When you’re truly reflecting back on 2008, like thinking about the days when you would spend hours calling into American Idol while reblogging GIFS on Tumblr, it feels like living in another timeline— neither of these things exist in their original form anymore! No one feels the decades-long difference more than American Idol season two finalist Clay Aiken, who skyrocketed to fame after his time on the show, but lost a huge portion of his fanbase, the claymates, when he came out as gay after the birth of his son. In a retrospective interview with People, Clay Aiken looked back on his coming out cover story from 2008, where he claims he lost “50 perfect of [his] fan base,” resulting in a drop in ticket sales for Spamalot on Broadway. “The first four months that I was in, the show was selling out, standing room only. You can actually look at the ticket sales the week after that cover came out,” Aiken shared. “It went from selling very well to the week after the cover came out, the ticket sales dropped. Spamalot ended up closing a few months after that… We are in a very different time. I lost maybe 50 percent of the fan base.”
He also celebrates the new world we now live in, where stars are celebrated for their queerness. “A lot of people who come out now end up having boosts in popularity because of it… That’s mind-blowing to me because it’s the opposite of what happened when I came out,” Aiken explained further. “But it means that there’s progress and it means that as a country, we’re headed in the right direction.”