#duncan james

Duncan James | Blue

"For me it was a really hard thing to do to come out, coming from a boyband, a world where you have a lot of female fans."

"There was a lot of pressure from the record company, I didn't want to let the boys down so I kept my mouth shut."

Jonathan Knight | NKOTB

"I was a young kid in the New Kids and I had CBS, my manager, all these people telling me 'You can't let anyone know you're gay. If you let the world know you’re gay, you're gonna ruin your career, you're gonna ruin your manager’s career, CBS is going to lose money on record sales.' It was just so much on my shoulders as a young kid."

"Knight says he never hid his sexuality, but was pressured to keep quiet to maintain the boy band’s heartthrob image"

Mark Feehily | Westlife

"I was playing this boyband character and was all smiles and Smash Hits used to ask 'what's your favourite kind of girl?' and I was answering them thinking 'Oh my God this is so cringe but if I don't I might draw attention to myself'. The danger is, when the character becomes too far apart from the reality and for me, that's what happened"

"It was the beginning of a lonely situation, I was surrounded by family and friends but there was this one part of me that was lonely because there was no one I could share it with."

"it was 'very scary' coming out as gay two decades ago while shooting to fame with the boy band."

Ricky Martin | Menudo

I was a closeted gay man who was making my partners hide," he said. Some of his partners had gone "back into the closet" on his behalf"

"Many people told me: 'Ricky it's not important', 'it's not worth it', 'all the years you've worked and everything you've built will collapse', 'many people in the world are not ready to accept your truth, your reality, your nature'."

Lance Bass | Nsync

"I thought if I had come out, NSYNC would be over. So I kept my secret."

" I terrified of the lasting rejection — I was certain that that would happen — but more than that I didn’t want to jeopardize the careers of these guys up here, much less the hundreds of amazing people who worked tirelessly to bring NSYNC to the world.”

"I’d see so many young, gay fans singing their hearts out and I wanted so badly to let you know, I was you. I just didn’t have the strength then"

Stephen Gately | Boyzone

"Being in a boyband and being gay, nobody had come out, it was just not the thing to do. It would have been management and stuff, it was all swept under the carpet. There’s an understanding among celebrities, or whatever you want to call it, but he was meant to be dating Baby Spice and all that." - Shane Lynch, band member

"What happened was, we were on tour and he got a phone call to say that the press was going to run with a story on him. He was distraught. They said to him, ‘Look, you can tell your story, or we’re going to print our story’. It nearly destroyed him.  It really nearly destroyed him" Shane Lynch, band member

"Even Louis Walsh – who didn’t know about Gately’s sexuality when he formed Boyzone – admitted it would have made him think twice about including him in the group. He later said ‘it wasn’t cool then to have a gay guy in a band’."

"Despite the entertainment industry having a long track record of LGBT+ acceptance, there were few publicly gay figures at the time. In particular, music industry insiders warned boyband members not to come out, for fear of alienating female fans who may have a crush on them"