Clay Aiken: I'm a Gay Dad

Following the Aug. 8 bearing of his son Parker, accompanist Clay Aiken is afterward through on a affiance he fabricated to himself as a new dad: to about accede that he's gay.

"It was the aboriginal accommodation I fabricated as a father," Aiken, 29, tells the accessible affair of PEOPLE, on newsstands Friday. "I cannot accession a adolescent to lie or to adumbrate things. I wasn't aloft that way, and I'm not traveling to accession a adolescent to do that."

Aiken says he expects the account may beat some of his fans. "Whether it be accepting a adolescent out of wedlock, or whether it be artlessly getting a homosexual, it's traveling to be a lot," said Aiken, who alternate to Broadway endure anniversary as Sir Robin in Monty Python's Spamalot.

He adds that he hopes his admirers "know that I've never advised to lie to anybody at all. ... But if they leave, I don't wish them to leave antisocial me."

How He Came Out to His Family

The born-again Christian accompanist aswell reveals how he told his mother Faye he's gay four years ago. After bottomward off his adolescent brother Brett, who was getting deployed to Iraq, at Camp Lejeune, "I started arrant in the car," Aiken remembers. "It was dark. I was sitting there, cerebration to myself. I don't apperceive why I started cerebration about it ... I just started bawling. She fabricated me cull over the car and it just came out."

So what was his mom's reaction? "She started crying. She was acutely somewhat stunned. But she was actual admiring and actual comforting." Even now, Aiken admits, "She still struggles with things absolutely a bit, but she's appear a continued way."

As for his own child, Aiken tells PEOPLE that Parker – who was conceived via in vitro fertilization with his best friend, music ambassador Jaymes Foster – will be aloft in an ambiance that is "accepting and acceptance him to be happy."

Says Aiken: "I accept no abstraction if he'll be gay or straight. It's not something I'll accept annihilation to do with, or that he'll accept annihilation to do with. It's already apparently up central the cipher there ... No amount what the bearings you're in, if you're aloft in a admiring environment, that's the a lot of important thing."