Clay Aiken is opening up about a painful chapter from his past. During a recent appearance on Page Six Radio, the 47-year-old singer recalled the moment Rosie O’Donnell outed him on “The View” in November 2006, during an on-air discussion with Kelly Ripa.
“I died inside a lot that week,” Aiken said. “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.”
The Incident That Sparked the Outing
O’Donnell’s confrontation with Ripa came shortly after Aiken playfully put his hand over Ripa’s mouth while he was co-hosting “Live with Regis and Kelly.” Ripa didn’t find the joke funny, and after removing his hand from her mouth said, “I don’t know where that hand’s been, honey.”
When discussing the incident on “The View” a few days later, O’Donnell called the comment “homophobic” while defending Aiken, telling Ripa, “from where I sit as a gay person in the world, I have to tell you, that’s how it came off to me.”
Aiken's Response to O'Donnell
Aiken, who was in Los Angeles when the episode aired, said he holds no ill feelings toward O’Donnell. “I don’t have any ill feelings against Rosie, she did mean well,” he said. “Her words were, I think, chosen in the heat of like, ‘why the hell is this girl on live TV with me right now?'”
At the time, Ripa defended herself from O’Donnell, saying her comment was made because “he’s shaking hands with everybody in the audience” during cold and flu season, adding it was “outrageous” to imply she was being “homophobic.”
Moving Forward and Coming Out
Aiken later referenced the awkward on-air moment when presenting at the VMA Awards with Tori Spelling a few weeks later, calling her “very gracious” in “trying to diffuse the whole situation.”
While O’Donnell mistakenly outed the “Invisible” singer while defending him, Aiken didn’t publicly confirm his sexuality until September 2008, when he posed for the cover of People with his newborn son with the headline, “Yes, I’m Gay.”
“It was the first decision I made as a father,” Aiken told the outlet at the time. “I cannot raise a child to lie or to hide things. I wasn’t raised that way, and I’m not going to raise a child to do that.”
His son was born via invitro fertilization with his close friend and music producer, Jaymes Foster.
From American Idol to Fatherhood
Aiken made a name for himself when he competed on season two of “American Idol” in 2003. He finished in second place as the runner-up to Ruben Studdard.
“Nobody thought that anybody was going to … Even Kelly [Clarkson] had not had anything happen for her yet, right? Her album had not even come out when we auditioned,” he told People in July. “So none of us realized that the stakes were there.”
