Chely Wright on the Climate for Gay People and Her Shift to Corporate VP

When Chely Wright came out of the closet in 2010, revealing to Nashville and to millions of country fans that she was gay, that emergence put her in a position to become a spokesperson and activist on behalf of the LGBTQ community, as someone middle America had known, trusted and sung along with. Now, in 2025, she’s doing a different kind of coming out — as a corporate person, who’s at least temporarily setting aside music, and the platform that comes with it, to take a senior executive gig with ISS, a company that has 320,000 employees around the world.

Does that make her a sellout? Far from it, if you dig down to what Wright has already been able to accomplish in six months on the job as ISS’ Senior VP of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and New Market Growth for North America. The former country star is bringing the same sensitivity and ethics she had as a recording artist and public role model to her responsibilities in the private sector, looking to build on what she says the 125-year old corporation was already doing in the areas of (dare we say it?) diversity, equity and inclusion, which she maintains is vital as a national and international business model, and not just good for goodness’ sake (though there’s that, too).

As Pride Month wraps up, Variety presents a conversation with Wright that touches on her experience coming out and whether she thinks the world has gotten better or worse for queer people in the interim. As for the rather severe career change she’s been through since coming out, she sees it all on a continuum, as someone who loved the business part of the music biz, even when she didn’t have to be focused on it. — and as someone who holds a belief that there’s an art to the collaborations that happen in meeting rooms, too. We also discussed the stage musical that is in the works based on her life story, with Jean Smart set to produce. But for now, the focus is on what Wright — once one of People magazine’s “Most Beautiful People in the World,” in her country-star days — is doing to beautify things from the boardroom.

First, let’s just straight-out ask: Are you done being an artist? Have you flipped the switch from one thing to another, and now you’re a corporate person, indefinitely?

That’s a fair question. I’d be surprised if that were the case. I am still every day jotting down lines and humming into my voice memo melodies. And I am actually working on writing some new music for a musical. Jean Smart acquired the life rights of my book (“Like Me: Confessions of a Heartland Country Singer”), and we are working on a musical, which is pretty cool. It’s just cool to even know Jean Smart, frankly. So that project is really fun to be working on. And I also believe in my bones I’m gonna make another album, if not several. I don’t think that could ever not be part of who I am.

But for now, with this, I’m very much in a full-time role, flying all over the world, getting to do good things and use the skillsets that I built during my music career: leadership, storytelling, listening and execution. I think sometimes people don’t realize all that an artist has to do. Not all of them love it, but I loved the business side of the music business as much as I love the music. And this skillset is so transferrable, it’s not even a stretch. I get to bring all of the skillsets around people relationships, saying, “Hey guys, there’s that mountain. Let’s go climb it.” In the past, that might have looked like, “Hey, let’s get our gear and go to Japan and do a tour” or “Let’s go into Iraq and do a USO tour.” It’s oddly similar to being an artist. That may sound weird, but I mean it.

With the avenues of making it in the music business becoming more complicated every year, the idea of simply focusing on the music and saying “I’m gonna leave the rest of it to my team” is not an option very many people have anymore.

Yeah, and I think I always knew that. In fact, there were many times throughout the course of my career, certainly when I was more popular than not, that my business manager or people at the label would say, “Hey, we’ve got this new artist that’s coming out; will you talk to them about how to think about their business?” While it maybe would have been more flattering had they said “Will you teach this person how to write a song?” or “Will you give this person voice lessons?,” no one ever asked me to do that. I’ve had two nicknames in my lifetime, from those who love me: “Captain Safety” and “Triple Checker.” Those two behaviors and personas are really helpful as a music artist who’s touring, when you’ve gotta think about what could go wrong, and then you’ve gotta triple-check your team and triple-check yourself. I do that in business, and it serves me just as well as it did when I was an artist.

ISS is certainly a world-famous company, but not all of us are too aware of it. What is this company you’ve gone to work for, in a nutshell?

It’s a 125-year-old company that provides facilities management and service lines that essentially bring buildings to life, from vertical transportation — that’s escalators, elevators, technical services around that — to HVAC, plumbing, electrical, janitorial and hospitality… When you go into a building, people don’t often notice the things that are happening, unless there’s something wrong. So we have 320,000 placemakers around the globe who go to work every day and do this really honorable work of making sure that no one notices all those high-functioning things. … In addition to those service lines, we also do the best corporate dining. We have incredible executive chefs, and we focus on sustainability; plant-forward meals are a big conversation — local sourcing, working with local farmers and local businesses. So we do everything that you might not notice when you go into a building and have a great day in that building. And our food division is Guggenheimer.

