'American Idol' hopeful Jeremiah Lloyd Harmon's brave coming-out story: 'Everybody was a little jolted by how transparent I was being'

Ten years ago, a couple weeks ahead of the American Idol Season 8 finale, Entertainment Weekly put Adam Lambert on its cover and predicted that he might be the first gay singer to win the show. That didn’t happen, although Lambert did quite all right for himself — releasing three top 10 solo albums, scoring a Grammy nomination, and, of course, becoming the new frontman for Queen. As Lambert returns to the show this Sunday to mentor Season 17’s top eight contestants on Queen Night, the landscape has changed a great deal, and now Idol may very well soon crown its first LGBTQ winner: Jeremiah Lloyd Harmon, a spectacular vocalist whom judge Lionel Richie once recently said could hit “notes that Freddie Mercury can’t do.”

“The climate has changed. This is 2019,” longtime American Idol executive producer Megan Michaels Wolflick tells Yahoo Entertainment when asked about Harmon’s chances. “Back when Adam was on the show, he wasn't as open or as free; now it's not even a question. People just come in, it's part of their life, part of their story. I think Adam at the time probably would have been open to it. [Editor’s note: Lambert first publicly, and very frankly, addressed his sexuality after his Idol season ended, via a cover-story interview for Rolling Stone.] We didn't censor it, it was just the climate [compared to] where we are now.”

Harmon’s story is very different from Lambert’s, and not because his sexuality has been such a prominent part of his edit on the show. While Lambert grew up in liberal Southern California and had been out to his friends and extremely accepting relatives since he was a teenager, Harmon grew up as a pastor’s son in the small Maryland town of Catonsville, and he only came out to his religious, conservative family three years ago, at age 23. “The consensus seemed to be that this is not a path that I should follow,” Harmon told the show’s producers of his family’s displeased reaction at the time. He later revealed that he had left home and quit his janitorial job at his father’s church, leading viewers to believe he and his family were now sadly estranged.

“I think ‘estranged’ would be the wrong term,” Harmon clarifies to Yahoo Entertainment. “I think one thing that I've learned in the process of owning my own story, and taking my personal power, is how to draw appropriate boundaries in my life. And part of that resulted in me quitting the job at my dad’s church and deciding to move out of my parents’ house, because of differences that we had. Even through that, I've always been in touch with them, and I've made it a point to keep the conversation going. I've never been estranged from my parents. There is intentional distance, but I think that distance has been healthy for us.

“I think everybody is going to see how that's shaped and strengthened our relationship next week,” he adds, revealing that his parents will be in the audience when he performs on this Sunday’s Queen Night.

Harmon admits that it’s been a struggle for both him and his family as he’s told his coming-out story almost in real time this season. “I think everybody was a little jolted by how transparent I was being. I even surprised myself in some ways,” he says. “It’s kind of been an all-at-once experience. None of us, me or my family, have ever been in the public eye like this before. So I think everyone is just processing it in their own way, and at their own pace. There have definitely been some challenges as a result of that, but I think we've done a great job of just keeping in touch and overcoming those together. … We sort have been forced into discussions that maybe otherwise wouldn't have happened the way that they did, so I think it'll be up to us to decide if this is something that will build us up or scare us off, if that makes sense.”