Throwback Thursday to That Time Colton Haynes Appeared on the Cover of XY Magazine

Colton Haynes wasn’t always the gay celebrity heartthrob he is today. His roles in Teen Wolf and Arrow may have cemented his legacy in Hollywood, but back in 2006, a 17 year-old Haynes appeared in a titillating cover story for controversial teen gay magazine XY, with his then boyfriend.

In 2016, Haynes spoke about his hypocrisy about that infamous XY cover shoot (“This was, like, the cover of Vogue for me. I was like, ‘This is it! I’m going to be in a magazine!’ I truly thought it was going to be this serious moment in my career.”) and his PR team’s efforts to scrub the photos from the Internet once his star began to rise (we were even threatened with legal action if we ran the photos). Haynes says he worried about how that was perceived by the LGBT community: “I looked like I was fucking gay-bashing,” he says. “Like I hated myself or I hated the gays, which was never the intention at all. I was just young and trying to make it in this town and doing what these people were telling me to do.”

That same year, Haynes said in an article for EW where he came out, that he “wasn’t ready” to do so earlier. There were a lot of remaining questions, including Haynes’s photo shoot for the March 2006 issue of XY magazine, where he’s engaging in some heavy, half-naked making out with his then-boyfriend. He more pointedly addresses what happened in the Out profile, saying that at 17, he was thrilled to do that photo shoot. Haynes said. “I truly thought it was going to be this serious moment in my career, and I knew it would earn me enough money to get to L.A.”

While he would get to L.A., that photo shoot would haunt his career. It would be the evidence that made it look like Haynes was refusing to come out of the closet after he booked his first major gig on Teen Wolf. “I looked like I was fucking gay-bashing,” Colton said. “Like I hated myself or I hated the gays, which was never the intention at all. I was just young and trying to make it in this town and doing what these people were telling me to do.” Indeed, his earlier years in Hollywood sound rough: His agent dropped him when he learned Haynes was gay, and afterward, told him to advertise on RentBoy.com, an escort website, as a way to earn money.

“I feel really bad that I had to lie for so long,” Haynes said. “But I was told that was the only way I was going to be successful. When you’re young in this industry, people take advantage of you, and they literally tell you that your dreams are going to come true. If you believe that, you’ll do anything. And you do believe it, especially if you’re from Kansas.”