Colton Haynes Talks About How His Teen Dream Became a Gay Hollywood Nightmare
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Teen Wolf and Arrow star Colton Haynes reveals in an essay he penned for New York Magazine that his early days in Hollywood consisted of sex work and assault by executives.
Losing a Teenage Dream
Before I came to Hollywood, I was confidently queer. Years of mixed messages in the industry changed that.
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Squeal for me, piglet,” I said. “Want me to feed you your food?” ¶ The voice on the other end of the phone moaned. ¶ “You want to get fat for your master, little piggy?” I continued. “You like that? Now oink for me. Tell me how much you love your owner.” ¶ It was 2006, and this was my first job in Los Angeles, as a phone-sex operator. It wasn’t how I had planned on making it in Hollywood, but it wasn’t a bad start — to be 18 years old, new in town, and earning enough money to pay my bills. I dipped in and out of dinners, shops, and meetings to take my calls. Standing on Santa Monica Boulevard outside a CVS, I growled into my cell phone to a caller, “You want me to fatten you up like livestock getting ready for slaughter?” I kept it up as passersby eyed me strangely. “Time for your Geritol.”
I could never understand why so many of these guys had a thing for farm play. But I could sell a farm scene: I was from the Midwest, a little town in Kansas called Andale, northwest of Wichita. I thought it was weird that my phone-operator job had nothing to do with the way I looked, since that was the only thing about me that had ever been affirmed — mostly by much older men. My first serious relationship, if you could call it that, at 14, was with a man in his 40s who worked in the area. I began go-go dancing at a gay bar in Wichita that same year — fake ID in hand — after sneaking in one night with a few castmates from my community-theater program. I felt at home there. The thumping of the beat rattled the club, and from up on the box, all the men looked like wild animals. We danced in cowboy hats, low-rise boot-cut jeans, and no underwear, sweat trickling down our abdomens toward our shaved crotches.
After sending out resumes and headshots, a manager finally agreed to meet with him – but it was not what he expected. “The owners of the company — let’s call him Brad — was waiting for me with his assistant. He was wearing a skintight muscle tee and had gleaming-white veneers. He was middle-aged, and his hairline looked as if it had recently been rejuvenated.”
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Brad would have Haynes, as well as the dozens of other aspiring actors, audition for him, constantly critiquing how outwardly gay Haynes appeared.
“‘Why are you using your hands so much when you talk? And your posture is too … loose,’ he said. ‘We’re definitely going to have to change your mannerisms. They’re a little too … theater.’ Code for gay. I stood up straighter.”
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One of the conspicuous things Brad made the actors do was participate in a “sexy-scene night,” where they would act out sex scenes from movies. Haynes was paired with a man he calls Ethan, an actor he recognized from TV. His description of the events performed in front of the “class” is pretty graphic.
“We began with our lines. Eventually, I had to take off my pants. I stared into Ethan’s eyes, feeling everyone else’s eyes on my body. I pulled down my boxers, and I got on my knees. I turned Ethan, bare naked, toward the audience and began performing a fake oral-sex scene on him. Then he threw me down on all fours and simulated penetration while my d*ck flapped back and forth, slapping against my stomach. I closed my eyes so I wouldn’t have to look at the audience.”
At the end of the scene, Brad commented on the size of Ethan’s testicles.
After putting Haynes through a series of tests, Brad still thought he acted too gay and eventually dropped him, telling him that if he was in need of money, he knew a place that could help. “He wrote down something on a business card, then handed it to me. ‘It’s been a pleasure working with you,’ he said. Back at my apartment, I looked at the card. On the back, he’d written ‘rentboy.com,'” a site for sex workers.
Despite that horrific experience, Haynes took his career into his own hands and cold-called his way into his first acting gig on CSI: Miami. “The day after it aired, calls started pouring in from companies wanting to represent me.”
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Even after landing an agent, it was still a tough industry for Haynes to navigate. When Haynes was younger, he had done a revealing photoshoot for a gay magazine called XY. His management considered it “so radioactive it had lawyers send cease-and-desist letters to anyone who posted the images online.”
Once, “at a photoshoot for a fashion editorial, the XY pictures were up on the mood board. A member of my team threw a fit. I understood because it was explained to me repeatedly — by managers, agents, publicists, executives, producers — that the only thing standing between me and the career I wanted was that I was gay.”
They still wanted Haynes to present as heterosexual. “When I was photographed cozying up with Lauren Conrad at an event in 2011, I was told not to deny our rumored relationship — better to have the tabloids speculate about us,” he says.
All the hiding and suppressing began to take a physical toll on Haynes. “My mental health deteriorated, and I grew dependent on alcohol and pills. When a doctor suggested my secret was making me sick, I knew he was right.” This is when he was able to work up the courage to come out in 2016.
Haynes believed his career suffered for it. After all that he’d done, “the work mostly dried up. When I was closeted, I beat out straight guys to play straight roles, and I played them well. Now, the only auditions I get are for gay characters, which remain sparse. Is that because I’m not very good? Maybe. But that didn’t stop me from booking roles before. It’s no different for the young gay actors I see coming up today, trying to make it in a system that isn’t built for them.”
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To be a gay actor in Hollywood, even in 2021, is to be inundated with mixed messages,” the 33-year-old said. “Consumers are mostly straight, so don’t alienate them. But lots of the decision-makers are gay, so play that game! Now that I’m older and sober, I’m trying to square who I am with the inauthentic version of myself I invested in for years. I often wonder how different things would’ve been if I were allowed to be who I was when I moved to town: a hopeful kid confident in his sexuality.
