On 14 June 1995, the Nashville singer Ty Herndon was riding high with a No 1 single on the country charts and an album hurtling towards gold status when he was arrested on charges that could have killed his career in an instant. At 10am, he pulled into a gas station in Texas, right across the street from a park well-known for gay cruising and hookups. Amped by a hit of meth amphetamine, Herndon strolled into a glade where he soon met a guy he later described as “movie-star handsome”. The stranger began stroking his own crotch, then reached for Herndon’s. But when the singer unzipped his fly, the man, an undercover cop, said, “This ain’t your day, cowboy,” leading to the star’s arrest on charges from drug possession to indecent exposure.
While news of the incident traveled fast – aided in no small part by the police alerting the media – Herndon’s record company swung into parallel action. They cooked up a massive PR strategy that painted the singer as victim of drug use while feeding the media a series of lies to explain away the sex. “The drugs could be forgiven,” Herndon says during a Zoom interview the other day from his Nashville home. “Being gay definitely could not.”
In fact, nearly two decades would pass before Herndon felt he could be open about his sexuality with the public, a move that, even at that late date, gave him a hold on history. When Herndon finally told People he was gay for a 2014 cover story, he became the first major male county star to publicly come out. That was almost 20 years after pop stars like Elton John and George Michael had done so, boldfacing the extra depth and duration of homophobia in Nashville, something that has only begun to ease with the recent rise of prominent LGBTQ+ stars like Lil Nas X, Orville Peck and Maren Morris.
A glossy version of Herndon’s story might suggest his troubles ended, or at least greatly abated, with his coming out. But in his new memoir, titled What Mattered Most, he presents an iceberg’s worth of issues that lay just below. Those issues include bipolarity, dyslexia, obsessive/compulsive disorder, attention deficit disorder, porn addiction, sex addiction and drug addiction. “What they all equal together is, ‘You’re fucking crazy!’” Herndon says with an almost manic laugh.
Outbursts like that happen often during our 90-minute talk, which, matched to his often skittish speech, probably reflects his ADHD. “It’s the flight of the bumblebee,” he says of his fast-moving thoughts.
At the same time, Herndon has always maintained a rock-solid grounding in faith: he mentions God 12 times during our talk. Unfortunately, his ballast of belief doubled as a core source of his torment. When he was a nine-year-old choir boy at a Pentecostal church his family attended in rural Alabama, he heard the preacher denounce homosexuality as “an ungodly sickness that corrupts the soul”. The preacher pointed directly at him when he said that. “To have someone who I thought was going to be my ally turn into my enemy started the ball rolling on so many things,” Herndon says.
As to why the preacher singled him out, he says: “I was a flamboyant little kid. I sashayed up to that church like I owned it!”
Herndon’s father, an archetypal macho southern man, first had an inkling his son might be different when he took him on a hunting trip and he refused his instruction to shoot a deer. “My dad just looked at me and shook his head,” Herndon recalls.
At school, he more often gravitated towards girls as friends than boys, though by the time he was ready to have sex in high school he did so with both. “With boys it felt different,” he says. “More romantic.”
Herndon’s powerful singing voice, which he developed at church, led to incredible opportunities by the time he was a teenager, including invitations to perform with various groups at Nashville’s storied Opryland. To his surprise, he found that institution included lots of gay people in their ranks, if mainly closeted ones. As to why so many LGBTQ+ people have been historically drawn to the conservative worlds of gospel and country music – including artists as prominent as Billy Preston and the Rev James Cleveland – Herndon said: “We’re looking for a tribe, a family. Those places can come off as very beautiful and loving.”
At the same time, the contradiction between the overtly homophobic messages trumpeted in those spaces and Herndon’s identity greatly intensified his need to hide, as well as his feelings of shame. Those feelings would grow to monstrous proportions after an experience that looked to be his greatest opportunity. When he was 21, he had the chance to appear on the powerful TV talent show Star Search, which was the American Idol of its day. During the process, a staff member on the show, who Herndon doesn’t name, invited him to dinner and, afterwards came to the singer’s hotel room. There, he slipped a pill into his drink and raped him. “I felt as though I was being ripped apart,” Herndon writes of the experience in his book.
