Before Kristy McNichol, Five Other Teen Idols Who Came Out

Family, Empty Nest star in good company with Ricky Martin, Lance Bass, more

A Grammy winner. A big-screen leading man. A boy-band favorite.  

Kristy McNichol, the popular teen star of the 1970s and 1980s, who through a rep Tuesday to People, said she was a lesbian, is in good company. 

Here are five other teen idols who opened up—and came out:

1. Lance Bass: While he was riding the boy-band wave with Justin Timberlake and the rest of 'N Sync, Bass felt he'd wipe out the group if he discussed his sexuality. "It would overpower everything," he said in 2006 when, with 'N Sync on hiatus, and amid incessant rumors, he revealed he was in a relationship with Amazing Race alum Reichen Lehmkuhl.

2. Ricky Martin: From the moment the former Menudo member started winning Grammys and living "La Vida Loca," he was put on the spot about whether he was gay. But it wasn't until 2010 that Martin, by then a single father of two, decided he wanted to announce he was a "fortunate homosexual man."  

3. Chad Allen: A staple of the teenybopper magazines of the 1980s and 1990s, the Our House and My Two Dads star was working on yet another prime-time series, Dr. Quinn, Medicine Quinn, when he was outed by a supermarket tabloid. Despite the buzz, Allen waited until a 2001 Advocate cover story to say he was, as the headline put it, "out on his own."   

4. Wesley Eure: On TV's original Land of the Lost, the singular-billed Eure was the young Will Marshall. Later, he became heartthrob Mike Horton on Days of Our Lives. In 2009, he let the world in on who he'd been all along: an out gay man. "I never made it a secret," Eure told AfterElton.com. "I never talked about it because it never seemed important."

5. Tab Hunter: The 1950s and 1960s pinup was a leading man in the Rock Hudson mold: an All-American hunk who squired glamorous starlets on the red carpet, and led a closeted life off it.  "Finding out who I was, sexually, was one thing," he wrote in his headline-making 2005 memoir. "Admitting it was something else entirely, since any evidence could have destroyed my livelihood (or so I thought)."

Other noted former teen stars who have come out as gay or bisexual: Neil Patrick Harris, Disney star Tommy Kirk, Dobie Gillis' Sheila James Kuehl, Lindsay Lohan, Anna Paquin, Who's the Boss' Danny Pintauro and Evan Rachel Wood.