Kelly Ever After: Why I Had to 'Breakaway' from Kelly Clarkson

When I broke up with my boyfriends, I also had to break up with my gay Asian American Idol.

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Photo illustration by Sam Yan

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.

The zeitgeist of American Idol's premiere season has since entered the annals of pop culture history, and I was a child who bore witness. I can still recall my surprise at my parents watching it: We never used our TV except for KSCI's Chinese programming on Channel 18 in our Los Angeles suburb, so it was particularly unusual for our household to be watching something so, well, American. I remember tuning in week after week to watch the pool of competitors winnow until, finally, only two were left: Kelly and… someone else.

I know the runner-up. His name is on the tip of my tongue, and I could Google it if I really wanted to be certain. I know he starred in a campy musical film with her after the competition ended, and I know he went on to have a career on Broadway. I could name him—heck, I remember voting for him, for no reason other than I was a boy and he was the male finalist, and boys (ignorantly) stick together, right?—but the extra second of effort it would take to do so only illustrates the degree to which I actually cared about him. I didn't; I don't. It was always about Kelly.

Honestly, back then, just as I hadn’t yet begun to grapple with my identity, I was too young to fully grasp the immensity of her talent. But, years later, in high school and college and my early 20s, I would return over and over to YouTube videos of her televised performances, chiefly her cover of "(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman" by the legendary Aretha Franklin, wherein Kelly chose to show off her actual range. I would also revisit—when I became a Mariah Carey superfan and proud member of the Lambily—her take on Mariah's cover of "Without You" as well as her post-Idol rendition of "Love Takes Time" in 2003 (not her 2022 version!) to marvel, over and over, at how America really did strike gold on its first attempt.

(@thick_flair). "22 years ago they went searching for America's best singer and, amazingly enough, found it [on] the first try." 28 September 2024. Tweet.

No reality singing competition winner since has ever come close. That fateful finale, America voted for her—even my mom voted for her—and she won. She starred in that musical film, put out her debut album, notched a couple of hit singles, and might have disappeared altogether had her follow-up not been an actual blockbuster of a smash album.

Named after the Avril Lavigne-penned track, Breakaway was maybe the third CD that I ever purchased when I decided to properly begin my own collection of physical music (which still endures today). Its singles—"Breakaway," "Since U Been Gone," "Because of You," "Walk Away," and, of course, "Behind These Hazel Eyes"—were inescapably omnipresent. For a good two years, it felt like she had a hit record on power rotation at every Southern California radio station, regardless of genre, regardless of time of day. For an angsty pre-teen about to embark on his own prolonged coming of age, her songs hit home.

Like so many others, I spent my early teens in a constant cycle of self-discovery. Between my own class, race, and sexuality, my introspection was in overdrive, and I was severely depressed. Why didn’t I look like everyone else? If people found out that I had a crush on a boy, would I be ostracized? Were my parents going to kick me out? My precocious self had decided that I was mostly interested in sad-boy alternative rock bands like Something Corporate and Taking Back Sunday, but Kelly was acceptable because she wasn't like all the other pop stars. She was cool. Her songs were pop, but they had killer percussion and guitars and felt viscerally raw. She was more of a rock star, and her music was authentic. She was real.

The chorus of "Behind These Hazel Eyes" goes as such:

Here I am, once again
I'm torn into pieces
Can't deny it, can't pretend
Just thought you were the one
Broken up, deep inside
But you won't get to see the tears I cry
Behind these hazel eyes

Despite almost never crying regardless of how empty I felt, despite having only kind-of-sort-of dated a girl for a month and therefore possessing basically zero romantic experience, despite not even having hazel eyes, I related so hard. It was one of the first songs I ever acquired via LimeWire to add to my Apple iPod Mini, and I had it on constant repeat, pretending that the music chronicled my own life. In high school, my iPod was confiscated because I was too preoccupied with it during our homeroom hours as we (they, because I never liked to actually speak the words) recited the Pledge of Allegiance. I didn't have any interest in being patriotic—I was busy listening to Kelly Clarkson.

