Allison Glock, in Esquire:
… For him, it is a question of solemnity. “I recognize there is a little bit of preposterousness to me running for office,” Aiken says as we drive away from the fundraiser and past the lantern-lit Kinkadeian houses of Southern Pines, one of the more conservative hamlets in an already absurdly gerrymandered district. “People like me. But I need them to take me seriously.” (A struggle his campaign team dubbed WTF mountain.) “It’s still a laugh line: ‘Clay Aiken running for Congress? Ha ha ha!’ But when I’m done here, the people of North Carolina will know I’m serious. That this is real.”
Aiken has been the butt of the joke since grade school, where other kids tormented him “like it was their job.” He was poor, raised by a single mom, wore glasses and cheap, clunky tennis shoes, had freckles, walked with his toes pointed east and west, was redheaded and clumsy and effeminate. He was a nesting doll of vulnerabilities, a bully’s fever dream, but especially in the South, where the signifiers of masculinity do not stretch to include musical theater or kindness to Down-syndrome kids…
Part of his unease came from his being in the closet, as much to himself as anyone else. But the more salient truth is that Clayton Holmes Aiken was never constructed for modern celebrity. He was a natural introvert with a soft spot for kids who struggled, and if you’d asked him in middle school what he wanted to be when he grew up, he would have said a teacher or possibly Senator Terry Sanford.
“There was no man I admired more than Terry Sanford,” Aiken recalls, his enunciation crisp and deliberate, as if to mirror his respect for the North Carolina politician who built the community-college system and founded the first U. S. state-run arts school. As governor, Sanford was also the first southern politician to fight conspicuously against segregation in the sixties. In eighth grade, Aiken interviewed him for a school paper. “I didn’t know what my deal was yet, but I knew I was different. And here was this man who was looking out for people who were different.”
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