Miss Memory Lane is a vulnerable meditation on gender, desire, and fame, and what it felt like living up to his straight public persona. He finally came out on Tumblr in 2016, and the 33-year-old has since become one of the more candid young gay celebrities, sharing his struggles with addiction, marriage, and divorce. “I was always fixing my hair, checking my reflection,” he writes in his new memoir Miss Memory Lane, “swerving any indication that there was something feminine or gay about me.” The juxtaposition of his generic MTV teen dream image and the newly surfaced imagery of queer love was especially striking back in the 2010s, before a generation of young out stars defined a new Hollywood era.Īs Haynes became more and more famous - he later played a superhero sidekick on the CW’s Arrow - he was out to neither the public nor the industry. On the magazine's cover, Haynes, then 17, gazes at the camera while embracing his real-life boyfriend. But soon after his acting debut, queer publications unearthed surprising pictures of the onetime Abercrombie and Fitch model posing for the queer youth magazine XY. His character had a girlfriend, and he was assumed to be hetero offscreen. Colton Haynes first came to fame as an all-American dreamboat on Teen Wolf, MTV’s breakout scripted hit from 2011.