Clay Aiken surprised the public by announcing he’d welcomed a son. “At the end of the day, Parker is the most important thing of the year, and of my life, without question,” he told People. The question was, “Who’s the baby momma?” It turned out to be Jaymes Foster, the sister of David Foster. “She’s very close with Clay; they’re best friends. It made perfect sense to me that he’d want to have a child with his best friend,” David told AP radio (via The Register Citizen). The producer called Aiken a “spectacular father” and his sister “a natural mother,” sharing she’d “always wanted a child, so it kind of worked out.”
Few were surprised when Aiken came out to People months later. Unfortunately, he was forced out of the closet after Rosie O’Donnell unintentionally outed him while accusing Kelly Ripa of being homophobic. “I cannot raise a child to lie or to hide things,” Aiken told People. “I wasn’t raised that way, and I’m not going to raise a child to do that.”
Like his love life, Aiken, a devout Christian, tries to shield his son from the media glare. However, he does open up about Jaymes. “She was ending a relationship, a marriage, which she had been in for over 20 years,” Aiken told ABC. “I’ve always wanted kids. Being a gay man, it wasn’t something for me that was going to be an option either way.”