{"id":31324,"date":"2022-06-01T00:36:11","date_gmt":"2022-06-01T00:36:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/harchi90.com\/colton-haynes-opens-up-about-homophobia-in-hollywood-and-surviving-sexual-abuse-queerty\/"},"modified":"2022-06-01T00:36:11","modified_gmt":"2022-06-01T00:36:11","slug":"colton-haynes-opens-up-about-homophobia-in-hollywood-and-surviving-sexual-abuse-queerty","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/harchi90.com\/colton-haynes-opens-up-about-homophobia-in-hollywood-and-surviving-sexual-abuse-queerty\/","title":{"rendered":"Colton Haynes opens up about homophobia in Hollywood and surviving sexual abuse \/ Queerty"},"content":{"rendered":"
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The early chapters of Colton Haynes’s new memoir, Miss Memory Lane<\/em>, 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. Of a boy who learned all too early what his looks and sexuality of him could get for him \u2014 and more importantly what others could take. Of a teenage runaway, a precocious troublemaker, a wannabe model willing to do just about anything to get what he wanted.<\/p>\n But the Colton Haynes who gets on a Zoom call on a recent spring afternoon is a very different person. He’s measured and thoughtful, though still unflinchingly honest about the life that brought him to this moment. 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. 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.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n QUEERTY: What made you decide to tell your story now? <\/strong><\/p>\n 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. But I had this interaction at a comic convention a couple years back with this young queer kid. He just brought me to tears. 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 realized that maybe my story or being open about my past might help a lot of people. 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. I wanted to package all of this up in these chapters so I could hopefully start some new ones.<\/p>\n How did you decide how much to reveal, which stories to tell?<\/strong><\/p>\n I just wanted to make sure that if I was going to do it, that I wasn’t going to be censored. It is a very dark, emotional\u2026 I do talk about a lot of sexual experience, and I wanted to make sure not only that it wasn’t a smear piece, because I don’t want to hurt people who’ve hurt me in the past, I just really wanted to authentically speak about my experiences. Basically, I have no other secrets left.<\/p>\n