Discovering her third album, My December, was another turning point for me. Breakaway proved she had angst; My December proved she had emotional depth. Every song from that third album felt as though it had been crafted, bespoke, for me. I was an angry teen—I didn't really know why—and I felt worthless and alone, as if nobody cared about me, as if my existence meant nothing, and her music somehow made my days more bearable as I counted down the days until the end of high school, when I could finally escape my suburban prison and be free. Kelly's music spoke directly to the lightless void within me, and I became such a fan that I even followed her WordPress. To this day, My December is still one of my favorite albums of all time.

A decade later, as I entered my twenties, I took a job at Sony Music in New York City. I worked in marketing, setting up release campaigns for new music across all of Sony Music's roster… which included Kelly. She was readying her first Christmas album, Wrapped in Red, for which the department stockpiled plenty of promotional materials, including a Kelly Clarkson cardboard standee that I smuggled home. A coworker, aware of my fanboyish obsession, whispered to me that Kelly would be in the office on one of my days off; to compensate for missing out on the chance to meet my idol, I hand wrote a letter for my friend to pass on to her, in which I explained that I'd been a fan since I was a child, that I loved My December above all other albums, and that I wanted her to release more Mariah Carey-esque songs. (I take credit for Meaning Of Life's "Medicine," which bears a striking resemblance to Mariah's "Emotions"—thank you, Jackster!)

I remember all the years spent passionately refreshing Kelly's Diva Devotee vocal profile (three octaves and two notes seem like a lowball estimate) and attempting to convince strangers that she was our generation's Whitney Houston-Mariah Carey hybrid. I was a bonafide stan, and she had been my patron saint of choice ever since my formative years of angst. That cardboard standee of her that I'd spirited away from Sony? I actually own two. One of them first accompanied me from work to a college party photo booth where all my friends insisted on taking pictures with our celebrity guest, then to my Lower East Side apartment where she frequently scared me at night by lurking in the corner shadows, and finally to my father's home in Los Angeles, where it continues to stand today. Hers was the first show I ever attended at the historic Radio City Music Hall and the second concert in my life overall.

But, my nascent adulthood coincided with my foray into the dating pool. As my relationships with men came and went, so too would my relationship with Kelly.

The command she holds over gay men is such that she was the bridge between me and the boyfriend of a man I'd loved, who loathed me for whatever affair he feared me having with his partner and who, despite that, still managed to eke out a joke about expecting a child with me—her then-forthcoming Christmas album, Wrapped in Red—when we three were once in a room together because he, too, was a Kelly fanatic. It was her music that played in the background during my first time having sex: "When I'm with you, I'm alone" was unintentionally the refrain in my head as I made my sexual debut (I owe my first boyfriend deep gratitude for his everlasting patience with me).

I'm not "Alone" in my love for her, I know, but I think there's a special grip she has on my demographic in particular—I have never met a gay man of Asian descent who has never, at one point or another, loved Kelly Clarkson. The men I dated as I came of age were prime examples: Jun, my third boyfriend, literally had “junloveskellyclarkson” as his email address, and Henry, my fourth, only listened to three musicians, of which she was the clear dominant. I don't want to make outlandish claims, but I proffer that there's something worth identifying about her ubiquity among us.

As the inaugural winner of American Idol, Kelly's victory was delivered by almost nine million votes manually cast in a pre-digital world; it was as democratic as an over-produced reality television show could be. At that point in time, Pew Research Center estimates that Asian Americans numbered approximately 12 million in the United States, just under 4% of its total population. (Today, we're approximately twenty-two million, or nearly 7% of the overall.) The Williams Institute at UCLA's School of Law estimated in 2021 that just 3.8% of Asian American adults identify as LGBT. Demographic surveys of earlier American Idol seasons don't exist, but extrapolating these numbers (and somewhat erroneously assuming an even distribution) gives us a working assumption that maybe 360,000 of the votes were cast by Asian Americans, of which possibly 13,680 were sent in by our LGBT kith and kin.

Using more recent statistics as merely illustrative tools, almost 60% of all Asian Americans were born outside the United States, compared to 14% of Americans overall, and we can break this down further by generation. Despite Millennials, Gen Z, and post-Gen Z totaling 57% of all Asian Americans, almost 83% of all U.S.-born Asian Americans are in our age group. 95% of U.S.-born Asian Americans are at minimum proficient in English, compared to just 57% of non-U.S.-born Asian Americans. What's evident, then, is that the vast majority of us grew up in households where either our parents or grandparents were our immigrant forebears.

