Sixteen.

Enter part two of two, about how I restored my relationship with Kelly Clarkson, piece by piece.

Within the past month, Kelly Clarkson released her takes on two seminal songs: "Good Luck, Babe!" by Chappell Roan and "My Heart Will Go On" by Céline Dion. The songs themselves are special to me for different reasons, but those reasons are irrelevant to the matter at hand; the takeaway here is that Kelly's virtuosic ability to sing anything, over two decades after her very public ascension, has not only persevered—it has actually improved. Watching these now, I am for but a moment as captivated by her as I used to be all those years ago, but it's only momentary nostalgia, fleeting.

I remember, throughout my teenage years, passionately refreshing her Diva Devotee vocal profile (three octaves and two notes seems like a lowball estimate) and attempting to indoctrinate strangers about her being our generation's Whitney Houston-Mariah Carey hybrid, as evidenced by her chameleonic vocal prowess across genres (see: her ever-evolving list of songs covered, on both television and tour) and songwriting skills.

I'd lied earlier, you see, by omitting any allusions to her when describing my favorite musicians in Six. I was, for a decade, a diehard Kelly Clarkson fan, and she was my patron saint of choice during my formative years of angst. That cardboard standee of her that I mentioned in Fifteen? I actually own two. One of them accompanied me from work on the subway, first 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 they both continue to stand today. Hers was the first show I ever attended at the historic Radio City Music Hall, and the second concert in my entire life overall. The command she holds over gay men is such that she was the bridge between me and the then-boyfriend of a man I'd once 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—because he, too, was a Kelly fanatic. It was her music that played in the background during my first intercourse: "When I'm with you, I'm alone," unintentionally or otherwise, was 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—Bowen Yang and Matt Rogers, of Las Culturistas, love her too (and, just like them, I also preferred MADtv over Saturday Night Live)—but I think there's a special grip she has on my demographic in particular. I have never met a gay Asian man who has never, at one point or another, loved Kelly Clarkson. For example: Jun, my third boyfriend, literally had junloveskellyclarkson@gmail.com as his email address, and Henry, my fourth, only ever listened to three singers, of which she was the predominant one.

I don't want to make outlandish claims, but I think there's something worth identifying about her ubiquity among us.

As the inaugural 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 twelve million in the United States, just under 4% of its total population. (Currently, we number approximately twenty-two million, or nearly 7% of the overall figure.) 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 here 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, and despite Asian Americans being 3% lower than Americans overall (10% versus 13%) to be living in poverty, we know that twelve of the nineteen subgroups have poverty rates at least as high 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 and a down-to-earth attitude, but that was par for the course for a contest of singers. I don't think it's quite accurate to say that she faded into the background for much of the season, but she wasn't a controversial figure. Yet, she established herself as reliably consistent and endeared herself to us during the show and afterwards without ever pretending to be anyone other than herself. It's easy to see why Asian Americans, given the contexts of both her background and ours, would 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 all into superfans. Just as I was awed by the raw angst permeating the album, so do I assume was everyone else. Anger unfiltered—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 so-called 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. To 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 consciously acknowledge, for a brief moment, our storied collective activist history, 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. "LGBT" 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's incumbent upon us LGBT Asian Americans to recognize and dismantle the structural barriers to social equity.

When my (ex-)boyfriends expressed 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 these relationships took root, Jun's email address and Henry's obsession were indicative of commonalities shared between us, and I had hope that this would portend good tidings. But, while Jun knew more or less all the lore of Kelly Clarkson world that I did (unreleased and leaked 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'd ever have.

My relationship with Kelly was a casualty of my relationships with these men, poisoned over time by my disdain for them resultant of our very bad breakups. I loved her, but I could no longer listen to her because her music reminded me too much of them (mostly Henry, less so Jun). It reminded me of all the effort and time I'd sunk into my failed relationships, and 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'd previously provided me; instead, listening to her only made me feel worse.

When Henry and I were beginning to separate, I tried very hard to save our relationship. I'd rationalized to myself that all the effort would be worth it because he was the one I thought I was supposed to marry, because that's how seriously I took our relationship. I sent him a Google Drive folder filled with her deep cuts and unreleased music, some sourced from the materials I'd gained through my former job at her then-record label, and within that folder I buried a Cameo that I'd commissioned from drag star Pangina Heals, who I'd asked to tell Henry on my behalf that I was sorry, that I was wrong, and that I loved him. His reply was: "You don't have to but thank you." I don't know if he ever even 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 his Idol at an album release event for Kelly's newest record, chemistry. My first reaction was revulsion at the world forcing me to look at the man who'd broken my heart; my second was to nod and mentally congratulate him on finally meeting Kelly Clarkson in person; my third was to report his dating profile for being an impersonation and catfish, as I'd done to his prior accounts whenever they were forced upon me by unforgiving algorithms that correctly predicted the chemistry between us, because I'm petty when scorned and I wanted to curse him into 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.

Upon chemistry's release, I did give 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 knew that it would come with all the expected trappings, 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 and their potential. It has songs about falling in love, about the depths to which two souls would dive, together, 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 too was listening to the album and relating to it, except that I was the villain onto whom he projected (wrongfully) all the negativity of her new musical angst. It was Henry in my head as I listened to "favorite kind of high" and "me" and all the songs 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 wanted depth, even if I thought he was shallow, but still I was upset at having lost him because I loved him despite or inclusive of his shortcomings. I had loved him anyway, and still that couldn't save us.

Since then, I've prevented myself from giving too much to relationships that do not feel reciprocal. I've told myself that I wouldn't let anyone hurt me so deeply ever again, and, as I said those words, I felt once more the emotions that I think are at the heart of Kelly's music. That hurt, that fear, that anger, that sadness—all of that is why my demographic loves her. We desire, we want to be desired, but it feels like it seldom works out.

Kelly Clarkson is the artist who was most important to me as I came of age. My relationship with her was tainted by successive ex-boyfriends, but I've recently been thinking that my history with her should take precedence over theirs; after all, I'm the protagonist of my own narrative. That relationship is mine, and I've been thinking that I should endeavor to heal my inner child, the kid who adored "Behind These Hazel Eyes" as he imagined the end of relationships not yet had to fill the song's storyboards. But, I should be forthright and admit to myself an unspoken truth, that it's also about my relationship with Henry, and that attempting to reclaim my relationship with the music that defined my teenage 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. 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, too.

Miss Independent, eat your heart out.