by Chely Wright
Scared Straight
I didn’t see Brenda that night. She called and left a couple of messages on the answering machine that was shared by everyone in the house. I didn’t call her back. I just needed to be alone with my thoughts and figure out what in the world I was going to do.
I showed up at Sport Seasons the next morning for work. I knew that I’d be seeing Brenda and spending the whole day with her. The entire workday passed before I could get the courage to ask her if we could talk. In the meantime, I could feel her genuine concern for me and I sensed her discomfort that we still hadn’t talked about what had happened. Just as we were closing the store, she asked me if I wanted to see her later that night. I told her I did because I wanted to talk to her about a couple of things.
There was really nowhere private for us to go except to my house, so we each headed that way in our own car. We went downstairs. I made sure every light in the basement living room was on.
I sat in a chair adjacent to the couch. “I’m not gay, Brenda. The other night was a mistake. I don’t want to lose you as a friend, but what happened the other night can’t happen again.” She stared down at the rug on the floor and with the toe of her Nike cross trainers attempted to straighten the fringe that was stitched to the edges. I watched her progress because I couldn’t bear to look up at her. Every piece of the decorative maroon string was soon pointed perfectly in the same direction. She remained silent. I looked up and saw that her head was still hanging down. She was wearing a Sport Seasons T-shirt and a nice pair of tan pants. Her face was hidden from me. I saw that her pants, right at her knees, were wet with tears. Once I realized that she was crying, I got up and sat next to her on the couch. I put my arm around her and held on to her tightly. She finally lifted her head and said, “Okay, I’m sorry.”
We talked a little bit more that night, but not much. We worked together during the next few days, and although it was a little awkward, I was hopeful that everything was going to be all right.
As the weeks went on, I was unable to resist spending my free time with her. She was gentle and sweet, and one of the prettiest girls I’d ever seen. I had asked her shortly after we first kissed if she’d ever done anything like that before. She told me no and it made me feel better. I began to hope that we were both just normal girls and that this was an isolated incident, not indicative of any reality that would manifest itself in my life. Thinking of it in those terms, that it was a first for both of us, made it easier for me for some reason. But our mutually imposed sanctions on being physical and sexual with one another didn’t last long at all.
I worked throughout that fall at Sport Seasons and spent the rest of my time at Middle Tennessee State University. Most of my classes were in general studies, but I also took several political science courses. Brenda was a student there as well, and it was nice to have someone to share the burden of driving, as the campus was about forty-five minutes from Nashville. I was spending less and less time at home and seldom saw Laura-Grace and Gardnar. When I did go home, it made me nervous, because Brenda was usually with me. I didn’t want them to know what was going on between us, so I ended up staying with Brenda at her grandmother’s apartment.
It made my stomach hurt to think about how I was living a dual existence. My belongings were in one place and I’d sleep in another. It was a very unsettling time in my life. When I was at Brenda’s place, I longed to be back in my basement living area because that’s where my keyboard was. Since I was a little girl of four years old, I’d played the piano nearly every day of my life. When I wrote songs, I leaned heavily on having a piano in front of me. Needless to say, I felt lost in so many ways and struggled to even recognize myself. I had no piano, and I was essentially living in two places and in a relationship with a girl. It started to scare me that I was choosing this unacceptable relationship over my music. I resented how this part of my life was forcing me to choose between my heart and my music. I felt so far away from my dreams at that time in my life. I just didn’t see a way for my existence and my dreams to intersect. My entire life, I’d been able to imagine, in chronological and linear steps, how I would accomplish my goals. I had been able to envision Point A, Point B, Point C, and Point D, and then I’d just have to plan on how to connect the dots. This situation was different. These dots simply could not be connected.
I went home to be at my house for a while, to be with my piano. I played it all day long and through the night, and a new song began to take shape. Typically, once I had a new song written, I’d type out a page with the lyrics on it for future reference. There was an old blue electric typewriter that sat downstairs on a table just off the basement living area. I set my spiral notebook down next to it and began to scour the table for a fresh piece of typing paper. There was a piece of paper in the typewriter already, which was not unusual, as all of us in the house used that machine for schoolwork and other things. I looked at the paper already in the typewriter so I could determine which of my roommates was in the middle of a project.
I glanced down at the page. A single word was typed on the paper.
“Lesbian.”
I couldn’t imagine which one of my roommates had typed that. There were other people in and out of the house, but I speculated that whoever wrote it must have had enough knowledge about my comings and goings to know that I was spending a lot of time with Brenda. I pulled the page out of the machine hard, just the way my typing teacher in high school had told us not to do. I kept that piece of paper in my jewelry box for a long time. I eventually threw it away with a childish hope that the memory of it would go away too.
After the typewriter incident, I refused to allow Brenda to come over to the house. This was the time in my life when I started to learn how to hide on a whole new level. I had graduated from hiding my feelings of homosexuality to now having to hide my actions of homosexuality. It takes a lot of work to cover up an entire part of one’s life, but desperate times call for desperate measures.
I needed to get my own apartment.
