Clay Aiken talks about getting political

Clay Aiken certainly showed how much he has grown and matured as he made it to the finals of NBC’s Celebrity Apprentice where he finished as runner-up to Arsenio Hall.

A few weeks ago, viewers got to see the political side of the openly gay singer when he appeared as a guest on CBS’s Face the Nation and more than held his own against anti-gay Family Research Council head Tony Perkins.

In an interview this week with Michelangelo Signoreli on his SiriusXM radio program, Clay laughingly wondered if the experience did indeed happen.

“Wasn’t that crazy?” he asked. “So it did happen, you’re saying? Because I was thinking it was all a dream.”

It was no dream.

Among the highlights was when Clay, sitting next to Perkins, addressed the religious argument against same-sex marriage with some churches protesting that they would be forced to marry gay couples: “When my mother married my stepfather, she went to a Baptist church and said she had been divorced. They wouldn’t let her get married there. So churches are able to decide who gets married at a church.”

He came out publicly nearly four years ago because he was a new father and wanted to live honestly and set that example for his son. But he did not think he would become such an LGBT activist.

‘You know, it’s a process for everyone.’ he said. ‘Even in 2008, when I came out publicly, I said, ‘I’m not going to be one of the activist people, who speak out publicly about it.’ That’s where I was in my own personal journey. I believed at that time that I was completely, perfectly out.”

“It hasn’t been until the past two years that I really started realizing a part of this is going to be making sure other people don’t live through what I did,” added. “Making sure that people don’t have the same type of struggle that I did. I’ve realized now if I can be a a part of making it easier for a kid to be able to be comfortable with himself, then I have a responsibility to do it.”

Clay has legions of loyal fans – they are widely known as ‘Claymates’ – who, ironically, are not known to be a gay friendly bunch. In fact, in previous posts about Clay on Greg In Hollywood, it’s not unusual to get dozens of posts from female fans irritated that I referred to the singer as “openly gay.”

“My fan base is very ‘red state’ typically,”Clay told Signorile. “I think a lot of people who are the most fervent supporters of mine are people who would have voted for a marriage amendment, but now might not. I speak more to people who are in the middle, sway-able area. I think some people, like Adam [Lambert] or maybe Rosie [O’Donnell], probably speak a little bit to a crowd where, it’s like, we already got them. But I think that Ellen [DeGeneres] and Neil Patrick Harris speak to that middle crowd too. I think you gotta have both. You gotta have people who stir the turd so that people can smell it. And you gotta have people who keep things as normalized as possible.You need to have Malcolm X so that Dr. King can be more effective.”

Here is a LINK to the Signorile interview.