Kelly Ever After.

Some people wait a lifetime for a moment like this…

I’m so pleased to announce that my essay, “Kelly Ever After,” has been published by the Queer Love Project! Simply click this link here to read it. As a preview, I’m excerpting below some of its opening lines, and the rest of the essay can be found on the Queer Love Project’s website at the aforementioned link.

There was a time in my life when I thought I had hazel eyes.

Back when I was just over 10 years old, I knew that hazel as a color leans closer to the fragmented shades of pistachio, but I was a kid who wanted to feel special. I rationalized that the complexities of hazel, not merely green, allowed for the inclusion of brown. My eyes are firmly brown (not even remotely hazel), but there was a song that I loved, that made me feel seen, and I wanted to stake my claim to it because it was mine—it was about me and nobody else. I'm talking, of course, about "Behind These Hazel Eyes" by Kelly Clarkson.

If every gay man has a relationship with a pop star onto whom he projects himself, then Kelly was my North Star. I was a diehard “stan” before I knew it. Because she was with me through all of my ups and downs, all of my formative experiences, my adoration for her was incontrovertible, and to me she could do no wrong; I thought I would love her forever. It all began in 2002 with a reality television show, when she came into my life before I even came out to myself, but I never foresaw that my relationship with her would eventually crash and burn, hijacked by a string of ex-boyfriends.

Founded by Jerry Portwood, who formerly served as the Executive Editor for Out and the Digital Editorial Director for Rolling Stone, the Queer Love Project’s editorial mission is to advance and archive LGBTQ+ narratives. Through our stories, we give voice to the humbling and deeply human experience that is love. Expressing our love, our humanity, can also be a political act in defiance of our systemic persecution; therefore, by leaving behind as much of our art as we can for future generations, we show them that they are not and will never be truly alone.

"Kelly Ever After" is a fun essay. It retraces the (parasocial) relationship between me and a certain pop star as my life has progressed, and it's an attempt to preserve a spirit of lightheartedness despite the changing seasons. I'll pause here before discussing my essay in further detail below to avoid potential spoilers. I hope you like it!

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Fans of Kelly Clarkson will know that she has been drumming up interest online over the past decade through video recordings of her cover versions of various artists' music, usually shared under the hashtag #KCFanRequest. (Indeed, I used to personally maintain for posterity a running list of such covers at Last.fm.) These performances first began as she toured and were later incorporated into her television show, The Kelly Clarkson Show. My original concept for "Kelly Ever After" was prompted by her more recent performances on her show of "Good Luck, Babe!" and "My Heart Will Go On" by Chappell Roan and Céline Dion, respectively, both songs that have entered my personal canon. Her takes on these records came to me through virality because I no longer follow her as ardently as I once did.

That, I realized, was a train of thought that could be fleshed out into a proper full-length essay. When the Queer Love Project sought work by LGBTQ+ writers about how music has shaped our lives, I knew I had the right piece. Some of my eagle-eyed early subscribers may recall previewing my drafts for Fifteen and Sixteen, which served as the basis for "Kelly Ever After" and were my early working copies as I tried to parse my way through a relationship I used to have with the music I used to love. Thus, "Kelly Ever After" is the first time it's been published in full, and I hope that those interested will find intriguing the essay's process of evolution. (It reminds me of when Carly Rae Jepsen, who I promise is relevant to this essay in an extremely tangential way, released her songs "Felt This Way" and "Stay Away" on the same album as a sample of her songwriting process.)

As I wrote this piece, I had in mind many of the men (of Asian descent) that I've dated. Two of them, Jun and Henry, ultimately made it all the way through to the essay's publication because they were the ones most consequential to the subject matter. Others were excised, including a man from Hinge with whom I had a very fun first date and who would later go on to attend Kelly's first Las Vegas concert residency, which made him a bonafide fan in my eyes.

How did Kelly Clarkson become my diva of choice? I know that every gay man stereotypically has his idol, but my relationship with mine was intense. Honestly, I think I just discovered her at the right place and time, at a critical juncture in my life as I began to undergo my adolescence. I retreated into music very early on when I began to withdraw from the world, and listening to my favorite songs helped me to create and curate a vibrant inner sanctum. Something Corporate, Jack's Mannequin, Taking Back Sunday, The Killers, and Senses Fail were the bands whose music adorned my mental refuge; I felt misunderstood by everyone except them…and Kelly Clarkson. Kelly, whose music was on heavy rotation at every Top 40 radio station when I began to pay attention to pop music, was the only pop star who presented as authentic to pre-teen me.

I was around twelve. "Since U Been Gone" and, of course, "Behind These Hazel Eyes" were the first songs to really break through via pop radio to enter my life, and I was fascinated. Kelly didn't seem to be like any of the other pop stars. She had the affect of a next door neighbor; she wasn't manufactured, and her music felt real. Therefore, she was also the reason I became interested in pop culture, celebrity culture, music culture, just plain, simple culture. She was why I began to pay attention.

