Personal Life
Despite her resolution against having sex with women, by her early 30s Wright had had sexual relationships with two women (as recounted in her autobiography). At age 19, for the first time a girl came on to her — "it was the first time I'd ever had a girl's body pressed against mine"—and this initiation into sex (by a girl of the same age) became an affair that lasted the better part of a year. From 1993 to about 2004, Wright maintained a committed relationship with a woman she describes as "the love of my life", a woman she met shortly after winning her first recording contract. The era of their relationship overlaps Wright's rise to chart-topping stardom. They maintained their union even though her partner subsequently got married to a man for many of those years and even though after the end of that marriage each woman briefly dated a man (not the same man). During their final five years they lived together. The relationship suffered numerous breakups followed by reconciliations, being as it was under continuous strain from several factors: the fact that both women were closeted, the fact that, at least in the early part of their years together, "neither one of us thought it was acceptable to be in a gay relationship", and Wright's prolonged absences while performing on tour nationally and internationally.
In the last months of 2000, Wright embarked on an affair with fellow country music singer Brad Paisley. Even though Wright and her female lover had moved together into a new home earlier in the year, tension mounted between the two. Wright was touring together with Paisley, with whom she had co-written one song the previous year, and he had been enamored of her ever since. Although she felt no sexual attraction to Paisley, as to all men, she recounts why Paisley was the man she decided to have a relationship with, "he’s wickedly smart, which is one of the reasons why I made the decision to spend time with him. I loved Brad. I never had the capacity to fall in love with him, but I figured if I’m gonna live a less than satisfied life, this is the guy I could live my life with. If I’m gonna be with a boy, this is the boy." Her actions were further fueled by the fact that she held him in high esteem and great affection in every way other than sexual attraction. In her autobiography she expresses remorse for how she treated him. She also addressed this point in an appearance on The Oprah Winfrey Show, stating, "I have a lot of regret for how that began and had a middle and ended. I had no business being in a relationship with him".
In the end, she abandoned the belief that being gay is immoral and deviant:
"I hear the word 'tolerance'—that some people are trying to teach people to be tolerant of gays. I'm not satisfied with that word. I am gay, and I am not seeking to be 'tolerated'. One tolerates a toothache, rush-hour traffic, an annoying neighbor with a cluttered yard. I am not a negative to be tolerated."
Between 2004 and 2006, Wright came out to members of her immediate family and to a few of her close friends. It was not until 2007 (as she stated on Oprah) that she decided to come out publicly. She spent the next three years writing her autobiography and orchestrating the coming out. Among the reasons she has given for wanting to come out to the public are to free herself from the burdens of living a lie, to lend support to gay children and teenagers, and to counter the belief that gays are wicked and defective. On May 3, 2010, People magazine reported that Wright had come out publicly. Wright is the first major country music artist to come out as gay (former country artist k.d. lang came out in 1992 but had abandoned the country music genre by then and Kristen Hall, formerly of Sugarland, was already known as being out in the folk music genre).
On April 6, 2011, Wright's publicist announced that the singer was engaged to LGBT rights advocate Lauren Blitzer. The couple married on August 20 in a private ceremony on a country estate in Connecticut. Wright and Blitzer were married by both a rabbi and a reverend.
A documentary film about Wright's extended coming out is scheduled to be released in 2011. Titled Wish Me Away, the film shares its title with one of the tracks on her 2010 album, Lifted Off the Ground. The film will premiere at the 35th annual Frameline Film Festival in San Francisco on June 22, 2011. It was filmed over three years.
Read more about this topic: Chely Wright
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