Lance Bass: Out of Sync
I must admit, until Lance Bass came out on the cover of People Magazine last year, I hadn’t thought much about the former *NSYNC singer. I wasn’t a boy-band fan, and had only peripherally followed the goings-on of other members, like Justin Timberlake, and the dancing and Singing Bee antics of Joey Fatone.
I’m sure, however, that real fans were not as clueless. And of course, that’s who Lance’s new memoir, Out of Sync, is intended for.
That’s not to say that I didn’t appreciate Out of Sync, but I was much more interested in Lance's coming out experiences, than I was in the details of the band’s early days or unscrupulous managers.
So I’ll just skip to that part.
Lance describes the challenges of hiding his sexual orientation while in the band. He explains his rational for doing so by saying, “We had worked long and hard to make it, and I couldn’t risk that, not just for my own sake, but for the rest of the band. So I kept my private life private and went along with the publicity machine that always had us hooking up with girls.”It is only after the band breaks up, and he is threatened with being outed in the media, that Lance decides he should tell his own story.
Lance has said in interviews, he doesn’t plan on being the “poster boy for gay celebrities.” It's this kind of stance that has lead to criticisms that he has not done more for the gay community with his fame. It is true that his might not be the most activist driven life. But as he reminds us repeatedly throughout the book, that’s not what Lance Bass is about.
