Lance Bass is opening up about what it was like to be a gay kid in a small Mississippi town.
The 43-year-old father says it was anything but easy. That's especially true because Lance's family believed that being gay was morally wrong.
“I was taught that homosexuality is a sin and you have to fix it,” he told Today Parents. “You can’t act on it. So every night I’d get into bed and ask God to please fix me.”
Lance says he was as young as 5 when he would try to "pray the gay away" each night.
Lance revealed that trying to conceal, and even change, who he was took a toll. He says he became more and more withdrawn as he tried hard to conceal his identity from his peers. Mostly, though, he was terrified of his conservative Southern Baptist parents, Jim and Diane Bass, knowing.
“The last thing I’d ever want to do is hurt my family,” he said. “I was terrified of losing them. You hear so many horror stories — especially in the South — of families rejecting their gay kids.”
Lance revealed that when he joined NSYNC at 16, he wasn't worried about his bandmates rejecting him. But he was absolutely worried about public opinion.
“During big interviews, I wouldn’t speak because I felt people would figure me out," he said. "So I became the quiet one. That’s the personality that I created so that I wasn’t expected to talk much."
As a naturally outgoing person, the alter-ego went against everything that Lance truly was. But it was the role he felt he needed to play. He even had canned responses for what he would say when interviewers asked about his love life.
“I went through a major depression for years — and to this day, I still struggle,” he says of the challenging time. “Do I have PTSD from hiding a secret for as long as I did? I don’t know. I don’t know exactly what damage was caused by staying in the closet.”
After NSYNC ended, Lance started living more authentically. He was at a gay bar one night when someone asked if he was gay. He responded honestly, but then that person turned out to be a reporter who said they were going to a run a story on Lance's sexuality with or without his permission. He was faced with deciding whether to confirm or deny who he truly was.
Lance's sister was one of the few people who knew. She told him it was going to "kill" their mother.
Lance says that it was far from an easy conversation. “My mom was surprised, and she had to go through all of the emotions. It’s almost like a feeling of loss, like someone has died,” he said. “You know, a huge part of me did die — that character I created died, and I was finally able to be my true self. Up until then I'd been lying and hiding."
After about a week, Lance's mother started speaking to him again. “She was just really emotional and needed to get her thoughts together,” Lance said. “And my dad was like, 'OK. You’re being safe, right?' And that was pretty much it.”
But after a while, Diane came around. Deep down, she wanted to support her son, so she started educating herself on LGBTQ issues.
“She’s a teacher and she immediately started reading everything about being gay,” he said. But all of her sources were faith-based.
“It was a lot of ‘you can pray the gay away,’” he said. “I would catch her reading these really horrible, demonizing books, and I’d throw them in the trash. Once she realized there was a lot of false information out there, she started talking to different pastors that accepted gay people.”
When the article about Lance's sexuality came out, he says his parents lost many friends, but they didn't stress over it. “Not only has she accepted the fact that I’m gay, but she celebrates it," Lance said. “The world has so much to learn from her.”
In 2014, Diane even spoke in front of her congregation about her journey as a Southern Baptist with a gay child, and she talked about the importance of the church becoming a more accepting place. “My son is a Christian and wants to be able to worship, but does not feel that the church cares about him and has pretty much disowned him as a fellow believer," she said.
