He should be the out celebrity gays continually clamor for. At just 28, Lance Bass already has an impressive and varied list of accomplishments: a record-shattering stint with the band 'N Sync, a memoir on The New York Times best-seller list, a role singing and dancing on Broadway, and a Human Rights Campaign award. Hell, the kid even endured several grueling months of training—plus surgery—to win NASA's endorsement for a trip to the International Space Station.
So why do some of you—and you know who you are—see him on the cover of this magazine and scoff? Is it because he's "just a pop star"—as though that's a genre of music that gay people have suddenly rejected? Is it because his coming-out interview in People magazine convinced you that he must be a self-loathing homosexual? Or is he just not your type?
Whatever the reason, Lance Bass can't seem to catch a break from us. What you might not realize is that he knows it. He's heard every complaint and every rumor—at least he thought he had, until he wandered into the bathroom of a New York gay bar a few weeks ago and overheard two men scheming in the next stall. Their plan? To snap a picture of Bass with a camera phone and sent it to Internet gossip Perez Hilton, then claim they had a threesome.
"I'm hearing this, and I just want to knock down the door and say, 'Are you kidding me?'" Bass relates, incredulous. "They didn't even know I was there, and it's crazy to hear people plotting against you just because they can."
That sort of negative attention is nothing new for Bass, who seems both adored and scorned by gays in equal measure. Just check out the comments section on any gay blog: The very same people who swoon to any comment by Jake Gyllenhaal will bare their fangs for Bass, invariably declaring, "Why is he famous again?" Does it ever make him feel like gay people can be somewhat...
"Fickle?" Bass supplies, chuckling. "You know, every community is hard to please. Our community is very fickle. It's a touchy community because it's the last civil rights movement we have left here in America. So when someone new like myself comes along and says off-the-mark things, yeah, I can see how people would get pissed."
In person, Bass seems like an unlikely target for anyone's vitriol. Reserved, well-spoken, and unfailingly polite, he freely cops to growing pains in his first year as an out gay man—a year in which his coming-out announcement was followed by two more, from T.R. Knight and Neil Patrick Harris. But while those actors publicly came out in their 30s—after having lived at least a decade as men who were out in their private lives—Bass came out at 26, just a few short years after he'd had his first gay relationship.
At times that inexperience showed. Only two months after he came out to his parents in May 2006, rumors about Bass's sexuality were so pervasive that publicist Ken Sunshine recommended a People magazine tell-all. Though Bass expected he'd have at least a week to mull the idea over, People sparked to the plan immediately, scheduling a photo shoot and interview for the very next day. The day after that, the magazine decided to bump Johnny Depp off the cover, and released its newest cover to the media: Bass, with the words I'M GAY emblazoned in huge yellow letters.
When most people come out, they deal with it out of the public eye, and they start getting educated about it," Bass says. "Me, I had 24 hours to say what I had to say on a subject that I had no clue about."
The result was a cover story that went a long way to further gay visibility but still prompted sniping from many gays—especially for employing the divisive phrase "straight-acting."
"That People magazine article was hilarious," says Perez Hilton, who often covers Bass on his widely read blog. "If Lance is a straight-acting gay, then I eat pussy for breakfast, lunch, and dinner."
Even now, Bass blanches when he's reminded of the term, which he calls a rookie mistake. "It was a very normal phrase among my circle of friends—and they'd always say, 'You're such a SAG'—a straight-acting gay. So I reveal that to People magazine, and it looks like I created this phrase and [that] I'm trying to start this movement that you should be straight-acting if you're gay. It's just dumb!"
Bass was unaware that the phrase is often used by men who are still adjusting to their sexuality, and it was his first lesson in what some of his forerunners already know all too well: The relative paucity of openly gay celebrities means that those who are out bear the burden of the hopes, dreams, and scrutiny of gay people vying for visibility. In other words, if you're going to be an ambassador for the gay community—and you inevitably will be at Bass's level of fame—you need to know your shit.
Since then, Bass has strived to educate himself—even dipping his toe into gay activism by becoming involved in Logo's Visible Vote project—but his gradual evolution has been intentional. "I knew last year that when I came out, if I said, 'OK, I'm going to lead every parade and I'm going to speak at every engagement,' half of the community would say, 'Screw you! Who are you to come out and start speaking for everyone?'" He adds, "That's why I held back and was like, OK, I said my piece now; I'm just gonna lay back and get way more educated about myself, about the community, and not pretend I know what I'm talking about."
He laughs, "Then, of course, the other half of the community is like, 'Why don't ou do more?' So it's very hard to please everyone."
Hard, yes, but that hasn't kept Bass from trying. As a member of 'N Sync, he carefully conditioned himself to please his female fan base above all—meaning: no cigarettes, no booze, and absolutely no talking of relationships.
"I was always watching what I said, what I did," he says. "You would learn so many things throughout the years, like, gay people do this and gay people say this. I remember one tikme someone told me that if you say the word so a lot, that's a tell that you're gay. I was so afraid to say the word so in anything I did! That's how crazy things got for me."
Though 'N Sync's success would spirit Bass away from what he describes as "the shackles of my small-town life," his upbringing still left him afraid to come out. He kept his sexuality secret from the other members of the band, even making out with women in clubs so that his band mates would think he was taking groupies home. Clandestine gay relationships eventually followed, though the stress of keeping his boyfriends secret took its toll.
"It's crazy to even think of having a relationship when you can't be honest with yourself," Bass says. "That's why I think I always fell in love so quickly, because deep down I thought, This might be the only thing you're able to find."
