Lance Bass is featured on The Advocate‘s landmark 1000th issue. In the cover story, Bass discusses what he perceives as the gay community’s love/hate relationship with him (discerned mainly via the comments left on gay blogs) He also talks about his training for space and the various relationships he’s had since coming out.

Bass attributes much of the vitriol directed at him to remarks he made in his People magazine coming out article, in which he called himself “a straight-acting gay” and chalks the comment up to naïveté.

Says Bass to the magazine: “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…When most people come out, they deal with it out of the public eye, and they start getting educated about it. Me, I had 24 hours to say what I had to say on a subject that I had no clue about… 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!…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 every-one?’ 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.'”


Bass says that although some may criticize him because he remained closeted for so long, he plans to look the other way and forge ahead with a project that addresses just that subject: “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.”

Bass can currently be seen in the NYC broadway hit Hairspray. Since breaking up with Reichen Lehmkuhl  last year, he has been spotted with hairstylist Ben Thigpen and fashion designer Narciso Rodriguez.