The American Idol contestant who got a surprise kiss on the lips from judge Katy Perry has said it was uncomfortable – but he doesn’t feel like he was sexually harassed.
“I am not complaining about the kiss,” Benjamin Glaze wrote on Instagram. “I am very honored and thankful to have been apart of American Idol.”
At his audition in front of Perry and co-judges Lionel Richie and Luke Bryan, Glaze admitted he had never kissed a girl because he had yet to be in a relationship. Perry invited him over to give her a kiss on the cheek but then quickly turned her head and kissed him on the mouth.
Bryan asked Perry, “Did you get him?”
“Yeah I got him,” she replied.
Many viewers were critical of Perry in this time of the #metoo movement.
“Imagine if a 33 year-old male artist tricked a 19 year-old female auditioner into a kiss like Katy Perry just did with that teenage guy,” tweeted Craig M. Tiede. “Would we all think it was cute?”
Tweeted Anna Baglione: ”If Katy Perry was a man and that American Idol kiss happened to a woman, it would be sexual harassment, right? If we want people to listen to legit claims of harassment by women, we need to end the double standards."
MORE: Katy Perry Gives American Idol Contestant His First Kiss
But, on Instagram, Glaze said: “I do not think I was sexually harassed by Katy Perry … I was uncomfortable in a sense of how I have never been kissed before and was not expecting it.”
The 20-year-old made the comment after telling the New York Times he was “a tad bit uncomfortable” with the kiss.
“Would I have done it if she said, ‘Would you kiss me? No, I would have said no,” explained Glaze, who said he was raised in a conservative family. “I was uncomfortable immediately. I wanted my first kiss to be special.”
Glaze told the Times his friends agreed that Perry’s surprise kiss doesn’t count anyway.
“It was lip contact versus a romantic situation with someone you care about,” he said. “That’s what a real first kiss is.”