Reichen says Neil Patrick Harris was "lanced"

Reichen Lehmkuhl, boyfriend of Lance Bass, had this to say about actor Neil Patrick Harris coming out in response to items on the Internet about his relationship with actor David Burtka:"It's to be outed by someone in the public media and to a celebrity, and Neil Patrick Harris, I understand, has been `lanced,'" Lehmkuhl told AP Radio News in a recent interview.

Harris, co-star of "How I Met Your Mother," came just a few weeks after "Grey's Anatomy co-star T.R. Knight publicly came out following speculation that co-star Issaiah Washington referred to him as a "faggot" during a heated argument with Patrick Dempsey.

The popular Defamer site had this to say: Should Reichen's attempt at turning his more famous boyfriend's name into a lower-case, media buzzword actually catch on, it could well be Lance Bass who ultimately suffers, the public's perception of the former, non-essential *NSYNCer becoming forever linked to the generic shorthand for "famous for being smoked out of the closet." Still, "lanced" does have a catchy succinctness to it, and we wouldn't be surprised if an entirely new vocabulary based upon the Great Celebrity Outings of 2006 were to follow suit, including "knighted" (announcing one's sexual preference as a direct result of an on-set choking or similar, violent attack), "doogied" (putting one's itchy-trigger-fingered publicist in his place with an unabashed rejection of his gay denials), and, not to leave out the man who started it all, the verb "to reichen," i.e. encouraging one's celebrity boyfriend to come out, then riding the free publicity for every photo-op, soundbite and self-promotional opportunity that it's worth.