Wish Me Away: Chely Wright's documentary about coming out and country

I've yet to see Chely Wright's documentary, Wish Me Away, that chronicles her coming out and being one the first openly gay mainstream country performers, but Sam Adam's review  for the AV Club encapsulates the problem with country music as an institution, and the stereotypes that go with it:

Country music is one of the greatest casualties of the culture wars. The vibrant form that once had room for drunken layabout Hank Williams and pot-smoking longhair Willie Nelson has been codified as the soundtrack for red-state America. While its musical boundaries continue to expand, encompassing Shania Twain’s Bollywood dabblings and Toby Keith’s horn-section swing, its subject matter is constrained to an immutable series of tropes: God, the flag, cheap beer, pickup trucks, the troops, and not much else.

No other genre of popular music is so intrinsically tied to that America. Even when the stereotypes don't ring true -- a lot of country artists are, in fact, liberal -- country is permanently tethered to religion (the christian kind), family, and conservative "values." I read Wright's book last year, and some of it was achingly sad. I half wanted her to abandon her country roots, shave her head and a make a loud, aggro punk record and know that she could leave that world and all the grief it's caused her. But doing that doesn't change the bigotry within conservative, mainstream country and adds to the illusion that homophobia is nonexistent in every other genre of popular music.

Chely Wright: Country Music and Coming Out

courtesy of last.fm

Early this week, before the People feature "officially" broke, AfterEllen's Heather Hogan posted one of the best stories on country singer Chely Wright's coming out: Five Reasons Why Chely Wright's Coming Out Matters.

This was particularly poignant:

1) It always matters when anyone comes out.

People who have already come out and are surrounded by supportive communities often forget the dark fog of fear and shame and confusion that lives inside the closet. Some people say that coming out is an ethical obligation, and that if all the closeted gay people in all the world climbed up on chairs and jumped off at the same time, the whole earth would be thrown off-course. Or at the very least, gay people would start to see some civil liberty equality.

I have pretty catholic (small "c") taste in music, and I'd never heard of Chely Wright until this week, after much speculation on which big-name country music star was going to come out as a lesbian in a People magazine story this week, and I'm not alone. Does this make it any less significant? No. Mainstream country is not exactly, well, diverse, and having an "out" star can only break down some of those barriers.

Jezebel's Dodai who posted Chely's Today Show interview adds:

At 39 years old, her coming out may not seem like a big deal to some, but it's a huge deal for her — and it's possible that her story (minus the country star part) sounds familiar to many men and women is this country who feel that they can't tell the truth.