American Idol Phenomenon Sanjaya Comes Out As Bisexual
Sanjaya Malakar, American Idol season 6 star, has come out as bisexual.
Sanjaya, the infamously ponyhawked teen troubadour from, now 32, made his debut on the show in 2006. He broke the news on The Adam Sank Show podcast Monday.
"At the time of American Idol, I had a serious long-term girlfriend,” Sanjaya told Sank.
“[A]ll of my publicists, they’re like, ‘Oh, just tell everyone you’re single, be ambiguous,’ you know? ‘No one needs to know anything about anything because you don’t want to lose your fans.’ And I’m like, ‘Okay, but why am I manipulating what I know myself? To figure out what kind of fans I’m gonna get? Because I’m still trying to discover who I am.”
“Because I grew up in a time when being called fa***t in school was the worst thing that could ever happen to you.”
It was one more lesson learned through Sanjaya’s seven-month Idol odyssey about showbusiness.
The seventh place runner-up, now a pastry chef and bartender in Montana, experienced first-hand how contestants on the show are manipulated to meet producers’ expectations, regardless of talent.
One example was the infamous ponyhawk. “I would literally go to Dean, the hairstylist, I would go to his studio the day or two before, and he’d have like four of five mannequin heads with wigs on them with hairstyles and be like, ‘What do you think?'” Sanjaya said on the podcast.
The week the stylist came up with the eye-catching ponyhawk pompadour, “My mom went in and was like, ‘This is ridiculous. My son is not a joke. I’m not going to have him walking around like a fool.’”
But according to Sanjaya, executive producer Nigel Lythgoe – who reality TV fans may know from his onscreen role as a judge on So You Think You Can Dance – convinced Sanjaya and mom to pull the trigger on the hairstyle, saying it would be a “media phenomenon.” Lythgoe couldn’t have been more right.
How is Sanjaya wearing his hair now? “My hair is gone. All that stress and over-processing, now I’m bald. But luckily I have a nice shaped head.”
Asked by LGBTQ Nation why Sanjaya chose Sank to share his story, the host speculated: “I think the reason he decided to speak to me, perhaps, is because I don’t have people on my show to humiliate him.”
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