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.