It’s all about equality for ’N Sync heartthrob
Lance Bass let his wedding be filmed for E! special
Lance Bass has been a globetrotting pop star and an aspiring astronaut. Now, he’s something much more earthbound, and probably more important: Michael Turchin’s husband.
The couple was married on Dec. 20 in a lavish ceremony at the Park Plaza Hotel in Los Angeles.
The event will be televised on Thursday at 8 p.m. in Lance Loves Michael: The Lance Bass Wedding, a 90-minute special on E! chronicling the wedding from planning to “I do’s.”
Gay marriage is nothing new, even in the U.S. Televised gay marriage, on the other hand, is not only new but virtually unprecedented in America. Turchin’s and Bass’s ceremony will be the first celebrity wedding between two men to be broadcast in the country.
That’s why Bass — a former member of the boy band ’N Sync who has contended with tabloid exposure for most of his adult life — allowed the cameras in.
“The motivation is visibility,” he said in an interview last week. “If I were getting married to a woman, I wouldn’t have it on TV.
“We’re so close to getting marriage equality all across the States,” he added, a buttery Dixie drawl still perceptible in his voice. “Especially those southern states that are right on the line.”
Indeed, a federal judge in Bass’s native Mississippi ruled that the state’s prohibition on gay marriage was unconstitutional just weeks before his wedding.
Thirty-six states plus the District of Columbia currently allow same-sex couples to wed.
Another sign of the times: there were two celebrity gay weddings that weekend in December. Elton John and longtime partner David Furnish tied the knot on the 21st.
“That definitely wasn’t planned,” Bass laughed.
He and Turchin met four years ago in Palm Springs, Fla., at a mutual friend’s birthday party. “We just kind of hit it off,” Bass said. The former teen heartthrob proposed in New Orleans a year and a half ago.
The best part about getting married was the food tasting, Bass said.
The hardest part was winnowing down the guest list to a manageable size.
All of the members of ’N Sync earned invites, naturally. Joey, JC and Chris made it; Justin (as in Timberlake) was on tour and sent his regrets.
“When you go through something like that, you’re a family,” said the man often described as the group’s “nice one.”
Now Bass has the makings of a new family. He and Turchin both want kids; “I’ve always said I want three; he’s happy with two.” Surrogacy and adoption are both in the cards.
The Turchin and Bass clans, meanwhile, are getting along “famously.”
“It’s funny seeing them together,” Bass said. “Our families could not be more opposite.”
“His family is from Miami Beach. They’re very liberal and Jewish.”
If the in-laws have anything in common, it seems to be their mutual blessing of their sons’ marriage.
“My Southern Baptist, conservative Republican parents walked me down the aisle,” Bass said. “That speaks volumes to the way things are changing.”