David Archuleta on coming out, quitting Mormon Church and having crushes: ‘I’ve become young again’
David Archuleta: “I decided to say, ‘I’m just going to accept who I am'”. (Wes and Alex)
There’s a grainy video on YouTube of a cherubic, then 16-year-old David Archuleta singing Elton John and George Michael’s “Don’t Let The Sun Go Down On Me” at the 2008 American Idol final.
Dressed in a slightly too big blazer, his hair gelled all fuzzy like a baby bird’s, and belting out a ‘70s ork-pop classic, he’s a boy cosplaying as a man. Cute as a button but with a matured, honeyed voice, he was the secure favourite to win the singing contest that year, but it wasn’t to be. In what remains arguably the show’s most contentious result, Archuleta lost the seventh season to rocker David Cook, to the sounds of teenage girls from Minnesota down to Mississippi bawling their eyes out.
At the time, Archuleta thought little of Michael and John’s version, bar appreciating its “nice message”. Yet several years after that fateful rendition, “Don’t Let The Sun Go Down On Me” became his survival song. In 2021, on the day he came out publicly as queer (he came out to his family in 2014), he played it on loop.
“I listened to it on repeat because suddenly it was like, this song means something different to me,” he says. The lyrics became a mercy plea. “Suddenly it became this thing of when you come out and you don’t know if your community is going to accept you, you don’t know if your friends and if your family are going to accept you.”
Archuleta had an intensely real reason to suspect he wouldn’t be accepted. Raised as a Mormon in Salt Lake City, Utah – the state with the largest Mormon population – the musician, now 34, grew up believing that to even think pro-LGBTQ+ thoughts was sinful. During his Idol stint, he knew he felt something he couldn’t contend with, but “you suppress a lot of thoughts and feelings, so it’s like something’s there, but you’re so afraid of it… you’re constantly in denial of your reality.”
Up until age 30, being in proximity to queerness – even just listening to George Michael – felt like playing with fire. “It almost is like voodoo. It’s like this dark magic that you’re supposed to stay away from, otherwise you’ll get hexed or something.”
Conversely, we’re chatting today about his recently-released cover of Michael’s anthemic 1990 single, “Freedom”. Both Archuleta and “Freedom” mark 35 years of existence this year, but only now does the song feel like a pertinent soundtrack to Archuleta’s life.
“Heaven knows I was just a young boy, didn’t know what I wanted to be,” goes verse one. “I was every little hungry schoolgirl’s pride and joy, and I guess it was enough for me.” Though Michael didn’t write the single from the perspective of a closeted 16-year-old Mormon boy appearing on a Simon Cowell-led singing contest, the comparison feels pretty stark.
Archuleta has spent the past 17 years working out who he is, and he’s just about getting to a point of understanding. Those 17 years contained enough soaring highs and deep lows to fill a memoir – so he wrote one. It’s in its finishing stages and due for release this year.
In it, he’ll chronicle his chasmic leap from childhood into adulthood through American Idol and his resulting, eight-album music career; his complex relationship with his jazz musician father and former manager, Jeff; the two year mission he took for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints [LDS] in the early 2010s; his three engagements to women while swallowing his queerness; his year-long attempt to continue on as Mormon after coming out publicly, and the suicidal ideation that consumed him during that period.
It’ll take us to where he is now, “and why I decided to just finally say, ‘You know what? I’m stepping away [from the church, in 2022] and I’m just going to accept who I am and let myself be, fall in love with men, and have intimate experiences with men”.
Archuleta is calling via Zoom from home in Los Angeles, pausing intermittently to stop his dogs from yapping at his feet. He’s still the most effulgent face on any screen he’s on, still with puppy dog eyes but now Disney prince handsome too. He’s open and easy conversation, garrulous yet soft-spoken, asking me what it’s like growing up queer in the UK (“So what is your story?”) and mulling over the outcome of this year’s Grammy Awards (“I was so bummed [for] Billie [Eilish]… I just wanted her to win at least one”).
He’s also prone to peppering the conversation with song – if I had a voice like his, the type that makes arm hair go all prickly, I would too – including his own, teenybop track, “Crush”.
It was his debut single after Idol, and remains his highest-charting song, peaking at number two in the US in 2008. He lilts the song’s lyrics. “It’s like… ‘I hung up the phone tonight, something happened for the first time, deep inside.’” It’s odd, he says, to be known for a song about having a crush when he denied himself that sensation as a teen.
“I had that feeling I feel, fully, without any fear behind it or shame, in my thirties,” he explains. Often he wonders how different his life would be if he’d been able to explore sexuality and sensuality alongside his peers. “Sometimes I’m like, oh man, I’m in my thirties, and most of my friends have already gone through all of those feelings, so it’s hard to relate to them.”
If ever there were someone entering a new era, it’s Archuleta. Since stepping away from Mormonism, he’s experienced a sort of rebirth, both in his personal life and musically – last year, he accepted the Outstanding Breakthrough Music Artist GLAAD Award, not far off two decades on from his career beginning.
