Boy band royalty Lance Bass joined Khloé Kardashian on this week’s episode of Kocktails with Khloé, and he had quite a lot to say. The singer told Khloé how he came out to the public as a gay man, and why certain members of the LGBT community were telling him “Bye Bye Bye.”
At the round table, Lance spoke on what led up to his very public coming out in 2006, all because a reporter overheard his conversation in line at a gay bar.
“I had 24 hours to come out of the closet,” he explained. “All the magazines called and said, ‘Look, we’re doing the story with or without you.’ And I wasn’t ready, at all, to really share that.”
He went on to talk about how he had a boyfriend at the time, so friends were already in the know about his orientation. The issue was that, as a public figure, he wasn’t ready to be seen as a “spokesperson” for the LGBT community.
But he went through with the interview and his story was featured in People magazine as the cover story the next day. Surprisingly, some of the biggest critics of his coming out were in the LGBT community based on what he said during the interview.
“My friends would always joke around with me and call me a sag, because I was a straight-acting gay,” he said. “So, to this day, I get gay guys coming up to me all the time saying like, ‘I can’t believe you would create something like sag, you’re not a part of this community.’”
But it’s safe to say that Lance Bass is in a much better place now, having married his partner Michael Turchin in 2014. Make sure you check out Kocktails with Khloé to get ‘N Sync with the rest of the guests, including Holly Robinson Peete, Jamie Kennedy and Shanola Hampton.
