Actor Colton Haynes is getting real in an honest op-ed for Vulture.
In which, Haynes begins by describing his first job in LA as a phone sex worker:
“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.
Haynes does credit the job for helping him to pay his bills, after he moved to Tinseltown at 17 following that shoot for XY magazine with his boyfriend Jay; the pair were invited to LA to celebrate the issue.
“During our trip, we wound up at the home of a movie executive who lived in a mansion in the Hollywood Hills,” Colton explains. “There were lots of other young men there, milling around the cavernous living room. They all looked like me: wide-eyed and full of promise.”
Colton was sat next to a 50-year-old writer who attempted to groom him with gifts (credit for his phone and an expensive calculator for the math class he was failing).
After being in LA for a year without a break or even an agent, Colton finally got a call. When he attended the audition, “Brad”, the manager immediately picked up on Colton’s mannerisms, calling them “too theatre”, but said he still wanted to represent him.
Actors were then expected to strip fully naked and simulate sex in front of their class and Brad.
“We don’t actually have sex,” Ethan, Colton’s partner clarified. “But according to this stage direction” — he flicked through the pages — “I’ll be mounting you and thrusting in and out of you. And we have to make out. So why don’t we get it out of the way and make out now? So we’re both comfortable.”
The scene quickly came around and Colton found himself on stage with Ethan.
“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 dick flapped back and forth, slapping against my stomach. I closed my eyes so I wouldn’t have to look at the audience.”
Brad was impressed with Ethan’s ‘low-hanging’ balls, but scolded Colton for needing a haircut. Despite Brad shaving all of Colton’s hair off, after failing to impressive an acting agent, he dropped Colton for being “too gay”.
When Colton eventually got new managed they also urged him to stay in the closet, and freaked out when the images from XY began to resurface.
Despite landing shows like Arrow and Teen Wolf, staying in the closet was giving Colton depression who sought to cope with alcohol and pills.
Colton ends his piece by highlighting how the homophobia which existed then, still exists today, explaining how he beat straight actors for straight roles, but now that he’s come out of the closet he only gets cast in gay roles which “remain sparse”.
“Everything in Hollywood, was about selling a fantasy; you just had to know who was buying,” he concludes, referencing young gay actors today “trying to make it in a system that isn’t built for them”.