You had one corporate gig prior to this, spending four years at Unispace, as their chief diversity and inclusion officer. Your responsibilities sound possibly expanded now that you’re at ISS. What you are doing in an average day or week there?

My role is head of corporate social responsibility (CSR) and new market growth. And the new market growth piece is pretty exciting, in that I’m working on a couple of joint ventures that bring some other types of people into the ecosystem of the built environment. It’s no big surprise that the built environment — commercial real estate — has been, historically, kind of a man’s world. One of the cool things I love about ISS is we’ve got a lot of women in the business. We’re a highly diverse team, with lots of different kinds of communities of people. But I’m focused on bringing into the JV (joint venture) landscape some women-owned businesses and some diverse-owned businesses, for real business solutions. We’re not talking about just hiring a small vendor to do flowers at an event that happens to be a woman-owned business; we’re talking about a significant cog in the wheel of business.

The head of CSR is having the opportunity to see what we’re doing in each market with each client, and find out collectively what we care about and what kinds of impacts we want to make, and turbo-boosting that. It’s core to who we are. When you study the history of ISS and how we came to be you, you’ll learn that the HR function that we all know and love started with our company. A hundred years ago, our company was the first that had a woman as the head of a business unit. So this has been part of what we do for a long time, but we needed someone in here to turbo-boost it. With my background in 501C(3)s and advocacy, it’s the perfect job for me right now, because it’s storytelling, client relationships, radical listening and community impact. So, who’s luckier than me? Nobody.

The initiatives you’re talking about have historically been something to brag about. But in a climate where, to part of the population, “DEI” has become a dirty word that it seems like some companies are trying to figure out how to keep their diversifying efforts under wraps, if anything. Can a corporation brag anymore about all the wonderful things it’s doing without being targeted as woke?  

It would be disingenuous to say that people are not behind closed doors at every organization around the globe having conversations like: How do we continue to hold true to our values, and communicate to our clients and the communities that we hold these true, while not also achieving the ire of the administration. And it’s tricky. Many saw it coming. It’s easy to marginalize the queer population or Black and brown people. But when you put names and faces to it, it’s more difficult. It’s like when I, Chely, raised my hand and told the world 15 years ago: It’s not just this bucket of people, it’s me — the person that you’ve come to her shows and you’ve stood in the autograph line. At this moment in time, I see a parallel track… People have distilled it down and repackaged DEI as giving people jobs who don’t deserve jobs, or giving someone a promotion who doesn’t deserve it. It’s not that, and by the way, it’s never been that. It’s never been about anything but being merit-based, and really kind of removing obstacles for some who don’t have an unfair advantage. And so I like to encourage people to say the words “diversity, equity, and inclusion.”

That’s one thing. But then also, in identifying the good that we do as a business, we’ve been doing it since way before anyone was talking about being woke or culturally correct or politically correct or DEI or whatever that might be. It’s about making sure that our diverse teams — 320,000 people around the globe that come to work —know that they matter, that we couldn’t do this work without them. And we are diverse; it’s not something we have to set out to do. And we have to be inclusive, or our service lines can’t work together.

I don’t want to say this is a blip in time, because this (antagonism) is very real for a lot of populations, mine included, being a woman and being a queer person. But I do think that the tenets of DEI in culture, of belonging and inclusion, are outlasting this campaign to marginalize DEI. I don’t want to say this is gonna go away quickly. Cornell and Columbia are losing funding, and a lot of organizations, like the Department of Education here in New York state, are having to take a stance and say, “Look, we’re not gonna kowtow; we’re not going to disband and eradicate all of our teachings around culture and inclusion,” as they well shouldn’t. But do I think this too will pass? I do. I do.

We’ve got clients who are asking us, like, “What are you doing internally with your ISS Guggenheimer teams? Are you taking your foot off the gas of inclusion and belonging?” Our answer is no. And I see our clients’ faces, and they’re relieved and they’re grateful. When you look at our portfolio of clients, it really matters to them. And I love that our head of DEI at ISS is a straight white guy who was in the Air Force for 27 years. I love that about our company. And nothing’s changed over here. We’re still focused on making sure that we bring to life the values upon which this incredible 125-year-old company was founded, and not taking our eye off the ball, but we want to make sure we protect the business as well.

