=chatgpt.com)
Curve, Chely Wright coming-out interview, 2010.
First-person material about the childhood bargain with God, including Chely’s later realization that a nine-year-old could hardly be expected to understand the bargain she was making.
The Iconic Midlife with Roxy Manning, “Owning My Truth: Chely Wright on Fear, Faith, and Finally Being Free,” 2026.
A valuable recent retrospective in which Chely revisits her childhood faith, the suicidal crisis, her decision to live and come out, and her distinction between spiritual acceptance and “country music jeopardy.”
Los Angeles Times, “Country singer Chely Wright finds strength to face the music,” May 7, 2010.
Contemporary reporting about Chely’s fear of Nashville, the absence of openly gay role models in country music, and her account of the conversation with John Rich. Los Angeles Times profile (https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2010-may-07-la-et-chely-wright-20100507-story.html?utm_source=chatgpt.com)
Metro Weekly, “Chely Wright’s Second Act: Out, Proud, and Living Her Truth,” 2018.
Retrospective interview covering the end of Chely’s long-term relationship, sale of their shared home, fear of being outed and the period leading into her 2006 crisis.
CBS News, “Second Cup: Chely Wright,” May 21, 2010.
Contemporary coverage of Like Me, the accompanying album, her religious struggle and her explanation of why she concealed her sexuality while pursuing country music.
Autostraddle, interview with Chely Wright, 2010.
Especially useful for the aftermath of coming out and the difference between private expressions of support from Nashville figures and willingness to support her publicly.
CBS News, “Chely Wright: Nashville’s quietly rejected me,” 2012.
Chely’s later assessment of what actually happened to her relationship with Nashville after coming out.
988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline.
Official source for the episode’s content advisory. The Lifeline provides free, confidential support 24 hours a day in the United States and its territories by calling or texting 988. (988 Lifeline (https://988lifeline.org/get-help/?utm_source=chatgpt.com))
988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline (https://988lifeline.org/get-help/?utm_source=chatgpt.com)

Transcript

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Before we begin, a quick note about this episode. Shelley Wright's story includes a period when she considered taking her own life. And we're going to talk about that honestly. If that subject is difficult for you right now, this may not be the right episode to listen to. And if you or someone you know is struggling with thoughts of suicide or simply need someone to talk to in the United States you can call or text. It's available 24 hours a day. Please take care of yourself. On January 26, 2006, Shelley Wright was alone in her house outside Nashville. She was 35 years old and had already done most of the things she used to dream about when she was a little girl in Kansas. She had moved to Nashville. She had signed a record deal. The Academy of Country Music had named her top female vocalist. She had performed at the Grand Old Aubrey. Her song, Single White Female, had gone all the way to number one. People magazine had even named her one of its 50 most beautiful people. That morning, none of it seemed to matter very much. Shelly had a 9mm handgun her parents had given her for protection. She put the gun in her mouth. For a moment, she was ready to pull the trigger. Thankfully, she didn't. Eventually, she put the gun down, went upstairs, and fell asleep. When she woke up a few hours later, she was afraid to go downstairs because the gun was still there, so she stayed upstairs. She got down on her knees. Shelly had spent a lot of time on her knees over the years. She knew how to pray. She'd been doing it since she was a little girl. This prayer was different. There wasn't really anything left to bargain with. She had tried that already. For most of her life, actually. The first deal had been made when she was about nine. Shelley would give up love, and in exchange, God would give her music. She got the music. Shelly Wright grew up in Wellsville, Kansas, a small town surrounded by farmland. Country music was already there. Her father played guitar, her mother kept handwritten lyrics to songs she loved. Family gatherings included music. And Shelley remembers deciding when she was very young that she wanted to be a country singer. Not just that she liked singing, she was going to Nashville. She was going to make records. She was going to stand on the Grand Ole Opry stage. She was only four years old. A few years later, Shelly figured out something else about herself. She liked girls. One of her earliest crushes was on a female teacher. There wasn't much she could do with that information. She was a child. But Shelly was also a church kid, and she knew enough about what she'd heard there to understand that girls weren't supposed to feel that way about other girls. She began praying about it. Dear God, please don't let me be gay. She said that prayer over and over and over. Sometimes she would go outside into the fields around her home, far enough away that nobody could hear her. Then she could say it out loud, please don't let me be gay. Shelley tried offering God some things in return. She would be good, she wouldn't lie, she wouldn't steal. She believed in him, and she wanted to do the right things. Just take this one thing away. It didn't go away. And country music didn't either. As Shelley got older, the two things began running beside each other. She studied