Unfortunately for Bass, his first gay relationship was with a man who still identifies as straight. "Still, to this day, he's with women only, and I was the only guy he was ever with," he says. "To have that be your first relationship is really confusing because that sets the precedent for everything you're going to have to deal with in future relationships. I had feelings—huge feelings—that weren't reciprocated."
As more of his close friends learned his secret, Bass began to come to terms with his sexuality, but he was still afraid that going public would jeopardize 'N Sync's popularity with female fans. In the end, those concerns were moot. In 2004, after a band hiatus that found Bass acting, film producing, and training in Russia to become a cosmonaut, Timberlake informed the group that he was, for all intents and purposes, leaving 'N Sync to go solo. Though he initially felt betrayed by Timberlake, Bass soon found that the lessened glare of the spotlight allowed him more freedom to be himself.
He also found that some of those personal choices would, inevitably, make him the brunt of many jokes, and that realization, Bass says, is one of the reasons he stayed in the closet for so long, for fear of embarrassing gays everywhere. The worst of it came when he returned to the United States from Russia after months of difficult training with cosmonauts. (Bass's attempt to go into space aboard a Soyuz spacecraft was ultimately shelved when a sponsor who had agreed to pay for his passage pulled out.) While space travel is a dream many people have as children, most grow out of it. Bass's story struck some as a juvenile obsession—or worse, a transparent publicity grab. As usual, the reaction caught Bass off guard.
"I worked the hardest I've ever worked on that," says Bass, who even underwent a voluntary procedure to correct a heart arrhythmia so that he could continue with training. "I went through some things that really changed my life, and it hurts to work that hard on something and people just don't even care."
Then, just a few months after the dissolution of 'N Sync, Bass met Reichen Lehmkuhl. Best known for winning the CBS reality show The Amazing Race, Lehmkuhl was working in real estate and was introduced to Bass when the entertainer was planning to sell his Los Angeles house. The two eventually started dating, and sightings of them together began to pop up on gossip blogs. This was a turning point for Bass, since Lehmkuhl is openly gay.
"I was finally in a relationship I was proud of," Bass explains. "I was very much in love, and when you're in love, you don't care what people think." However, Bass admits that the gays' treatment of Lehmkuhl made him wary of what his own reception might be like.
"I saw how half the people hated Reichen's guts—they didn't just dislike him, they hated him—and then the other half just loved him," Bass says. "I never could understand that."
Inevitably, his relationship with Lehmkuhl became glaringly obvious and finally ended up on the New York Post's Page Six, which Bass says was the catalyst for his People story. Of course, this led many to snipe that Bass was simply coming out in order to promote himself. "We've already established that Reichen is someone who wanted the fame and the spotlight and wanted cameras on him; otherwise, he wouldn't have gone on a reality show in the first place," says Ken Baker, online chief of Us magazine.
Baker says that some of that public perception may have rubbed off on Bass, and he is quick to leap to the singer's defense. "I don't want to sound like a cliché when I say that he's such a nice guy, but there aren't a lot of celebrities you're immediately going to say that about in Hollywood," Baker says. "Lance really is."
Even Perez Hilton agrees, and he notes that Bass is famous for more than just his personal life. "No matter what anyone says, they can't take away the multiplatinum albums that he was a part of," he says. "He comes from a place of having accomplished something, so he's not just a celebrity. I appreciate that and commend that."
Then why do so many in the blogosphere persist in vilifying Bass? Though he says he understands why people gossip about him—when reminded that Hilton broke extensive stories about the rise and fall of his relationship with Lehmkuhl, Bass jokes, "I basically started that website!"—he admits that the cruel tone of some coverage can sting, especially when it comes from other gay men.
"I'm only human," he says. "If someone says anything negative about you—even though I've learned to take it with a grain of salt, and I know it's entertainment, and I'm in a position where people are going to pick me apart—you can't help but feel down sometimes."
As harrowing as that criticism can be, Bass is trying to negotiate his position among gays, and that may shed some light on the delicate dance performed by gay celebrities who are trying to position themselves as "also gay," another term Bass coined in his People interview. It's an identity that Ellen DeGeneres, T.R. Knight, and Cynthia Nixon have attempted, with varying degrees of success, to achieve. But is it possible for them to serve as advocates for gays without becoming stereotyped by the industry they work in?
"When you're put in that position, it's kind of hard to say to [the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation], 'No, I won't speak out,'" says Seth Abramovitch, associate editor of the celebrity-focused blog Defamer. "You do it to be a better citizen and a good role model, but what happens is that's all people start seeing you as."
While that mantle may have worried Bass when he first came out, he says he's now "so comfortable being who I am" that he's unafraid to make career choices that reflect—and even promote—a gay sensibility. In January he finishes a six-month stint on Broadway playing Corny Collins in Hairspray, and he is already talking to Logo about developing a reality show that would promote a whole new class of openly gay musicians.
"I want to prove something," Bass says. "The music business says you can't be openly gay and be successful, which I think is crap. I want to go out and search for a musical act, develop them, make their first album, everything—and all that time they're openly gay."
Some critics might carp about his mission, since Bass himself remained closeted for so long. While he voices regret for not coming out during his 'N Sync days, Bass still thinks his actions have had a powerful effect.
"I have people coming up to the stage door after Hairspray saying 'I came out because of you' or 'I told my mom after reading the People article'...and some of them are 12, 13 years old!" he marvels. "And they're already comfortable enough to say, 'This is who I am.' It's such a good feeling." It's a feeling that Bass never could have fathomed at that age, though he's beginning to feel it now. If allowed, Bass might just actually survive being gay, and maybe even thrive in his status as a gay celebrity. And who wouldn't want that?