Broadway Singer Jennifer Holliday Drops Out of Trump Inauguration
A day after Jennifer Holliday was listed among the artists participating in Donald Trump‘s Make America Great Again! Welcome Celebration, the Broadway star announced that she was dropping out of the inauguration performance following criticism from her fans.
In an open letter to Holliday’s “beloved LGBT community” that she provided to the Wrap, the Dreamgirls singer explained that she agreed to the performance because of her reputation as a “bi-partisan songbird.”
“I was honestly just thinking that I wanted my voice to be a healing and unifying force for hope through music to help our deeply polarized country,” Holliday wrote. “Regretfully, I did not take into consideration that my performing for the concert would actually instead be taken as a political act against my own personal beliefs and be mistaken for support of Donald Trump and Mike Pence.”
Pence, as governor of Indiana, signed the controversial Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which targeted the rights of LGBTQ people.
Holliday, a longtime star on Broadway, admitted that the response from the LGBT community to her performance – including a Daily Beast article titled “Jennifer Holliday Will Perform at Trump’s Inauguration, Which Is Heartbreaking to Gay Fans” – convinced her to pull out of the Make America Great Again concert.
“I sincerely apologize for my lapse of judgment, for being uneducated on the issues that affect every American at this crucial time in history and for causing such dismay and heartbreak…