country records almost obsessively. She read liner notes and learned the names of songwriters and producers. She knew who played on the records and who wrote which songs. She looked for somebody like herself, but she couldn't find one. There were plenty of women in country music. Patsy Klein, Loretta Lynn, Tammy Wynette, Dolly Parton. Women singing about husbands and boyfriends and heartbreak. Nobody Shelly could find was saying she was gay. So she reached a conclusion that probably seemed perfectly reasonable to a teenager in Kansas. She could be gay or she could be a country singer. She couldn't be both. At some point, the prayers changed. Shelley began to believe that maybe God wasn't going to change her. Eventually, she even began to believe God wasn't condemning her. That helped, but it didn't solve Nashville. Years later, she would describe the difference pretty clearly. Maybe she wasn't in spiritual jeopardy anymore. She was still in country music jeopardy. So Shelley made a deal. If she couldn't have love, she would take the music. She would live without the other thing. She was young enough to believe that might work. At 18, Shelley left Kansas and headed toward Nashville. She worked at Opera Land USA for a while, singing in one of the shows there. She could see the life she wanted getting closer. Eventually came a publishing deal, then a record deal. In 1994, her first album was released. The next year, the Academy of Country Music named her top new female vocalist. The Little Girl from Wellsville had made it. Or at least she was getting there. Then in 1999 came the song that changed her career, Single White Female. It went to number one on the country chart. There is an obvious irony in Shelley Wright, a closeted lesbian becoming famous, singing a song about a single woman looking for a man. But Shelley doesn't talk about the music as if it were fake. That's one of the things I find interesting about her story. When she sang about wanting someone, she understood wanting someone. When she sang about heartbreak, she knew that too. She could put the woman she loved into a song without telling anybody who she was singing about. The feelings were real. It was everything around them that had to be adjusted. Because by then, there was a woman. Shelley calls her Julia in her memoir. They would be together on and off for about 12 years. Those were also the years Shelly's career was becoming everything she hoped it might be. They had dogs. They worked in the yard. They did the ordinary things couples do when nobody is watching. The problem was that somebody might always be watching. Shelley tells one story about the L word, the television series about lesbians living in Los Angeles. She and Julia wanted to watch it. Buying the DVD shouldn't have required much planning. For them it did. They waited until around Thanksgiving and went to a store in Nashville. When it was time to pay, Shelley went back to the car. Julia bought it. Then they went home and watched television. That's how small the closet can get. Not an award show, not a reporter sticking a microphone in your face, a checkout line. Shelly'd become recognizable enough that even buying a television show felt dangerous. There were men in her life too. Some were friends, some became dates, and eventually there was Brad Paisley. Brad was still building his own country career then. Shelly liked him very much. She thought he was funny and extremely smart. She loved being around him. What she didn't feel was sexual attraction. Brad didn't know that. He also didn't know about Julia. Shelley later admitted that she hurt him and has expressed regret for bringing him into a relationship without allowing him to know what was really happening. At the time, she found a way to make sense of it. She had already accepted that she wasn't gonna get the kind of romantic life she wanted. Maybe she could build something different with the man she genuinely cared about. And if she was gonna be with a man, Brad seemed like a pretty good one. It didn't work. The relationship ended. Shelley continued singing. Julia remained part of her life, and the secret remained too. By then, Shelly had discovered something else about success. It didn't make the fear smaller. In some ways, it made it worse. There was more to lose now. A record deal can disappear. Radio can stop playing you. The Opry can stop calling. People who once wanted you at their table can suddenly stop returning calls. Every good thing that happened to Shelly added another thing that might disappear if somebody found out. And people were beginning to wonder. In 2005, Shelly spent an evening with her friend John Rich, who was half of the country duo Big and Rich. On the ride home, according to Shelly's account, John asked her about something he'd heard. People were talking. Was she gay? Shelley said no. John Rich later said the conversation had been interpreted differently than he intended and wished her well after she came out. But what matters here is what happened inside Shelly when he asked. Somebody had noticed. After all those years of careful answers and checkout lines and watching who saw her with Julia, people in Nashville were talking anyway. Shelley panicked. And she did something that made sense according to the deals she'd been living under since she was a child. She protected the music. She ended things with Julia. They sold the house they shared. Shelly moved out. For years she had somehow managed to have both parts of her life. Not openly, not easily, but Julie was there. And now she wasn't. Shelly had finally done what she'd promised all those years earlier. She