Clay Aiken is looking back at how coming out publicly as gay in the late aughts affected his career, speculating that the disclosure cost him about half of his audience.

“Back then it was a big deal,” the American Idol alum recently told People.

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Aiken, who came in second place in the Fox musical competition show’s second season in 2003, eventually came out in a 2008 People cover story after the birth of his son.

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“It was the first decision I made as a father,” he said at the time. “I cannot raise a child to lie or to hide things. I wasn’t raised that way, and I’m not going to raise a child to do that.”

Over a decade and a half later, Aiken told People that he noticed a dramatic decrease in ticket sales for Spamalot – the Broadway show in which he was appearing at the time – after the 2008 cover story was published.

“The first four months that I was in [Spamalot], the show was selling out, standing room only,” he said. “You can actually look at the ticket sales the week after that cover came out. It went from selling very well to the week after the cover came out, the ticket sales dropped. Spamalot ended up closing a few months after that.”

“I lost maybe 50 percent of the fan base,” he added.

But Aiken, whose holiday album Christmas Bells Are Ringing came out late last month, said that he’s pleased that we now live “in a very different time.”

“A lot of people who come out now end up having boosts in popularity because of it,” he said. “That’s mind-blowing to me because it’s the opposite of what happened when I came out. But it means that there’s progress and it means that as a country, we’re headed in the right direction.”

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