Colton Haynes is Still 'Trying To Figure Out Who The F*ck I Am'
Colton Haynes looks, Hollywood quickly decided that he was a leading man. He was typecast as a dumb jock, a jerk, the boyfriend of the beautiful singer in a music video — roles he was told that meant he couldn't be gay.Forced back into the closet, he set about changing his voice and mannerisms. "I definitely had to lock all that back up," he says. "And it was really damaging to me because, still to this day, I find myself longing to be that kid who could be wholly anonymous."Before moving to Los Angeles and booking starring roles in hit shows like Teen Wolf and Arrow, Haynes didn't care who knew that he was gay.
He got hired as a teenager to dance as a go-go boy at a local gay bar, Big Daddy's, and even took his boyfriend to prom senior year.
He was unequivocally out."I learned shame through this industry," he says, and now that he's publicly out about his sexuality, he's experienced a dramatic shift in how Hollywood sees him, rarely going in for roles that aren't "the gay best friend or the gay dad."A great deal has changed for queer actors in the entertainment industry since 2007 when Haynes moved to Los Angeles and went on his first audition, but as he makes clear in his new memoir, Miss Memory Lane, "We still have a long way to go." More than simply a celebrity memoir, Miss Memory Lane is a radical act of honesty from a seasoned storyteller.
