{"id":1813,"date":"2016-04-11T03:59:59","date_gmt":"2016-04-11T10:59:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.billymasters.com\/custom\/?p=1813"},"modified":"2016-04-11T03:59:59","modified_gmt":"2016-04-11T10:59:59","slug":"american-idol-and-the-gays","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.billymasters.com\/custom\/blog\/2016\/04\/11\/american-idol-and-the-gays\/","title":{"rendered":"American Idol and the Gays"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>With the <strong><em>American Idol<\/em><\/strong> finale, we come to the end of an era.\u00a0 It&#8217;s interesting to see the progress of gay rights and visibility in America over the course of the show&#8217;s history.\u00a0 Prior to appearing on season one, <strong>Jim Verraros <\/strong>was an openly gay singer.\u00a0 Allegedly, he was told by producers to delete all references to his homosexuality from his online journal.\u00a0 <strong>RJ Helton <\/strong>was also a season one contestant who was gay (although not out).\u00a0 Season two had <strong>Clay Aiken <\/strong>&#8211; again, not openly gay.\u00a0 We made some headway with season seven and <strong>Adam Lambert <\/strong>&#8211; although he was openly gay in life, he wasn&#8217;t out on the show.\u00a0 In fact, we didn&#8217;t see an openly gay contestant in the top 10 until 2010 with <strong>MK Nobilette <\/strong>(she also finished in 10th place).\u00a0 Interestingly, many <em>American Idol<\/em> contestants have found success after the show ended playing to gay audiences at pride festivals and circuit parties.\u00a0 Say what you will about the show, but it offers an interesting snapshot of an era of change.\u00a0 Perhaps it helped that change along.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>With the American Idol finale, we come to the end of an era.\u00a0 It&#8217;s interesting to see the progress of gay rights and visibility in America over the course of the show&#8217;s history.\u00a0 Prior to appearing on season one, Jim Verraros was an openly gay singer.\u00a0 Allegedly, he was told by producers to delete all<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1813","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-breaking"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.billymasters.com\/custom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1813","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.billymasters.com\/custom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.billymasters.com\/custom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.billymasters.com\/custom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.billymasters.com\/custom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1813"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.billymasters.com\/custom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1813\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1818,"href":"https:\/\/www.billymasters.com\/custom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1813\/revisions\/1818"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.billymasters.com\/custom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1813"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.billymasters.com\/custom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1813"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.billymasters.com\/custom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1813"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}