After years spent telling himself he couldn’t be queer, he’s now asking himself the question: “Who am I? Who have I been?” He describes his experience to date as “like living in reverse,” having been thrust into adulthood and working life as a 16-year-old and now, taking the time back to relive his youth.
“I feel like I have become young again. I’m just more playful. I have more energy,” he says. He’s been going out, dancing, raving at EDM festivals, drinking, swearing – he didn’t say his first curse word until he was 27 – and gulping down every ounce of life he can. The launch party for “Freedom” took place at West Hollywood’s famed LGBTQ+ bar, The Abbey. Archuleta reminds me that fittingly, it’s the venue Chappell Roan wrote “Pink Pony Club” about, her ode to discovering her own queer liberation. He chirps a little of the chorus.
While “Freedom” is a suitable anchor for this next stage of his career, the phase began last Spring, with his rousing single “Hell Together”. It’s inspired by his mother and friend, salsa singer and vocal coach Lupe, who stepped back from the church after realising her son’s painstaking struggle to reconcile his faith with his sexuality. “You said, ‘If I have to live without you, I don’t wanna live forever… if paradise is pressure, we’ll go to Hell together,” he falsettos on the chorus.
It’s deeply moving, but a true account of how Lupe ultimately decided to put her son first. “That song made me cry when I heard it,” she’s since said of its release. “There’s no way I’ll be in a higher glory than my child. He did nothing wrong but shared that he was [queer] and wants to live an honest life.”
Despite his wide-reaching American Idol appeal, Archuleta says that many of his fans post the show were “Mormon or just conservative, because I represented their values”. Since coming out, he’s seen a “huge difference”. He has, as is to be expected, grown a fairly sizeable LGBTQ+ following (plus the odd, out-of-step crossover fan; in 2022, one such “fan” contacted his management, unimpressed with his talk of queerness on stage). Most soul-stirring for him are those fans – queer or otherwise – who found him after struggling to contend with their own faith.
After dropping “Hell Together”, “suddenly there’s so many people saying, ‘Oh my gosh, I’m in tears, I’m crying. I feel seen, and I wish my mom had done that for me,’” he shares. “I was like, ‘Wow, OK. This is an experience that, even though if you’re not queer, it is very real to still try to find a new community and space to exist in after religion.”
Still, Archuleta is just figuring things out. It’s been five years since his last full-length album, 2020’s Therapy Sessions, but he’s keen not to make coming out and his religious background the nucleus of his music going forward. “Just because I’m coming out as queer does not make me a completely different person,” he says, preferring to describe himself and his music as simply “maturing”, addressing things he hasn’t before.
He’s at a strange sort of crossroads, he suggests, perhaps still affected by the guilt, shame, and fear that permeated his experience in the church, while also being welcomed into the queer community in all its debaucherous, unfettered glory. He has friends still who are Mormons, and yet also now has friends who are incredibly comfortable talking about sex, d**k, topping and bottoming. He’s been asked about his own bedroom preferences on social media and in interviews. I wonder if it still feels uncomfortable, or if he’s becoming attuned to the community’s liberal stance on sex.
“That’s still a process for me. I consider myself more on the demisexual scale of things. I don’t know if it’s from my religious conditioning but I’ve been out for four years now and it’s still my experience,” he says. He’s understandably uneasy reflecting on the pressures put on queer men to be so candid with their sexuality.
“I think there’s a lot of obsession between… maybe not obsession, but… well, I think there is. It’s like, ‘Oh, are you top or you bottom? It’s a joke too, like, ‘Oh, bottom!’ Or, ‘Top energy!’ I don’t know, that was such a foreign concept to me,” he adds, shifting in his chair. “Maybe after this conversation I’ll be like, you know what? The next time I get asked about bottom and top s**t, I’ll just be like… I don’t really feel like talking about that right now. I don’t know. I’m fumbling through what my boundaries are, I guess.”
Besides, as he’s said, he doesn’t want to be defined by his sexuality. “I feel like it’s ingenuine if that’s all I portray myself to be. I’m not just queer. There’s so many other things to talk about and to say,” he opines. That said, the subject might creep up in his upcoming album, or EP – he’s not sure yet, but he’s written “a lot of songs”. His next single “Crème Brûlée” for example, due for release on 21 March, is in his own words, “pretty shocking”.
But then he’s also having fun trying out a little Spanglish (he’s Hispanic), adding a sprinkling of Latin flare, toying with “a little flirtiness” in his music. He wants to show off his classic vocals, but mix it with the sensual, synthy stylings of last year’s Mount Rushmore of pop: Billie Eilish, Sabrina Carpenter, Chappell Roan, and Charli XCX. “I’m still trying to develop: What’s the David Archuleta sound like? What is the look? And I’m still experimenting a little here and there to see what lands and falls.”
With a little help from George Michael, David Archuleta has found his freedom. Now, he’s just working out what he wants to do with it.
David Archuleta’s cover of “Freedom” is streaming now.
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