Blaming himself, he fleetingly contemplated leaping from the balcony of his room on the 21st floor. A few days later, he worked up the nerve to tell his story to the show’s producer, the late Sam Riddle, only to be told he should never tell a soul. “Don’t fuck up your future,” Herndon reports Riddle telling him.
“The number one thing in recovery is to be heard,” Herndon says. “What I carried with me for years after he said that was that I never going to be heard.”
A month later, Herndon’s father died of a stroke at 45. The pain of it intensified the singer’s already myopic focus on his career. Despite all the attention he engendered along the way, including winning the “Texas entertainer of the year” prize, he still couldn’t get a major label to sign him. Herndon believes the stream of rumors about his sexuality factored heavily in that. To deflect from that he misrepresented many female friendships as romantic relationships and worked hard to develop as much macho affect as he could muster. “I could step on that stage and be every bit the fishin’, huntin’, love-makin’ cowboy you wanted me to be,” he says.
At 31, Herndon finally convinced Sony to sign him but, by then, he had developed an addiction to crystal meth. When he finally got the chance to record his debut album, he was still getting high, though meditation exercises allowed him to keep it together during the recording sessions. His debut album, What Mattered Most, showed his hard work. Shortly after its release in April of 1995, it racked up gold sales, bolstering his label’s plans for him to become the next breakout star in the so-called “hat act” trend that swept to fame giant stars like Garth Brooks, Alan Jackson and Clint Black.
Two months later came Herndon’s arrest. He says that, at first, he didn’t even understand he was being arrested by a police officer. The man who slapped the handcuffs on him didn’t initially announce himself, but instead threw him in the back of his unmarked vehicle and drove around for some time, leading Herndon to believe the man was going to kill him. After it became clear that he was being arrested instead, he feared it was his career that would meet an ugly end. Given that likely consequence, Herndon was surprised, and stirred, when his record company fully backed him up. Talking about it in our interview makes him break down in tears. “It felt like a miracle to me,” he says once he regains his composure.
But their backing meant publicizing as widely as possible his marriage to a woman who was, in fact, just a friend. “What I really wanted was to tell the world I was gay,” Herndon says. “But in 1995 that was not possible.”
Three years later, when George Michael was ensnared in a similar entrapment scheme by the LA police, Herndon felt special empathy. “I just wish I had his phone number,” he says. “Holy cow, it would have been great to have somebody to talk to about that. His level of stardom was way more than mine, but the shame is the same.”
Herndon’s humiliation was amplified by country radio DJs who missed no opportunity to make crude jokes about the arrest and to mock his improbable excuses for it. “It took for ever for that not to be the first thing on the table,” he says.
Regardless, Herndon earned two gold albums in the 90s and amassed seven top 10 country singles, including three chart-toppers. By 2000, however, he wasn’t charting the same way, an issue he tried to fix by hiring a new manager who turned out to be a charlatan. As his career faltered, his drug use and sex addictions soared. In 2010, he was intrigued when a friend of his, the singer Chely Wright, became the first female country star to come out. (Though kd lang came out in the 90s, by that time she was no longer associated with Nashville). Even after Wright’s encouragement to Herndon to make his own move, it took another four years for him to publicly come clean. “I still had a lot of stuff to work out,” he says.
The reception to his declaration was warm on a personal level and some professional opportunities opened up, but he didn’t regain his sales momentum. More significantly, his behavior didn’t change in a sustained way despite some sober stretches and multiple stays in rehab. The extreme disruptions to work opportunities caused by Covid ruined his finances, sending him into a fresh spiral of drugs and shame. Things didn’t turn around for him until just the last few years, when he finally found effective therapy, got fully sober and met a younger man (30 at the time to his 60) whom he bonded with in a deeper and healthier way than any previous relationship had afforded him. Three years ago, the pair got married.
Today, Herndon works closely with Glaad to help extend the acceptance of LGBTQ+ artists, an evolution he played a part in. “I never thought I would have a powerful voice about anything other than singing a song,” he says.
He says he doesn’t feel envy for the relatively easier path queer people have today. “Everything I am, is because of everything I’ve been through,” he says.
He even has a different view of the arrest that led to his worst public humiliation. “For so long I was driven by the need to make people forget that story,” he says. “Now, I don’t want them to forget it. I want them to know everything.”
What Mattered Most by Ty Herndon is out 31 March on HarperCollins
