Like Me (26 page)

It took me a couple of days to tell Julia what had happened. She knew that I was bothered by something because I couldn’t eat or sleep and I was agitated. She was concerned about how scary John was, but mostly she was concerned about how it was affecting me.

An added tragedy of the matter was that I knew that John was not alone in his disdain for gays when it came to the industry and fans of country music. John’s rant played a part in validating my
fears of being outed, and more than likely it influenced some of my decisions in the short term. Julia and I were having some trouble at that time. I was frustrated and hopeless about our chances of working it out or making it in the long term, and a week or so after my evening with John Rich, I began to look for a different house to live in. I had a crazy fantasy that even if Julia and I did make it, we would have to do it living separately.

The only person I told about that night was, of course, Julia. After I came out to my best friend, Chuck, a few months later, I told him about what John had said. We all agreed that it would be best to keep what we knew about John Rich’s feelings toward homosexuals between us. As it turned out, it wouldn’t be long before John himself would make his position on the topic a public issue.

John was a guest on a conservative radio talk show shortly after our “talk” in his car, and when asked about his stance on gay marriage he said: “I think if you legalize that [same-sex marriage], you’ve got to legalize some other things that are pretty unsavory. You can call me a radical, but how can you tell an aunt that she can’t marry her nephew if they are really in love and sharing the bills? How can you tell them they can’t get married, but something else that’s unnatural can happen?”

There was such an uproar across the nation and on the Internet that John issued a statement to the press the very next day that said:

Suffice it to say that, in my opinion, John Rich and the notion of equality and “Love Everybody” have never met.

W
hen Julia and I broke up, it was a difficult and sad time for both of us. Although couples therapy had proven to be good for us, we were tired of fighting an unwinnable war.

Even after we broke up and moved out of our home, we continued to go sporadically to couples therapy. She finally admitted to me in therapy that for years whenever I’d have a record that struggled on the charts, she’d be overjoyed inside. She told me that she used to pray that my singles would fail and that MCA would drop me. I know it was humiliating for her to admit it after I’d been accusing her of exactly that for years. In her defense, she knew that as long as I did that job there would never be a place for her in the way she wanted and any kind of success might take me from her. Acknowledging each other as partners would have been a step toward being a healthier couple, but I couldn’t risk it and we both knew it.

W
hen you’re gay you realize that, for the most part, a lot of the world hates you without having ever met you. It’s unsettling. At times I was able to let that go, but it caused a tremendous strain on our feelings for one another.

I wanted to be able to be myself. I was one-half of a fully committed
relationship and I had to hide that. Then I found myself, even in the privacy of my own home, having to omit certain parts of who I am. Like it or not, I was a well-known country music singer. I’d worked and dreamed my entire life to achieve that, and Julia simply did not like it. So, because I loved her, I left my work outside of our home. I wanted her, I wanted us to be together, and I did what I had to do to make it work. A part of me also felt like I didn’t deserve to have it all. I don’t believe that today.

I
never imagined that I might develop a relationship with someone else. But I did. I had gone to great lengths, by moving out of my home with Julia, to re-create my world and present myself as a straight single woman. The last thing I needed was to have a new person in my life. I’d just have to hide all over again. Nevertheless, I became involved with someone new. I wondered how long Julia and I would last, not being together. I was convinced that we just needed that time apart, to throw people off, and then we’d find a way to get back together.

I had a new record out and was doing the things asked of an artist by a record label—promotion and touring. Being out on the road at that time provided a nice distraction for me. I was numb from the breakup with Julia, but mostly I was consumed with the logistics of it all. We had to sell the house and we each had to buy a new house, all the while still living under the same roof. We’d been sleeping in different bedrooms for quite a while, but there was still a tension that lingered in the house until we finally went our separate ways.

I was working with a woman involved in the release of my current record at that time, and we soon became close. Several months into knowing one another, Kristin told me that she was attracted to me and that she couldn’t stop thinking about me.
She confessed that she’d never been with a woman other than kissing her girlfriends when they were drunk. However, she said, she was cool with same-sex relationships—“chill” with it, to use her word. I was flattered but cautious.

At first she was fun and easy to be around, and that was refreshing to me. But there were moments early on where I saw things about her that I knew would be a challenge. One evening we went with a couple of other folks to the Nashville Sounds minor league baseball game. As we were walking out, a man was randomly handing out literature about Christianity. We each had the pamphlet in our hands as we talked about the game. “Isn’t that ironic,” she said, “that that man happened to randomly give all of us that literature—the four people at the stadium who don’t believe in God?” She said that she wished she’d told the “Jesus freak” to buzz off.

“Kristin, I very much do believe in God,” I objected. “I always have.” I had told her I wasn’t a member of a religious group or a church, but that didn’t mean I was a non-believer. I didn’t like the way she arrogantly scoffed at and belittled people who believed in God. Why would I even consider having a girlfriend who was not spiritual? My faith in God was part of me.

Kristin could be unpredictable and erratic. She would profess her love for me and then disappear for days at a time. She would say that she would be at my house by 6:30 p.m. to have dinner and not show up. Then she would text me three hours later and ask me what I was doing, as if nothing had happened. I understood the push and pull of being a closeted person in a gay relationship, but I sensed it was something more serious than that.

Kristin liked, as she put it, to get “hammered.” She told me stories about her ex-boyfriend Bobby, who was a recreational drug user and a heavy drinker. She admitted that she drank heavily to cope with the sexual part of their relationship and she sometimes blacked out.