You are famous for being a do-gooder. In your new role at ISS, you have already gotten to do some very positive things. You were integral in putting together a benefit dinner at Pasadena’s Art Center in April that helped out some of the touchstone restaurants in Altadena that were devastated by the January fires. What did that entail?

In January, because we have a lot of clients on the west coast that we do FM (facility management) for — everything from corporate dining to janitorial — we mobilized an effort to feed frontline workers, doing things like making thousands of breakfast burritos… After things seemed to stabilize at the end of that week, we asked ourselves three questions: Did we do enough? Our answer was no. Could we do more? Yes. And the third was, if we could do more, what would that look like? On day two or three of the fires, I had reached out to President (Karen) Hofman at Art Center. I’d known her for quite a while and just said, “How are you? … If we can be of any help, Guggenheimer is our food division. We can feed people. Tell us where we, how we can help.”… Our team huddled and said, what can we do, hyper-locally? If there’s a problem in a community that’s suffered as Altadena and Pasadena did, let’s get in there and bring all that we have to bear.

So we agreed, with Karen, that we were gonna do this event there and cook for it. In planning the event, we did a deep dive into Altadena and Pasadena and how there are some local restaurants that were iconic enclaves of civil rights and inclusion, and women-owned businesses, that we thought we could help. We reached out to two of the restaurants, Amara Kitchen and the Little Red Hen, to include them in this event we were doing with (celebrity chef) Amanda Freitag. And we came to the table with some grant funding and a partnership that lasts more than just the night. So obviously we can procure things that a small restaurant can’t, whether it be cooking equipment or small wares or whatever they’re going to need. … It was a powerful, emotional evening. And then to watch Amanda bring Ms. (Barbara) Shea from the Little Red Hen and Paola Guasp from Amara Kitchen to up on stage and even do a mashup of two of the dishes… Watching those two beloved recipes become one was a terrific emotional metaphor for the night. And then Ikea, our partner, got up at the end of the night and surprised the restaurants with: “When you’re ready to rebuild, you don’t have to worry about furnishing your restaurants. We’ve got you.” And they’re also going to work on the design and the space planning with the Art Center for these restaurants. So it was a win-win-win-win.

Let’s talk some more about your career shift. Certainly a lot of people in music have a detour into a different field thrust upon them, because there is no avenue for them to move forward and make money. And sometimes it’s people just really wanting to have a second or third act, rather than continuing to be the opening act or slugging it out on club tours the rest of their lives, even if they still have some viability there. So some musicians may look toward someone like you for inspiration. Was this something that had been percolating for you a long time, in terms of thinking you didn’t just have to stay on the same course forever?

It’s a great question. We both know just getting a record deal does not even mean your record will ever come out, and then having a record come out and then having a hit, the odds of getting struck by lightning are probably higher. So for those of us who have been that lucky… I think I began seeing career longevity through a different lens sooner than anyone else similarly situated because I was a closeted gay person, and I knew that at any moment that my career could be gone like that if I were found out. So I did spend a good deal of my time holding on really tightly to that identity and hiding. You spend a lot of your energy when you’re in the closet staying in the closet. I did think about what would I do if this career were taken from me.

But never in my wildest dreams did I ever imagine I would be taking a train from the upper east side to an office on Madison Avenue, like I did in my previous job. Which is like being in a movie, by the way — if you’re going to work and you go through Grand Central, it’s like, whoa, I’m in a movie! But I would never have imagined it, mostly because I never saw anyone do it.

With my early understanding that my career could be taken from me in a moment’s notice, that’s why I started buying rental houses in Nashville in the late ‘90s; that, for a long time, was my side hustle. I still have those houses and I still manage them myself. I still go through the applications, and I turn over a house myself — get in there, repaint it, change the toilet, all of that. I can’t tell you how many times I was painting a rental house, ran home, got a shower, and went out and did the Grand Ole Opry. I loved it, but I also think I was doing it out of survival, and “I have to make sure I’m OK in case the career is taken.”

And how did your thinking start to change, if it did, when you came out?