Although data disaggregation of Asian Americans by origin subgroups is paramount, we know that 12 of the 19 subgroups have poverty rates at least as high as or surpassing the American average. This, coupled with our language proficiency and immigration household statistics, paints a clear picture of trends borne out through personal, anecdotal experience: The Asian American circumstance is one of much travail. It is, for this reason, perhaps altogether unsurprising that so many of us had instilled within us the mantras of keeping our heads down and working hard, and therefore that we might relate so viscerally to the original American Idol.

Kelly's rise throughout the competition, week by week, was all but certain. She displayed great technical prowess, but that was par for the course in a contest of singers. I don't think it's quite accurate to assert that she faded into the background for much of the season, but she wasn't a controversial figure. She established herself as reliably consistent and endeared herself to us with her down-to-earth charm. It's easy to see why Asian Americans, given the contexts of both her background and ours, could be drawn to her. Particularly to those who wish for a quiet assimilation, her success was an aspirational rags-to-riches story for the ages.

It's Breakaway, however, that I think turned us into superfans. Just as I was awed by the raw angst permeating throughout the album, so do I assume was everyone else. Unfiltered anger—except, as a cynic would point out, through the machinations of the pop music industry—has a specific appeal to Asian Americans, and even more so to those of us who were concurrently going through puberty. Insofar as anger is a rational response to injustice, it is an accumulated rejoinder that many of us grew up being expected to bite back or bottle within, be it an aggregate result of the overtly xenophobic racism, the microaggressions, or even the "lunchbox trauma" to which we're commonly subjected.

Calling it empowering is too facile; her music, rock-adjacent with pop sensibilities, was anger made accessible, palatable, a pressure valve for emotional release. For those of us who came of age during the era of the music video, the apartment she personally desecrated for the "Since U Been Gone" video was a visual catharsis, a scream expelled yet contained.

I want to acknowledge for a brief moment the storied activist history of Asian Americans, often exemplified by the likes of Yuri Kochiyama and the Third World Liberation Front, the best of us who understood all too well the importance of our proactive participation in anti-racism organized efforts. Indeed, "Asian American" as a term itself owes its emergence to a focused determination by our predecessors to establish a distinct political identity in the pursuits of agency and solidarity. Ergo, the stereotype of Asian Americans being a meek model minority is just that—a[n historically inaccurate] stereotype—and indentured silence is a trope that we can, and should, reject.

Similarly, those of us who are aware of our queer ancestors know the urgency of being loud and proud. "LGBTQ" emerged, like "Asian American," out of political necessity: Public identities and coalitions were forged for the purpose of civil rights advocacy. As inheritors of double political identities, then, it is incumbent upon us LGBTQ Asian Americans to recognize and dismantle the structural barriers to social equality, and I believe it is why so many of us have found solace in Kelly’s indignant music.

Whenever my boyfriends would express to me their love for Kelly Clarkson, I admit that I felt seen. Although I had finally begun to diversify my own listening habits by the time those relationships took root, Jun's email address and Henry's obsession were indicative of deeper commonalities shared between us, and I thought that this portended good tidings despite me not actually looking to date anyone based solely upon their taste in music. But, while Jun knew more or less all the lore of Kelly Clarkson that I did (secret songs, significant performances, etc.), Henry was ignorant. Henry's love for Kelly was shallow. He cared only that she was the first (and best) American Idol winner, that she had a couple of hit records, and that she now hosted a television show that he wanted to attend. Henry turned out to be the worst breakup I would ever have.

In my mid-twenties, when Henry and I broke up, I tried very hard to save our relationship. I had rationalized to myself that it would be worth the effort because he was the one I thought I was supposed to marry. By then, I had dated men for a decade, and I had convinced myself that this man, the one whose love for Kelly was nowhere near as deep as mine, was the one I wanted to be with forever, the one with whom I’d eventually buy a home and start a family. He had his shortcomings and I had mine, but I assumed he loved me and I wanted to be loved.

