“I’m so glad that God made me gay, because I don’t know if I would’ve been so open-minded, if I was just a normal straight white guy from Mississippi.” Ahead of the Sochi Olympics, the former NSYNC singer on his new documentary and Russian homophobia.
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Lance Bass, the 34-year-old former member of NSYNC, has expanded his résumé from boy band bass singer to executive producer. His harrowing new documentary, Kidnapped for Christ , just premiered at Slamdance this past weekend; the film captures the plight of three American teens sent to a Christian reform school in the Dominican Republic.
"All of them are sent there for different reasons," a visibly energized Bass told BuzzFeed over lunch in Park City, Utah. "One is drugs, and one for just not getting along with their parents. And then there's this guy, David, who was gay, and his parents were convinced that he needed to be sent away so they could change him."
David's story lurks at the heart of the documentary; a clean-cut, smart kid, one who never got into trouble, was taken out of his senior year of high school and shipped abroad to "cure" him. For Bass, David's story is all too familiar, as he knows exactly what it's like to hide who you truly are.
"I was very much like David," Bass said. "The first memory I ever had was that I was attracted to boys, and not to girls. But I knew at a very young age that I had to hide that, thank god."
The cast and crew of Kidnapped for Christ.
Larry Busacca / Via Getty
He managed to hide his sexuality up until 2006, when he made the decision to publicly come out on the cover of People magazine. And prior to that point, the only people who actually knew he was gay were his close friends.
"My friends knew I was gay," he said. "I wasn't hiding that at all. But my family still didn't know in the beginning."
Bass recently published a letter that his mother, a devout Southern Baptist, wrote to her church, in which she describes the "miracle" of her son coming out of the closet. In the letter, his mother, Diane, describes the journey of finding out her son was gay and realizing that the true Christian thing to do would be to accept and love him unconditionally.
"My mom cried for about a week," Bass said, after he came out to her. "What I learned then about Southern mothers is that they're not against gay people, and they're not against being gay. They're against half of the world hating you. That's what scares them the most. They just know how much hatred their child is going to have to go through."
Bass experienced that hatred firsthand back in 2002, when he was training with the Russian cosmonaut program to be the youngest person ever to fly in space. He spent three months at the Yuri Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center, and that was enough time to figure out how the Russians at the center felt about the LGBT community.
"I was so scared the whole entire time that they would figure out that I was gay," he said of his time at the program. "I was always worried that they were going to figure it out at any moment, and kill me. Just come in the middle of the night and kill me."
It's no secret that Russia is a scary place for LGBT people right now. For years, gay pride parades have been met with violent protestors, anti-LGBT laws have been passed, and even public figures, like Russian celebrity Ivan Okhlobystin, have made anti-gay comments without fear of repercussion.
"It's really sad, I grew to love Russia," said Bass. "I lived in old communist Russia — I wasn't in Moscow — I was in the 1960s real Russia. So I really got to know them and appreciate their culture, and even then I knew how much they hated gays. That was one of the first things I realized, was how much they made fun of it. It scared me how much they talked about it, and how offended they were by gays."
One moment that sticks out for Bass in particular was during his medical testing before the training even began. "They had to give me a colonoscopy to test everything," he explained. "They did it. I was completely awake. It was very barbaric — their medical testing is very barbaric — and I'm sitting there and they're doing the procedure with lots of doctors in the room. So I have tears coming down my eyes, because it hurt so badly, and they all start laughing. And I asked my translator, 'Why are they laughing?' and they said, 'Well, they know now that you're not gay.' And they were all laughing because my colonoscopy hurt so much, and they were all happy because I wasn't gay."
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