I've always been drawn to lyricism, I think as a holdover from a childhood spent in libraries. The songwriting on Breakaway was easy and straight to the point, which is probably why it connected so easily for me, but—as I mentioned within the essay—it was My December that really hit home. That album, from start to finish and including all the bonus songs I had to track down across the internet, had—has—zero skips for me, from the romantic yearning of "Can I Have a Kiss" and "Be Still" to the roaring scorn of "Don't Waste Your Time" and "Judas" to the forlorn "Maybe" to the secret "Chivas." I loved that album. I still do.

In the lead up to her fourth album, All I Ever Wanted, I became a fanatic. I followed her WordPress religiously, desperate for any news about new music. When it finally released, I was instantly smitten with "The Day We Fell Apart." The angst was as real as the mythos of the successor song to "Irvine," which turned out to be "Ready." I followed news about her tour, obsessing over her performances of unreleased tracks "Poison Candy" and "I Wish I Could Be Lonely Instead." I got into play-arguments with my friends online, who told me they thought Kelly made music blaming other people for her problems. I read fan-fiction named after a Thankful deep cut. I was obsessed.

I couldn't be the only one, right? Well, I thought I was, until I wasn't. I met other gay men as I came of age in college who were absolute Kelly fanatics, and it was always kind of a surprise to me because I never pegged her to be a celebrity with such ardently devoted fans. She wasn't a Madonna or a Cher—she was just Kelly. I was almost baffled to discover that Kelly Clarkson had shooters because, speaking frankly, I knew her music was somewhat artistically staid in its unwavering commitment to generic self-empowerment and that she wasn't an iconic musician. (As I write this, my friend yells over to me from my couch that Kelly is like the mom-from-next-door who absolutely kills it at the neighborhood karaoke jam, which I could concede is iconic in its own way.) I loved her despite all of that, but I didn't realize so many others did in the very same way.

Jun, who would become my third boyfriend, was one of them. He had fairly expansive knowledge about the landscape of music, so his devotion to Kelly seemed a bit paradoxical to me. (You're knowledgeable about the legendary Donna Summer's discography but choose to be a Kelly Clarkson devotee? I was totally mystified.) Meanwhile, Henry, who would become my fourth and most consequential boyfriend, had an obsession with Kelly that seemed justified to me because he wasn't a deep connoisseur of music. He wasn't the type to dig into an artist's production and backstory context; his interest in music was purely shallow. That suited his Kelly Clarkson fandom just fine. (In comparison, living with Wayne, my wonderfully artistic second boyfriend, was like having my life intertwined with a songbird of the great musical canon; I would frequently wake up to him belting Mariah Carey and Whitney Houston classics in the shower. On the other hand, I feel as though I owe Alberto, the first, an apology for putting him through the whole "Alone" ordeal during our first intercourse.)

I suppose I should articulate my caveat that I don't seriously believe every single gay man of Asian descent has deeply loved Kelly Clarkson at one point or another within his lifetime, particularly because we aren't a monolithic demographic, but that wasn't the point. I simply saw a through line between identity and love, and I wanted to have some fun with the essay while balancing humor against history.

Henry was such a consequential boyfriend because I wanted him to be. I wanted him to be the man with whom I'd fall into a stable, secure, and loving relationship because he was kind, caring, and reliable. After a decade of going out with guy after guy after guy, I was tired of stringing myself along with men who for one reason or another couldn't go all the way; I was sick of dating. Henry represented the possibility of me moving on to a new chapter of life, one wherein I had a life partner with whom I could share everything. It wasn't that I wanted to conform to mainstream conventions of monogamy or whatever—I just wanted to know what it was like to have someone who would choose me above all others for more than just a year or two.

Above all, I think of "Kelly Ever After" as a bit of a metaphor for the fickle vicissitudes of life. The pop star who was also my North Star, whose live performances were always reliably superior to the studio recordings, whose depositions in the Dr. Luke and Kesha lawsuits I read voraciously, became a falling star when the gravity of my dating world unbearably intensified; my parasocial relationship with her was tainted because I had come to associate her with the man who shattered my heart.

The image art I created for "Kelly Ever After" is a composite of pictures I've taken with my cardboard standees over many years, from the record label offices to the New York City subway to my apartments from throughout my twenties. I should also say—I know the stereotype about writers needing editors because we're overly verbose—that I'm grateful for the Queer Love Project allowing me to keep as many paragraphs as I ultimately did, because I'm a maximalist on occasion and I love to over-share. I want to believe in the capacity of humans to read just a couple more sentences than most would expect in the era of the attention economy.

Kelly Clarkson and me and Mariah Carey too.

I hope the Kellebrities enjoy the puns and references I've embedded within the essay itself, and I know they'll understand when I admit that I can't listen to our favorite diva anymore. Although I intimately felt her progression between Wrapped in Red and When Christmas Comes Around… because Henry had loved her new Christmas music, it just all got to be a bit too much. I'll grant that, with years of distance between my ex-boyfriends and myself, I can appreciate chemistry’s "my mistake," "magic," and the Carly Rae Jepsen-penned "favorite kind of high" all the more, but my relationship with Kelly Clarkson will never return to what it was. It is, instead, a beautiful disaster of my own.