When I came out of the closet in 2010, I was very measured and very strategic in how I came out. I took a lot of flack for that, by the way, but I wouldn’t change a single thing about the strategy and thinking “Hhow do I do this and how do I do it well and how do I control it?” That was business thinking. And so when I did that, I thought that would be a three-to-six-month thing, and my career was gonna change a little bit, but I’ll just go back to touring, and it might look smaller or different. What I didn’t see coming was, that’s when I began having opportunities to do culture work, belonging, DEIB work with corporations and higher ed and faith communities — and that’s where that new side hustle began.

I actually had more of that work than I wanted to do. I kind of kept it at 30% of my work, and the rest was music. There’s no reason I couldn’t have gone 70/30 (in favor of the culture work), but I was still holding on so tightly to who I thought I was and who I thought I should be. I was having an identity crisis, because if I’m not 70% a touring musician, who am I? You know, I didn’t want to feel like anything was taken from me. So that opportunity became more and more real to me, and viable, and fun and gratifying, and certainly lucrative. And then when I was on tour, when COVID hit, all of that (music performance) went away — and the next week my clients were calling for virtual events. I took on new clients, so that went from 30% to 100%. It was there all along, but I didn’t wanna hear it. I didn’t know what that said about me as an artist.

Ultimately, though, you didn’t have so much ego tied up in the rewards of being onstage that you weren’t able to step away from it. Some performers would not be able to give that up or set it aside.

You know, ego is often seen as a pejorative, but it’s not. It’s how we see ourselves, and how we think the world sees us. When I came out, I didn’t want to feel like I was having anything taken from me. It was my choice if I want to shapeshift and change my career path or write a new chapter, but, it’s like, I’ll be damned if the world or the industry is going to take something from me that I earned. And yeah, it’s really hard. You know, from like age 4, I was telling everyone in my hometown, “I’m gonna be a country music star.” And then, 35 years later, going on the “Today” show and realizing, I’m gonna give some of that back — like, give a piece of that fan base and that sweat equity back.

And I also knew something about myself as a performer that is different from some other performers. Many of them are my dear friends qwho really struggled during COVID, not because of the ambiguity of what was happening and because of the global pandemic in which the world changed, but the visceral physical need to perform… to have that conversation with an audience five nights a week. I was lucky in that, for me, I think my being a performer was to facilitate being able to write and make records and connect with people that way. So I didn’t miss performing a single night. I don’t know what that says about me. I do love every second of performing, but I didn’t feel like I lost anything during COVID, in those first few weeks when my tour got canceled. Maybe I didn’t feel that kind of deficit because I knew I had other things I could do and had been doing other things for 10 years at that point.

You know, I have done a few shows in the past few years. It feels great. There’s really nothing like standing on stage and singing songs to 600 people or 60 or 6,000 that know your songs and want to hear your stories. But it’s not something I miss when I’m not doing it. I’ll tell you what I do miss. I miss sitting down with a cup of coffee and a guitar at 8:30 in the morning and then a new song existing by 3:30. I miss what it feels like to go into a studio and kind of work through, “How are we gonna record this thing? What are the tools in the toolkit here?” I miss that collaboration with people.

But then, I get a tremendous amount of collaboration every day, all day long. I start my meetings bright and early and we end in the evening and I get to engage and collaborate with several different kinds of teams around the globe. And that kind of gives me that same kind of buzz.

What is it about that collaboration, in the studio or now in the world of business, that innately appeals to you?

Having grown up on a farm in Kansas, with not enough resources and really pragmatic parents, their mantra to us kids was, “Plan your work and work your plan.” And solving problems with others, is there anything more fun than that? I love figuring out, OK, what are we solving for? What are the skills and the tools and the resources we have, and how do we patch this thing together and achieve the outcome we want? So whether it’s throwing hay, putting up fence, digging a cistern… or putting in lateral lines for plumbing or painting a rental house, it all kind of feels the same to me as: You reverse-engineer into the outcome that you want, and that requires problem-solving and collaboration.

Speaking of problems to solve…  you did an interview recently where you said that when you came out in 2010, you figured half your audience was OK with that, at that point… and if you’d done it earlier, it would’ve been 25%. If you were revealing that now, do you think it would be a lot more than half, or about the same? And is it a relief not to have to think about that, on a different career path?