I was a serial monogamist; I didn’t want to have to wade back into the dating pool and start over again. I emailed Henry a Google Drive folder filled with her deep cuts and unreleased music, many sourced from the materials I had acquired through my former job at Sony, and within that folder I buried a Cameo that I had commissioned from drag star Pangina Heals, who I had asked to tell him on my behalf that I was sorry and that I loved him. Henry’s only reply upon receipt was: "You don't have to but thank you." I don't know if he ever even listened to the songs or saw Pangina's message. I doubt it would have made a difference.

A year after we broke up, Hinge served me Henry's new profile, complete with a picture of him with Kelly at a release event for her newest album, chemistry. My first reaction was to feel revolted, because the world was forcing me to look at the man who'd broken my heart. My second was to mentally congratulate him on finally meeting his idol, because I never forgot how much he loved her. My third was to report his dating profile for being a catfish, because I'm petty when scorned and I wanted to curse him to a life of forever loneliness after what he had done to me—I would have him know, intimately, that his life would suck without me.

My relationship with Kelly Clarkson became a casualty of my relationships with these men, poisoned over time by my disdain for them after our very bad breakups. I had loved her, but I could no longer stomach her music because she reminded me too much of them, of all the effort and time I had sunk into my failed relationships. I felt as embittered as she sounded throughout the entirety of My December, but I couldn't even listen to her to commiserate and achieve the catharsis she had previously provided me; instead, hearing her only made me feel worse. I avoided her music altogether.

Some time later, upon chemistry's release, I gave it a precursory listen. She still sounded familiar to me, her voice an old friend to my ears. It's a post-divorce album, and I expected it to come with all the emotional trappings of a breakup, and it did. It has songs about puppy love, about honeymooning and that initial period where everything's a sugar rush because you're just so excited by the newness of that person. It has songs about falling in love, about the depths to which two souls would dive as they seek to build a life together. It also has songs about anger, about feeling betrayed and used and forsaken by the person you should have been able to trust most above all.

I had to stop.

Not only did I relate to the content of the music, I couldn't shake a nagging feeling that Henry was also listening to the album and relating to it, except that I was the villain onto whom he projected all the negativity of her musical angst. It was Henry in my head as I listened to "favorite kind of high" and "me" and all the tracks about the times both good and bad. So, I had to turn it off. I muted her on Spotify, I turned my back on my childhood favorite, and I stopped myself from listening to her because it just hurt too much. Jun had loved her too, maybe even more than I did, but it's Henry who affected my relationship with Kelly the most. I was a human being experiencing desire, and he was the willing recipient of all my desire until he wasn't, until he no longer wanted to be. I had wanted depth, even if I thought he was shallow, but I was distraught at having lost him despite (or inclusive of) his issues—I had loved him anyway, and still that couldn't save us.

Now that I’m in my thirties, I've prevented myself from giving too much of myself to relationships that do not feel reciprocal; I’m afraid of repeating past mistakes. I told myself that I won’t let anyone hurt me so deeply ever again and, as I spoke those words, I felt the emotions once again that I think are at the heart of Kelly's music. That hurt, that fear, that anger, that sadness—all of that is why we gay Asian Americans love her. We desire, we want to be desired, but it feels like it seldom works out.

Kelly Clarkson was the most important artist to me as I came of age. My relationship with her was tainted by boyfriends in succession, but I have recently been thinking that my own history with her should take precedence over theirs; after all, I'm the protagonist of my narrative. That relationship is mine, and I've been considering how to heal my inner child, the boy who had Breakaway and My December on repeat as he imagined breakups not yet had. But, I want to be forthright and admit to myself an unspoken truth: It's also about my relationship with Henry, and that attempting to reclaim my relationship with the music that defined my formative years would also be an attempt at moving on.

So, I've unmuted her on Spotify. I've been trying to give her a listen with a fresh perspective, but I also must admit that my tastes have changed with age and experience. As well, I don't feel that her artistry has progressed to where I'd like it to be, and other artists now hit home where she once did, reliably so. I loved her and I love what she's done for me, but I'm also going to allow myself to relinquish her music because it no longer serves me. I'm letting myself walk away from Kelly Clarkson, and by doing so, I'm finally walking away from Henry and Jun and all my other breakups, too. My hazel eyes no longer have any tears left to cry.

Sam writes A YEAR WITHOUT WATER on Substack.

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