If you were alive in the late ’90s, you know NSYNC. The boy band that gave us No Strings Attached, sold over 70 million records, and had teenage girls (and plenty of gay boys) absolutely losing their minds.
Lance Bass was the bass singer. Joey Fatone was the big, lovable one with the voice. Five guys at the absolute peak of pop stardom.
And one night, at 3 in the morning, Joey went looking for Lance – and walked straight into the secret his gay bandmate had been hiding from all of them.
That story of that moment came out this week in Boy Band Confidential, Joey’s new four-part docuseries on Investigation Discovery. The series goes deep on the darker side of the ’90s boy band era, but this particular moment is something else entirely.
So How Did It Actually Go Down?
When NSYNC were at their peak (sometime in the early 2000s), the band had been out together for the night.
Everyone ended up back at Lance’s place. Joey crashed in a guest bedroom. At around 3 a.m., he woke up, decided it was time to go home, and went to find Lance to say goodbye.
Bedroom: empty.
He checked the office.
“I open the door,” Joey recalled, “and Lance is sitting there, and there’s a guy straddling on top of him.”
Lance’s very first boyfriend. On his lap. At the computer. And Joey Fatone is now standing in the doorway taking all of this in.
Lance later laughed telling it: “Straight guys don’t do that.”
But what happened in the next few minutes is genuinely one of the sweetest things you’ll read this week.
“Surprise!”
Rather than panic, Lance invited Joey into the room. He looked at his bandmate and said, simply: “Surprise.”
Joey’s response was instant. “Oh, please. I don’t care.”
Lance later said he already suspected Joey wouldn’t care – but that actually hearing those words, out loud, after years of silence, still floored him.
“It was just so nice to hear those words, and finally have one of the members of your group know.”
He asked Joey to keep it between them until he was ready to tell the rest of the band. Joey didn’t even hesitate.
“I go, ‘Lance, I love you. You’re my brother. You let me know when it’s right for you to tell. I’m not saying nothing to the guys.'”
He kept that promise. But there’s a reason that promise carried so much weight – because what Lance was carrying at the time was heavier than most people realized.
The Weight Behind That Secret
Lance has talked openly about knowing he was gay from around the age of five – growing up in Mississippi, in a deeply religious household where homosexuality was considered dangerous and sinful, spending years praying every night to wake up different.
By the time NSYNC were one of the biggest bands on the planet, the fear had only grown.
“I knew, especially in the year 2000, that if anyone found out that I was gay, NSYNC’s career would be completely over, and these guys would hate me for the rest of my life,” he’s said.
So he made himself smaller. He became “the quiet one” – deliberately pulling back in interviews so nobody would read into him too much. He was protecting four other people’s careers with his silence.
And here’s the gut-punch: when he finally did tell the band, years later, their reaction had nothing to do with anger.
What The Rest Of NSYNC Actually Said
They weren’t upset he was gay. They were upset he hadn’t trusted them sooner.
“The guys are still so pissed that I wasn’t able to tell them when we were still a group,” Lance has said. “The thing that pissed them off the most is they thought we could’ve had so much more fun together at the height of NSYNC. I could’ve been my real self with them, and they wish they could’ve had that.”
The band he spent years protecting with his silence just wanted more of him. All of him.
He publicly came out in 2006 on the cover of People magazine – and Joey showed up in that interview too, fully in his corner. “He took years to really think about how he was going to tell everyone. I back him up 100 per cent.”
The public response was warm. The professional fallout was brutal.
The Career Cost Nobody Talks About
A CW sitcom Lance was set to star in – pilot already scheduled, days away from shooting – got canceled immediately. The network’s reasoning? Audiences needed to believe he was straight to play a straight character.
Casting directors stopped calling. “You’re too famous for being gay now,” was the feedback he kept hearing. His own summary of that period: “I lost everything.”
He was punished, professionally, for the very thing his bandmates had been waiting to celebrate with him.
It took years to rebuild. But he did.
Where Things Stand Now
Lance has been married to his husband Michael Turchin since 2014. They have twins – Violet and Alexander. His take on the industry today is a lot warmer: “It’s actually a good thing to be yourself these days.”
As for Boy Band Confidential – it’s streaming now, and it’s worth your time.
The series features interviews with Backstreet Boys’ AJ McLean, 98 Degrees’ Nick Lachey, and Boyz II Men’s Wanya Morris and Shawn Stockman, and it pulls no punches about what the boy band machine really looked like from the inside.
But the Lance and Joey moment is the one that lingers. Because sometimes the most important thing that ever happens to someone doesn’t happen on a stage or in a magazine.
Sometimes it happens at 3 in the morning, through an open door, with a friend who just says: I don’t care. I love you. Take your time.