TBO.com - TBO is Tampa Bay Online

Singer-Actor Moves On But Feels 'Out Of Sync'

ADVERTISEMENT

By MELENA RYZIK, The New York Times

Published: October 28, 2007

NEW YORK - Lance Bass has faced his share of screaming girls - the teenyboppers, mother-daughter pairs and grown women who have followed him since he joined the pop band 'N Sync at 16. But the fan-boys are sort of new.

'He's really cute,' Richie Tran, 35, a Manhattan doctor, said recently as he waited for Bass to appear at the stage door of 'Hairspray,' the Broadway show Bass joined in August.

'I love 'N Sync, and he reminds me the most of myself,' said Sean Avolio, 19, another fan.

When Bass emerged to sign autographs, Avolio, an aspiring actor from Harlem, was almost too nervous to talk. 'My heart is still going,' he said after taking his photo with Bass.

Since the dissolution of 'N Sync in 2002, Bass, 28, has mostly been in the spotlight for nonprofessional reasons.

'I'm gay,' he announced on the Aug. 7, 2006, cover of People magazine. That disclosure made him a rarity among former boy-banders - a rarity even among young multiplatinum-selling pop stars.

And it capped an already unusual career that includes Bass's attempt to travel to outer space and his newly published memoir, 'Out of Sync.'

'I've been asked too many times to write a book by the fans,' he said recently. 'And it was very, I don't know, like, therapeutic, writing this book. Because the whole time, with 'N Sync especially, it went by just so fast, it was like a blur. There was a lot of different things that I didn't realize were going on.'

In the book, written with Marc Eliot and released Tuesday, Bass reveals details that had been largely hidden by contracts and nondisclosure agreements: about the end of 'N Sync; about his relationship with the boy-band mastermind Lou Pearlman, now in jail in Orlando awaiting trial for embezzlement; about why he never made it to space.

The pile-up of disclosures is evidence of a life spent cosseted by professional hangers-on, maintaining a carefully manufactured image. Without that secrecy, Bass is charting a new path: Will he be a hero to the gay community and to his former fans? Can he date freely and adapt professionally? Just what does a gay millionaire former boy-bander would-be astronaut do?

For Bass, the past year has been a revelation. His coming-out was a hastily organized affair, driven by blogger gossip after he was spotted with his now former boyfriend, Reichen Lehmkuhl, an alumnus of the reality show 'The Amazing Race,' in Provincetown, Mass. As Bass divulges in his book, the entire process - from a call alerting him that the story was about to break to the People interview and cover shoot - took only 36 hours.

His public declaration also had private implications: Bass' family, Southern Baptists who live near his hometown of Clinton, Miss., were not all aware he was gay. After he came out to his parents, he writes, his mother asked him: 'If you died today, would you go to heaven?'

'It's still a very questionable thing to a lot of my family,' he said in an interview in his apartment, a rented two-story penthouse in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan. 'Just the way they're raised, you know, it's just so confusing to them. They don't know if it's wrong.'

Bass says he is dating casually, though he doesn't often bring boyfriends to meet his family.

'To publicly be able to be seen with someone, it's just such a weight off your shoulders,' he said, sitting on a couch in his modernist living room, as two publicists and an assistant sat nearby. 'I can't believe how happy I am now.'

In 'N Sync, Bass was the shy one; now he prefers 'laid back.' He dresses preppy casual, in jeans and slim polo shirts. He ends many evenings drinking wine on his large roof deck, plays poker with the 'Hairspray' cast during intermissions and loves what he calls 'dive bars,' including his old bandmate Justin Timberlake's new Upper East Side barbecue restaurant, Southern Hospitality.

Although Bass enjoys nearly unanimous support in the gay community for coming out, he has been criticized for characterizing himself in the People magazine story as a 'straight-acting gay,' and some chastise him for not doing more with his celebrity.

'Within the gay celebrity world, he's at the top of the list, but not because of anything great he's done,' said Andrew Belonsky, editor of Queerty

.com, a gay issues blog. 'I think that somebody in his position could be doing a lot more with the amount of ink that he gets.'

Bass' coming-out, Belonsky said, 'was the best career move he ever could've made.'

And Bass is capitalizing on this new identity. He is developing a reality show for Logo, the MTV-owned, gay-oriented network, that would assemble an openly gay boy-band.

He also continues to perform in 'Hairspray' and is contemplating a solo album, though he doesn't know what it would sound like (he says his favorite bands are Aerosmith, the Goo Goo Dolls and Journey).

Yet he still talks about 'N Sync in the present tense.

'I definitely regret that we're not making music right now,' he said. 'I mean, at one point we were the biggest band in the world.'

Bass said he could not predict how his former bandmates would react to his memoir, but he hoped they would all read it.

Share this:

Loading Comments...

Email Print

ADVERTISEMENT