Which kept breaking my heart, but also pissing me off, because all I could think was, “Did my photo get me in the door? Was that all I was good for? My physical appearance?” It made me believe that everything that I was was not good enough. It felt like there was something new every day. You were told by your manager and others that your mannerisms were “too gay.” What do you think he was responding to?
Sometimes I find myself hating the character that I’ve created. And I think that was hard for me, because I miss that person I was before I moved to Los Angeles. That experience, what it ultimately ended up doing is it made me a people pleaser, and it made me realize that I’d do anything that I could. It struck me: I thought I was the only person who was being affected by it because I was being targeted because I was the only one, at least that I knew of, who was gay. Every time I run into them, they say, “We survived that.” That happened to me pretty recently. To be so young with this group of actors-there’s a handful of actual stars, people who have been nominated for Oscars, that were in that class. Because the damage that it really has cause me… I’m still in contact with people who were also there with me. I would pray that it’s not going on in this day and age, let alone back then. I almost don’t feel like that was the only class that that was going on. Do you know if that kind of thing was typical? Is it now? You describe a pretty harrowing experience of being asked to simulate sex in one of your first acting classes when you got to L.A. I’ve taken a step back from a lot of those relationships and I’m trying to work on myself so I don’t hurt anyone. I’m still trying to kind of figure out now-being attracted to danger or wanting the people who don’t necessarily want me. Once I realized that that set the tone for a lot of the sexual nature that I would journey through, really up until I became an adult, I realized that it was wrong. You don’t understand that that’s not something that should be happening. In my child brain, I didn’t really know that was wrong. When I went to write about it, I was talking about it how…I felt like he was the only person I met who was also gay. The sexual things that were happening up until I went through puberty…I didn’t understand it until I became a teenager. How did you understand what had happened to you? When did you realize that this was abuse? You reveal in the book that your uncle molested you when you were six years old. Growing up in a situation like that and then becoming an adult trying to clean up a lot of those habits was pretty difficult for me. We were on food stamps and fighting over the EBT card. In the moment, I didn’t know that other people weren’t experiencing these things. I wanted to package all of this up in these chapters so I could hopefully start some new ones. And I lost my sister during the pandemic, and losing my parents, it didn’t worry me that I was 33 coming out with a memoir, because it really brought into perspective that we really never know how much time we have. But I realized that maybe my story or being open about my past might help a lot of people. It made me realize that I was still ashamed of a lot of the things that had happened so publicly a couple years back. But I had this interaction at a comic convention a couple years back with this young queer kid. HAYNES: I’d been asked a couple years ago to write a book, and I obviously wasn’t in the best headspace at that time. QUEERTY: What made you decide to tell your story now? It’s a story most queer people probably won’t find surprising, but it’s one we rarely hear told so honestly, revealing the discrimination many queer performers face in the entertainment business. Confidently out in high school and his early 20s, he has written openly about the pressure he received from managers and other industry insiders to essentially go back in the closet at the beginning of his acting career. He’s measured and thoughtful, though still unflinchingly honest about the life that brought him to this moment. Of a teenage runaway, a precocious troublemaker, a wannabe model willing to do just about anything to get what he wanted.īut the Colton Haynes who gets on a Zoom call on a recent spring afternoon is a very different person.
Of a boy who learned all too early what his looks and sexuality could get for him-and more importantly what others could take. The early chapters of Colton Haynes’s new memoir, Miss Memory Lane, out 5/31, paint a portrait of a wild child bouncing from state to state with his unpredictable, alcoholic mother and, at times, his frequently violent father.