rosie o'donnell outed him on live television in 2006. he says he died inside, and he says she meant well.

via PinkNews and Fox News, on his interview with Page Six Radio.

It started with a hand over a mouth.

In November 2006 Clay Aiken was guest-hosting Live with Regis and Kelly, and somewhere in the middle of a segment he reached over and clapped his palm across Kelly Ripa's face, the way you do when you are on daytime television and have run out of material. Ripa pulled it off and said, "I don't know where that hand's been, honey." Depending on who you ask, that is one of the funniest things ever said on morning TV or a small tidy piece of gay-panic hygiene, and twenty years later the internet has still not finished arguing about it.

Rosie O'Donnell made up her mind in about forty-eight hours. On The View she called the line homophobic. Ripa phoned the show live to say she had meant germs, it being flu season, and O'Donnell did not move: "From where I sit as a gay person in the world, I have to tell you, that's how it came off to me."

Which was a defense. It was also the end of a decision Aiken had not made yet.

what clay aiken said

He went on Page Six Radio last week and somebody put the word "defended" in front of him. He declined it. "You say defended," Aiken said. "I say outed."

He was in Los Angeles when the episode went out. "I got woken up by my son's mother, who said, 'Um, you need to wake up because Rosie just outed you on The View.' I woke up. I was freaked out." And then the line that is doing all the work: "I died inside a lot that week."

He would not say it in his own voice for another two years. In September 2008 he put it on the cover of People himself, under three words: "Yes, I'm gay."

defended, or outed

The distinction he is drawing is one that every closeted person understands instantly and that basically nobody on a panel show does.

O'Donnell was not gossiping. She was objecting, publicly and on his behalf, to a remark she read as an insult aimed at a gay man. But to make that objection out loud she had to treat the premise as already settled, and the premise was the one thing he had not agreed to say. That is the whole trap. You cannot defend somebody from homophobia without naming what the homophobia is about, which means the kindest person in the room can take the choice away from you while genuinely trying to hand you something.

Nobody in that story is a villain, and he still lost the week.

why he isn't angry

Here is the part that makes this worth twenty years instead of a clip. He is not carrying it around. "I don't have any ill feelings against Rosie," he said. "She did mean well."

He can afford that now, and it is still a more generous accounting than most of us would manage about the week our hand got forced. It also helps that in 2006 O'Donnell was one of a very short list of people on American television who would have taken that side at all. That year, "is he or isn't he" was not a rumor, it was a format. It ran in print. It sold.

We wrote last night about the version of this that happened in rock, where the same arrangement ran for decades and mostly ended in nobody ever saying anything. Daytime just did it faster, and with a phone-in.