Sat. February 28, 2015
Former NSync member Lance Bass claims that bloggers, including Perez Hilton, bullied him into coming out gay.
The recently married Bass discussed his 2006 coming out in Attitude's Love & Marriage special commemorative issue.
Bass came out in a People magazine cover story.
"Two years before I came out I was really bullied on the Internet by bloggers, that's when Perez Hilton just started and was just really malicious against me," Bass explained. "So, because of the bloggers like him hounding me, all the other magazines started calling me and saying, 'Look, we know you're gay, you can write the story with or without us, but we have to write it.' I decided to go with People and I think they did a great job. I had 24 hours to decide if I was going to come out or not, and within 24 hours it was on the stands."
"I had a lot of pressures on me at that point. Not only was I keeping the secret from my family, but I also had this career with four of my best friends. I knew, in the late 1990s/early 2000s, that if I came out, people would hate *NSYNC, and that would be the end of our career. There was no way I was going to do that to my four best friends, so, as long as I was with them, I was asexual. I wasn't with a girl, I wasn't with a guy, I just focused on work, and it kept me out of trouble."
"It wasn't until I realized there wasn't going to be another *NSYNC album that I felt ready! I wasn't even that sad about the end of *NSYNC as I felt that I'd actually get to be myself from then on. That's when I started finding myself and started dating guys – it was great," he added.
(Related: Lance Bass initially said "no" to E! wedding special.)
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