In a new video for the "It Got Better" campaign from the It Gets Better Project, out singer Adam Lambert opens up about the moment he realized he was gay and how he eventually came out to his family.

Though he describes his childhood as fairly happy and typical, once Lambert entered the sixth grade, he began to notice that he wasn't "wired the same way as most of the other boys," which made him feel lonely and isolated.

"Slowly but surely, I felt guilty about it and I felt ashamed of it," he says. "I didn't understand how to be that."

"You know when you're a kid and you don't have any examples," he continues, "where there's nothing really on TV, none of the other kids in class that you know of are identifying that way...it makes you feel like an outsider."

Though he says he "hid" from being his "true self" throughout junior high, once he made it to high school, he started to open up more, thanks to joining choir and drama as well as watching Will & Grace with his family.

"Will & Grace lightened the whole topic up," Lambert said. "I think being around the TV with my parents on the couch and us all laughing at the same jokes allowed me to kind of feel comfortable with them and made me realize, 'This is probably going to be okay with them.'"

When he finally did come out to his parents, he says it felt like "a ton of bricks had been lifted off [his] shoulders."

"I wanted to be me," he concludes. "I didn't want to fit into anybody's idea of what I was supposed to be."