gave up love and discovered that music wasn't enough. The months afterward became very dark. Shelly had friends, she had family, she had a beautiful home, she had money, she had a career. She'd later described the problem much more simply. No one really knew her. On January 26th, 2006, she picked up the gun. She didn't pull the trigger. The next morning, upstairs and afraid to go back down, Shelley got on her knees. This time, she wasn't asking God to make her straight. She wasn't offering to be good. She wasn't asking for another hit record. She had reached the end of that conversation. She had two possibilities. She could die in that house or she could come out. Shelley decided she was going to live. That didn't mean she'd called a reporter that afternoon. It would actually be years before the public knew. For the first time, though, the ending had changed. Shelley began writing songs. A lot of them were about the relationship she had just lost. Eventually, she began working with Rodney Crowell on a new album. Rodney was one of Nashville's most respected songwriters and producers, and Shelley trusted him. But she didn't tell him that she was gay. She played in the songs, all except one. That one was called Like Me. It was too obvious. Shelley knew Rodney well enough to believe that if he heard it, he would understand she was singing about a woman. So she kept it from him. Then one day, Rodney came to her house. He had something he wanted to tell her. People had been asking him about Shelly. Was she gay? Rodney had always said he didn't know. Then, during a trip to Los Angeles, he found himself participating in a long conversation about her sexuality, and he felt bad about it. So he came to Shelly's house to apologize, and she thanked him. She didn't come out to him, not that day. After he left, she thought about it. She prayed. The next morning she called Rodney and asked him to come back. They sat on the porch and Shelley told him she was gay. And she was gonna come out publicly. Then she told him about the song she had kept from him. Like me. She couldn't quite bring herself to play it for him sitting there. She told him she'd email it, and Rodney left. Shelley went to her computer, she sent him the song, and then she opened a new document. On the title page, she typed two words. Like me. That became the title of the book she was about to write. For the next few years, Shelley worked on telling the stories she had spent most of her life trying not to tell. She moved to New York, she wrote the memoir, she finished the album, and she started telling people privately. There was an odd new secret now. For 35 years, Shelley had been hiding that she was gay, and now she had to hide that she was planning to tell everybody. By the spring of 2010, there were publicists and managers and television producers involved. Shelley later remembered that dozens of people eventually knew what was coming, and somehow they kept it quiet. On May 3, 2010, the story finally broke. Shelly Wright was gay. Then came people. The Today Show, Oprah, ABC, NPR, the memoir, the album, the things she had believed would end her life with suddenly something she was saying into television cameras. Shelly explained it in a way I like. She wasn't coming out because she wasn't afraid. She was coming out because she wasn't ashamed. Those are two different things. Nashville's reaction was complicated. There were people who supported her privately. Mary Chapin Carpenter publicly praised her, and others said nothing. Some people Shelley had known for years stopped calling. She later described the response from country music as a kind of quiet rejection. Not everyone needed to condemn her, as sometimes silence does a pretty good job. Her mother continued believing homosexuality was sinful and a choice. Shelley talked openly about that too, while also making it clear that she loved her mother. There wasn't one magical week when everybody in Shelley Wright's life suddenly understood everything. Her career changed. Country radio didn't suddenly embrace an openly gay Shelly Wright because she'd told the truth. Some of the things she had been afraid of actually happened. Just not the things she had feared most. Her life didn't end. It got bigger. In 2011, Shelly married Lauren Blitzer, and two years later, they become mothers to twin boys. Shelley became involved in LGBTQ advocacy and created the Like Me organization to help young people who were growing up with some of the same isolation she had known. She kept making music, and her life eventually moved in other directions too. But I keep going back to Kansas. Before Nashville, before single white female, before Julia or Brad Paisley or John Rich, before the gun. There's a little girl standing out in a field because she wants to get far enough away from the house that nobody will hear what she's saying. She's trying to negotiate with God. She already knows what she wants. She wants country music. She doesn't understand yet what she'll want when she's 30 or 40. She doesn't know what it's like to come home to somebody. She doesn't know what it feels like when that person is gone. She's nine. So she makes the best deal a nine-year-old can make. Take this away from me. I'll be good. And if I can't have love, just let me have music. Years later, Shelly talked about that deal and said something I think she finally understood better than that little girl in the field possibly could. A nine-year-old probably shouldn't be held to a bargain like that. Shelley got the music. She just eventually decided she wanted the rest of her life too. I'm standing. And now the secret is out.