Kristin spent a lot of time getting drunk. The more she drank,
the more she seemed to crave male attention. She was attractive and didn’t have to work hard to get it. Often I’d end up babysitting her, trying to get her to eat something so she wouldn’t vomit. I suspected Kristin’s drinking problem was related to her problems dealing with her sexuality. I knew her drinking was dangerous for her, but one night I realized her drinking was dangerous for me.

Kristin and I flew to New York to spend time with my friends—a tradition, to meet in New York City and attend a holiday party. We arrived at the party, which was beautifully catered, with several bars and a dance floor in the tent area out back. Although Kristin was my girlfriend, we weren’t out to anyone but Chuck, the only one of my friends who knew I was gay, so I mingled at the party as if I was there as a single person. I was used to doing that in public. At one point in the evening, I realized I didn’t know where Kristin was and I asked my friends if they’d seen her. Someone said she was having one hell of a time.

Not a good sign.

I soon discovered Kristin gyrating on the dance floor by herself while a crowd of men watched. I stood by, drinking bottled water, and watched her invite two men to dance with her. By the third song, one man was on her front side and another behind her. She was straddling the leg of the man in front, while the man behind her was grinding his pelvis into her backside. She was laughing and yelling. I wasn’t jealous; I was just mortified.

I finally caught her attention and asked her to sit down and have some food with me. She ate two pieces of shrimp before she stood up and said that she needed to use the restroom. She never came back. About half an hour later, I found her doing shots with more men neither of us knew.

Later, Chuck and I were talking when a friend approached us and grabbed each of us by the forearm. Her eyes were wide and frantic. “We’ve got a problem,” she said. “Kristin’s a lesbian and she’s in love with Chely.” In hushed tones, Anne Marie told us
how Kristin, in her drunken state, had pulled her aside and told her.

Instead of discussing it further, the three of us searched the house for Kristin. We finally found her and pulled her into a bathroom. She was wasted. “Don’t break up with me ’cause I got too drunk again,” she kept saying. My friend’s jaw dropped to the floor. There was no way to talk myself out of this situation. I told Anne Marie that I was gay and that Kristin was my girlfriend.

Anne Marie just hugged me and told me that she was sorry I was forced into telling her that way, but that she loved me and just wanted me to be happy. The party was winding down, so we headed back to Chuck’s. When we got back, Kristin passed out. While she slept, I went downstairs to join the others and learned that she had spent much of the evening telling my friends about our relationship. I felt clammy and flushed. Chuck hugged me and said that everything was going to be okay.

K
ristin’s out-of-control behavior continued. I realized her frequent absences always seemed to coincide with meals. If I did get her to sit down to dinner, she’d pick at her food and say that she didn’t feel well. When I questioned her about the behavior, she finally admitted that she purposely avoided eating so that she could get drunk more easily. She also revealed that she was bulimic; she starved herself during the day, then went home to binge. She had been making herself throw up for years. Kristin said that if we agreed early in the day to meet at 6:30 p.m. to go out to a restaurant, she would say yes but know from the start she wasn’t going to show up. She also admitted that she often dropped plans we’d made if an offer to go out drinking came up. Drinking was the only thing that kept her mind off food. “I hate everything about who I am,” she said. “Everything.”

A few weeks later, I was on the road in California when Kristin called me from Nashville and announced that she had broken up with Bobby.

I had no idea what she was talking about. She had told me about her dark days with Bobby but had said she ended the relationship around the time we had gotten to know each other. But their relationship had continued, and she had decided to end it, leaving Bobby—who had had no idea about her relationship with me—devastated and confused. He began sending Kristin e-mails, begging her to give him another chance but also, at least initially, urging her not to fear her sexuality. Once I got over my shock, I read these e-mails and urged Kristin to at least respond to some of his questions about how she felt. After she had kept him in the dark for so long, it seemed to me, it was the least she could do.

Kristin ignored Bobby’s pleas. I feared that further angering Bobby would provoke some kind of action against her—and me. And it did. Soon he was sending e-mails to others about Kristin’s relationship with me. These anonymous e-mails began finding their way to Kristin’s boss, then to country star Ricky Skaggs, then to her mother and father and to two journalists at the
Nashville Tennessean
(who, fortunately, were personal friends of Kristin’s so they kept the information to themselves). The message was clear—Bobby wasn’t going to be ignored, even if it meant exposing me to avoid it.

Bobby sent me some of Kristin’s early e-mails from before she cut off all communication with him. In them she told him that I had been flirting with her and that she had been ashamed of the idea of being gay or bisexual. She told him she was curious enough to try to take things further with me, but that nothing long-term would ever come of it because the thought of being gay disgusted her. She did not tell him that she had initiated our relationship.

Although I had by this time revealed my sexuality to a small circle of trusted people, I had continued to carefully guard my secret. It had been a risk to let Kristin in. But when her feud with Bobby engulfed me, I begged her to confront him. “You need to reach out to him and stop this,” I told her. “You need to fix this situation. Please, be a grown-up and clean up your mess.” But she did nothing.

Still, I didn’t walk away from Kristin. I cared for her, despite all the headaches she was causing me. I knew too well what she was going through, and I wanted to support her. I was really unhealthy myself, though. I was trying so hard to save her rather than focus on making my own life healthier. I knew that the only way I could be healthy was to stop hiding and running from the fact that I was gay. But saving myself, in those terms, was not an option. So I continued to try to save her. I convinced myself that I had chosen Kristin over Julia (perhaps I had) and if I let the relationship between Kristin and me fail, it would prove that I had made a mistake in leaving Julia. I was bound and determined to make it work, and it didn’t have much to do with Kristin. I was a closeted woman. If I broke it off with Kristin, I’d have no chance of having partnership and love. It’s difficult to find people to date while you’re in the closet. I took what I could and tried to make the best of it.