Mind Reading: David Archuleta Went Through Hell Reconciling His Sexuality And His Faith. Now, He Wants To Help Others
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Three months after the publication of Devout, David Archuleta is both digging deeper into the journey that led him to write his memoir and finding more balance in his life since the New York Times best seller debuted.
Archuleta became a household name in 2008, when at 17 he was a contestant on the seventh season of “American Idol.” While fan votes poured in, those same fans had no idea he was wrestling with deep inner turmoil about how to reconcile his sexuality with his upbringing in the Church of Latter-Day Saints.
“I just didn’t really know how to trust myself,” he says. “It was the struggle of trying to please my dad, trying to please God and how I interpreted what that meant. And a lot of that had to do with my sexuality,” he says.
“I was taught feelings aren’t always trustworthy, that sometimes you have to go against your feelings and be disciplined. You don’t have to act on feelings, and being gay is a feeling. But I think it was deflecting from the question of what being gay actually is. There are queer kids, and I was one of them but no one really taught me anything about it and so I didn’t know how to make sense of it.”
Archuleta recalls being mired in shame and guilt that at times made it difficult to be in front of people. “You start compartmentalizing things and suppressing thoughts and feelings that you don’t know how to make sense of. You try to shut it out, but it’s still there.” What TV viewers interpreted as shy and endearing qualities “was actually terror,” he says. “I thought hiding was the solution to my sexuality. And then suddenly I was one of the frontrunners of my season and I was like, Oh I can’t hide anymore. I felt like it was a struggle that everyone was now observing and maybe they didn’t know exactly what was going on.”
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Content retrieved from: https://www.forbes.com/sites/cathyolson/2026/05/22/mind-reading-david-archuleta-went-through-hell-reconciling-his-sexuality-and-his-faith-with-his-new-memoir-he-wants-to-help-others/.