Brenda was unhappy living with her grandmother, so we decided to find a place together. Sometime in January 1990, Brenda and I moved into Priest Lake Apartments. We got a two-bedroom place, of course. I didn’t know exactly how the situation would unfold, but somewhere in the back of my mind I suspected that we wouldn’t stay together. The life of hiding was already proving to be stressful and frightening to me. I found myself pulling away from my parents and not calling them on the phone as often as I usually did. When I did speak to them, everything felt like a lie, even if they just asked, “What’s been going on? What’s new? Catch us up on things.” My answers could pass, technically, for the truth—but it wasn’t the truth and I knew it. I was telling lies by omission. It made me so sick that I developed a bleeding ulcer.
I did get hired back by Opryland to be in the Red Cast, the group of performers whose contracts were longer and a bit more secure. I threw myself into rehearsals, juggling my schedule with Sport Seasons, my classes, and hiding. My cast that year was composed mostly of the same folks from the Purple Cast, plus a few new faces. The three-week rehearsals that led up to opening day at the park were grueling. We were all excited because we knew we had an especially great cast and a well-written show to perform over the next nine months.
Opening day was always a big deal. Friends and family usually came out to watch our first couple of shows, and since I had no family that lived near, Brenda asked if she could come. I was nervous about her showing up. I didn’t want anyone to ask me questions about who she was, but I wanted her to see my show. She did come to the debut of the show, and I was pleased that no one asked me much about her. She continued to come to the performances on occasion, and when she did, I worked extra hard at making sure my cast mates knew that I was ambivalent about her showing up. I tried to hide my smiles when I saw her. I did my best to avoid hugging her hello or good-bye.
Living with Brenda was relatively easy. She was a busy student at MTSU and a full-time
employee of Sport Seasons. We didn’t have great amounts of time together, but we did get into our routine as a couple. I was the leaseholder of the apartment, so she paid her rent and utilities to me each month. One evening while I was doing the bills, we started talking about things. I told her again that I didn’t think I was gay. (I knew I was; I just didn’t want to be.) I offered that she wasn’t either. When I had asked her six months ago if she’d ever had any kind of sexual relationship with a girl before me, her answer had been “no.” That night, while I was writing checks for the rent and the electric bill, I suggested that perhaps we were both normal girls and that this thing had nothing to do with homosexuality. We were attracted to each other …but we weren’t gay.
Then she admitted that she had had a girlfriend before and that she lied to me because she didn’t want to scare me off. She told me her story of two beautiful young girls in high school who fell in love. By the time the whole love affair unraveled, it had become ugly. She shared the sordid details of parents getting involved, fighting with one another about who had started the relationship, demands from a father shouting threats from a front porch daring one girl to take one more step toward his baby girl, and religious beliefs that Brenda and her girlfriend would burn in hell for what they were doing.
I was angry with Brenda for having lied to me and for telling me that I was the first girl she’d ever been attracted to, and I felt tricked. I’d constructed a theory inside my head that said if only I had known she’d been with a girl before, I wouldn’t have gone through with being physical with her. I convinced myself that had she declared that she was a gay girl, I would’ve had my defenses up and would have been able to say no to this homosexual who was pursuing me. I know it was ridiculous, but I was scared and trying to do anything to identify myself as anything other than what I was—a homosexual. I knew deep down that I was lying to her too, though. I knew without a doubt that I was gay. But I continued to tell her otherwise.
I pulled back a little bit from her after she shared that story with me. I began to spend what little social time I had with my fellow performers from Opryland. Our cast decided to take a trip to the beach. I had never seen the ocean before and was excited to drive down to Gulf Shores, Alabama.
A dozen of us went and a few brought wives, girlfriends, boyfriends, or a pal. I didn’t consider inviting Brenda, even though I knew she would have loved to go. A couple of days before I left for our beach trip, Brenda asked if she could go. I said no.
The next morning, before I headed out to Opryland for a full day of shows, Brenda told me that she was so angry and hurt that she was going to do something and I’d be sorry. She told me that after I parked my car in the employee parking lot that day, she was going to find every car in the lot that belonged to my cast mates and put a flyer on each one saying that I was gay. “By this time tomorrow, all of your friends will know that you’re gay.” I begged her not to do it. She said it was too late, that she’d made up her mind.
One minute I was certain that she was just making idle threats and that she wouldn’t do something like that; the next minute I was convinced that she would.
By the time I left the theater that night, I was preparing myself for the worst. Before the last show, I packed up my hair and makeup kit and all of my personal items so I could get a head start out of there. My plan was to reach the employee parking lot and scan it for cars with flyers under their windshield wipers. There were hundreds of cars in the lot, but I only needed to address sixteen of them. I ran to my car first and put my bags in the passenger seat. I remember specifically finding each of my cast mates’ cars, one by one. No flyers. I saw a tram pull up to the lot and about eight of my friends got off and headed to their cars. I rushed to mine without being noticed, started it, and drove away. I was relieved but still upset. Although Brenda didn’t follow through on her threat, she did inflict a type of revenge. Fear. She knew that I had a big red fear button and she pushed it.
