Singer and actor Lance Bass says that, after coming out as gay in 2006, a network TV show he was supposed to appear in was shut down.

“I had a sitcom with The CW [TV network] at the time, and we were about to shoot the pilot and this came out and they were like, ‘We can’t do the show anymore. Like, they have to believe that you’re straight to play a straight character,’” Bass told California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) and media businessman Doug Hendrickson, co-hosts of the podcast Politickin’.

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“Every casting director I knew, they’re like, ‘Lance, we can’t cast you because they can’t look past… You’re too famous for being gay now that they can’t look at you as anything other than that.’ So, I lost everything,” Bass said.

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Bass didn’t mention the name of the show or any of the other people involved with its production. The CW declined to respond to questions about the show when asked by People magazine.

Bass also said that his other talent agents “fell off” after he came out, as if they no longer knew how to manage his career after he became known as a gay celebrity.

“They were right about that, it was definitely a career killer,” Bass added. “A lot of the casting directors for sure, they were like, ‘Yeah, that was really dumb’ … And so I had to completely restart and rebrand at that moment.”

He said, however, that some of those same directors have since cast him in other roles, which he called “funny and ironic.” He also said while the situation “sucks” he understood it as a business decision and added that he never holds any grudges about what occurred.

The U.S. was largely anti-gay when Bass came out

Bass, who first rose to fame as the bass singer for the American pop boy band NSYNC, came out in a cover story for People magazine on July 26, 2006.

At the time he said, “The thing is, I’m not ashamed – that’s the one thing I want to say. I don’t think it’s wrong, I’m not devastated going through this. I’m more liberated and happy than I’ve been my whole life. I’m just happy.”

However, anti-gay sentiment in the U.S. was high at the time. In 2006, then-President George W. Bush had called for Congress to pass a federal amendment banning gay marriage and 23 states had already passed their own laws or constitutional amendments banning gay marriage. Nearly 55% of Americans opposed gay marriage at the time, according to the Pew Research Center.

Gay male visibility in media was also fairly low. While the TV sitcom Will & Grace ran from 1998 to 2006, one of its gay male leads was played by a straight actor and its gay co-star Sean Hayes didn’t come out until 2010. The most high-profile male celebrity to have come out before Bass (arguably) was George Michael in 1998 after an arrest for public sex. The most prominent mainstream gay movie to have come out in the new millennium was Brokeback Mountain, a 2005 tragedy whose two male romantic leads were played by straight actors.

Inclusive media aided gay visibility after Bass came out, as did the ongoing gay marriage debate and the 2010 emergence of the It Gets Better Project — a video social media campaign to encourage gay kids not to kill themselves — in which a handful of celebrities, business leaders, and other social media users came out to help raise awareness of community support.

Bass told People magazine that he had known he was gay since age 5 but didn’t know any gay people growing up in his home state of Mississippi. He said that, as a child, he regularly prayed to God not to be gay because he had heard of gay people being murdered and homosexuality being caused by the devil.

Bass married actor Michael Turchin in December 2014. They have twin children. Since 2006, he has appeared or voice acted in eight films, 16 TV shows, and two video games.

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