Well, let me back up to what I was solving for when I came out. I can tell you what I wasn’t solving for, in coming out and telling my story: Getting people who didn’t like the idea of a country music singer being gay to be OK with being gay. I knew very clearly I wasn’t solving for that. The outcome that I was going for was telling the world who I was, all the pieces of me — this person of faith who toured in support of the troops and was from the Midwest who loves the Grand Ole Opry and loves country music and loves Connie Smith and Loretta Lynn and also happened to be gay. Beyond that, I had to let go of people liking me. The goal, as a country music, is to make sure that as many fans like you and like what you’re doing as possible. And wanting everyone at the end of this to be so delighted with me was a hard thing to throw out of the basket. But once I did, everything got easy. Maybe that’s easy to say because I’ll be 55 this year… For the 23-year-old me that started putting out records in Nashville, that felt so important to me then.

How you feel about the openness of country music now, with time and distance from it? You have to maintain an interest when somebody like a TJ Osborne comes out. I say “somebody like…” as if there are more examples, but there aren’t a lot. Still, you carved a path that that makes it easier for those examples we do have.

Yeah. And TJ specifically, he and I have had some really good conversations and, gosh, I hold him in such high regard, along with others in the industry who have raised their hand and said, “Hey, this is who I am.” It’s different every time, from the first time someone goes down a road and paves new ground or leaves tire marks for someone behind them to follow. I feel really lucky and grateful and honored to have done what I did when I did it, and I hear so frequently from other people in the industry and new or emerging artists that my story and my coming out gave them a little bit of comfort and insight and maybe community. Of all the things I’ve done in my life, coming out, not just when I did but how I did, I think it’s the thing of which I’m most proud.

And in the industry, it’s easier to be who you are now than it was 10 years ago or 15 years ago. But it’s also a really precarious time. I think that the world has taken some steps backward, and I don’t take that lightly. You know, if you’re a current artist with records out, it may have felt like we were doing really great 10 years ago or three years ago, but now they might feel like we’re back in the ‘60s. Now, in terms of how hard it is… I can say what Mary Gauthier said about me. She said, “Well, the first mouse seldom gets the cheese.” And I think there’s some truth to that, but I also say, “Well, it depends on what the cheese is.” I just feel grateful that I had the team around me that I did — my manager, my label, my publicist, my publisher. And every time I see someone come out in country music or in the industry, I feel like that I got to be a tiny drop in this giant wave of change. It’s pretty cool to see, and people will ping me and say, “Did you see so and so came out?” Every time I do, I can’t help but smile and just know I got to be a pebble on that road.

We are in a time where, at least in forms of music other than country, coming out seems almost commonplace — at the same time that prejudice has been normalized a lot more than it was a few years ago.

Yeah, it’s hard to measure. It could be tempting for me to say, “Well, I came out 15 years ago, so it’s a whole lot easier now.” No, there are too many variables. The star power is different. Their trajectory in the lifecycle of their career is different. And in the world, the temperature has changed. I think that with the enablement of the worst angels among us, the worst behaviors, it’s like the coral gate has been opened and people just feel it’s OK to say some things that they probably wouldn’t have said out loud 15 years ago when I came out. Now, when I came out, I got death threats. I got awful tweets and Facebook messages and I had somebody come to New York (who) said they were gonna do whatever they were gonna do to me. But even though I got that stuff, I just feel like the world has gotten this license to be mean. And if I’m an artist right now on a major label or an indie label, and I’m (focused on being) on the radio, I just don’t know that it’s easier now. We’re headed in the right direction, but I would not want to be that commercial artist right now. I feel for them, you know, I really feel for them.

Moving up to the present and future, we have to ask about the biographical musical.

Well, number one, being in the presence of Jean Smart is like a spiritual experience. We are working with Irene Sanko, who wrote “Come From Away,” and working with my pal, (veteran Nashville songwriter) Wayne Kirkpatrick, on some music, so the team is building and it’s exciting. It’s just crazy to think that, at some point, knock on wood, my story will be on a stage.

Could it have a final scene with you in a corporate suite, working on benevolent things?

You know what, I thought of that. Like, what’s the ending of this thing? I mean, more than likely it would (be when) I did return to the Grand Ole Opry in 2019, after not playing the Opry for a long time. That definitely feels like a big, fancy ending. But wouldn’t it be something if the ending were me in a corporate office? I don’t know how exciting and kind of stage-worthy that would be, but it feels like a big stage-worthy ending to me, or at least a chapter. This doesn’t feel like my ending, but it feels like a damn cool chapter.