I knew, at that point, that I would carefully take steps to distance myself from her.
From then on, I didn’t sleep in her bedroom and she didn’t sleep in mine. I felt like I was in a movie, a scared wife secretly planning her escape. She apologized for the threat and for putting me through such worry. She begged me for forgiveness, which I did honestly grant her. I couldn’t forget what she had done, though, and I promised myself that I would never again put myself in that position. But things would get worse before they got better.
I asked Brenda to find another place to live and I assured her that she could take her time. A week or so after she said she would find a new living situation, I asked her how the search was going. She said that she had changed her mind, that she didn’t want to move after all. She suggested that we live together as roommates and have no form of a relationship other than as friends. I knew she didn’t mean that.
We began to argue and I ended up putting some of my things in a duffel bag. I was going to stay at Laura-Grace’s until Brenda moved out. As I was almost to the door of the apartment, I heard her walk to the kitchen. She ran to where I was and got between the door and me. She’d grabbed the biggest knife in the kitchen. “You’re not going anywhere,” she said. She made me walk to the end of the hallway, back by the bedrooms, and sit with my back against the wall. We sat there for more than an hour.
I tried to calm her down, explaining to her that we needed to stop this situation; there was nothing good that could come of it. I wanted to call the police, but I wondered what I would tell them if I was even able to call. She got so angry with me that she began to threaten to out me again, to start calling my Opryland cast and to call my bosses at the park too. I stood up in the hallway and tried to walk away, but she grabbed me and pushed me against the wall. The drywall broke where my head hit it. It didn’t knock me out, but it stunned me. I was terrified and I began to cry.
It was then that she realized how out of control she was. She just slid to the floor and cried. I wanted to console her, but I didn’t. I picked up my duffel bag, walked out the door, and stayed away until she moved out. Within a week I was back in my apartment, alone.
After that I focused on my music. I had my keyboard with me, and I wrote songs anytime I could. During the day, I worked at Opryland and Sport Seasons, mostly at a new store location far from Brenda. I went to my classes at MTSU and spent time trying to get to know songwriters on Nashville’s famed Music Row.
Occasionally I did see Brenda. Once, I even went over to her new apartment. I felt it was important to try and stay friendly with her, and I honestly did miss her friendship. A month after our breakup, she started to see another girl; I was relieved.
“Dear God, please don’t let me be gay,” I would say in the quiet of my apartment. “I promise to be a good person. I promise not to lie. I promise not to steal. I promise to always believe in you. I promise to do all the things you ask me to do. Please take it away. In your name I pray. Amen.”
A few months later, a man asked me out to dinner and a movie. He was nice, handsome, and had a good job. We ate dinners, watched movies, and spent time together for a few months. I felt nothing—absolutely nothing.
For the next three years, I was able to deny myself the affection I craved. From time to time, I dated men, but those relationships were short-lived and faded away.
My First Recording Contract, 1993
When Harold Shedd signed me to my first record contract, in 1993, I was naively adamant about certain things. I recall sitting in his office at Mercury Records and discussing my vision of what kind of artist I wanted to be. I was not kidding when I told him that I had no interest in being a video babe. I told him that I wanted to be recognized in country music for my music and that I didn’t want teams of stylists being assigned to me to fix me up and make me fashionable. While I had always enjoyed my femininity, I’d never had a great interest in getting dolled up. I knew, to some extent, that I’d have to be aware of my image, but I didn’t want it to be something that ecl
ipsed what I believed to be my art.
Harold told me that he respected my position in the matter and that he had full intentions of presenting me as a serious musician, but that he couldn’t be held responsible if anyone thought I might be pretty to look at. I was taking myself far too seriously and quickly learned that I should use all of the tools I possessed to help me along the way.
It was a new era in country music. Videos were becoming a common part of the promotion of an artist’s music. Many people acknowledged this and attributed the explosion to Garth Brooks’s phenomenal success at that time. Before Garth’s emergence in country music there were six or seven major country labels out of Nashville. With so much subsequent worldwide attention on country music, major record labels began branching out. There were new divisions, sister labels, and imprint labels. Before long, Nashville’s Music Row would be overflowing with new buildings to house new labels. These labels were signing new artists left and right, and I was one of them. Country music fans weren’t buying only Garth’s records. They would be attracted to the genre because of their love for Garth, but once they decided to give country music a chance, they started buying records from a lot of other artists. Money was flowing in Music City.
Julia
I met the love of my life on April Fool’s Day, 1993. She was working in the music industry, and shortly after I was signed to Mercury Records our paths crossed. She was beautiful, interesting, and funny, and it didn’t take long for me to realize that I was falling for her. At the time, I was dating a man called Chris. I broke up with him soon after meeting Julia; I knew where my heart was headed. She was recovering from a recent breakup with a longtime boyfriend, but I sensed that the biggest part of her suffering came more from the blow to her ego than from missing him. Nevertheless, we were both single and had no one to answer to but ourselves.
