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.