Why LGBT Performers Never Won ‘American Idol’

Gay, lesbian and transgender performers have won Grammys, Oscars and topped the charts, but they will never win American Idol. The singing competition show first broadcast just a year before Massachusetts became the first state with marriage equality, and it finishes its run in the first full year of marriage equality country-wide. The 15 years of Idol‘s tenure are a microcosm of what America wanted to be and wanted from its culture for a decade and a half. But as the word moved forward, Idol stayed trapped in a past it could never really shake.

The thrust of American Idol was always to showcase the best undiscovered American singing talent, but part of the reason  you tuned in was to watch someone stumble. In the early episodes, that was a constructed reality, the handpicking of the very best to juxtapose the very worst of who showed up hoping for stardom. The first audition ever seen on American Idol is someone who Simon Cowell calls “terrible.” It continues with a montage of bad and more bad as they fast-forward through the early stages of auditions that, in later seasons, stretched for weeks and weeks. Idol was mean to its contestants, but when people showed up and made a scene – like a cheese seller named Stephanie Sugarman who knew to ham it up for the TV cameras and get her 15 minutes – the judges seemed unprepared for the talentless fame-seekers. Of course, we only saw an hour worth of footage for 10,000 auditions, and Idol‘s version of out-there in 2002 seems laughable in 2016. In Season 1, they framed people in Seattle as “belonging in the X-Files” by showing a montage of people having piercings in their tongues and belly buttons.

The meanness and the packaging of the outrageous contestants only ramped up as seasons went forward, with Idol realizing that fans would watch early to see the worst, and they stuck around later to hope for the best. Bad auditioners like William Hung became national memes, and now-defunct organizations like Vote for the Worst banded together to push forward the worst or funniest options during the national voting rounds. While American Idol showcased all sorts of contestants, and was happy to call out anyone as bad, there was always a special sort of meanness reserved for auditioners that fell into the queer end of the spectrum. If you showed up in drag, if you lisped, if you were a boy winking at Simon instead of Paula, you were easy fodder for the cameras, but you weren’t going far.