Out singer Lance Bass said in a recent interview he would come out gay earlier if he could.

The former NSync member has previously said that he was bullied to come out in a 2006 People magazine cover story.

“Two years before I came out, I was really bullied on the Internet by bloggers, that’s when Perez Hilton just started and was just really malicious against me,” Bass explained. “So, because of the bloggers like him hounding me, all the other magazines started calling me and saying, 'Look, we know you’re gay, you can write the story with or without us, but we have to write it.' I decided to go with People and I think they did a great job. I had 24 hours to decide if I was going to come out or not, and within 24 hours it was on the stands.”

The recently married Bass appears on the cover of the January/February issue of BELLA magazine.

On the Meredith Vieira Show, Bass talked about the interview and his regrets about not coming out sooner.

“It's a very nice interview, too. And in it you talk about what you would have said to your younger self if you could talk to that person,” Vieira said.

“And I would say come out immediately,” Bass responded. “If I could go back and tell my younger self, you know, be yourself immediately, because I lost so many friends being in the closet, and I didn't have close relationships with my family cause I was in the closet. … So, I would definitely have come out and just been proud of who I was.”