At 17, Colton Haynes did a photo shoot for XY magazine – a beloved publication for gay men – where he appeared shirtless on the cover, kissing his boyfriend. He was so proud of it that he sold physical copies for $15 each straight from his high school locker.
His teacher eventually caught him and told him to stop because the images were “too graphic.”
His response? “I told her she was being a little homophobic.”
That was 2006. By 2011, when Colton landed his breakout role on Teen Wolf, those same photos had become what his management team called a career-ending time bomb – and they were sending cease-and-desist letters to anyone on the internet who dared post them.
The boy who once proudly hawked copies of his gay magazine cover from a locker was now one of Hollywood’s hottest young stars – and he was completely, deeply closeted.
And it all started with a MySpace message.
The Shoot That Changed Everything
The March 2006 cover of XY magazine is exactly what you’d imagine: a shirtless teenage Colton, smoldering into the camera, wrapped up with his then-boyfriend.
It was arranged via MySpace – very 2006 of them – and shot in Texas. Both boys earned a couple thousand dollars for the job.
For Colton, it felt like a major moment. “This was, like, the cover of Vogue for me,” he later said. “I was like, ‘This is it! I’m going to be in a magazine!’ I truly thought it was going to be this serious moment in my career, and I knew it would earn me enough money to get to L.A.”
That last part, at least, turned out to be true. Colton and his boyfriend moved to Los Angeles together, landing at the same Wilshire Boulevard apartment building that once housed Judy Garland herself. For a young gay kid from Kansas, that had to feel like a sign.
He was openly gay, proud, and building a career as a model. He’d done the XY shoot with a signed model release and parental consent – everything above board. The images were genuine and free, a record of a teenager who hadn’t yet learned to be ashamed of who he was.
Hollywood was about to teach him that lesson very quickly.
“You Will Not Work If You Are Yourself”
When Colton started seriously pursuing acting, the industry made its position clear almost immediately.
“When I moved to L.A., I was basically told that I needed to change everything about myself,” he recalled. Voice coaches. Movement coaches. Instructions to “straighten up” for the cameras.
The natural warmth and queerness that had felt like freedom just a few years earlier was now reframed as a liability.
He has written about preparing for auditions with almost painful specificity. “I wore a slight variation of the same wardrobe to all four of my auditions: a checkered flannel shirt under a letterman jacket I found at a thrift store, and high-top Jordans to hide my lifts,” he wrote in his 2022 memoir, Miss Memory Lane. “I kept that varsity style to help butch myself up a bit.”
He learned, as he put it, “the tools I needed to suppress my affect, to make my personality match the way I looked – like a stupid, dumb jock.”
The message from every corner of his team was consistent: “It didn’t matter who was on my team,” he wrote. “The message I got was always the same: You will not work if you are yourself.”
And here’s the part that really stings – many of the people delivering that message were gay themselves. When asked if his team working to suppress his sexuality included gay people, Colton was direct: “100 percent for sure.”
Which makes what they almost did to his career even harder to swallow.
The Photos That Almost Ended It Before It Began
When Colton was up for the role of Jackson Whittemore on Teen Wolf – the MTV supernatural drama that would premiere in 2011 and make him a household name – the XY photos nearly cost him the job before he even started.
His manager later told him exactly what had happened. “Look what almost happened, Colton,” his manager said. “The head of MTV almost didn’t hire you because of that XY photo shoot we’ve been working our asses off to extinguish. Thank god Jeff Davis fought for you to get that role.”
So the showrunner had gone to bat for him. And Colton got the part. But the price was steep.
After he booked the role, his manager instructed him to “stay in character both on and off set.” The closet wasn’t just a career strategy anymore – it was a job requirement.
Meanwhile, Colton’s management team and a high-powered team of lawyers worked systematically to erase the XY photos from the internet.
Cease-and-desist letters went out to anyone who posted the images. Gay websites were threatened with legal action. The shoot that Colton had once been so proud of – proud enough to sell from a school locker – was being treated like evidence of a crime.
“I looked like I was gay-bashing,” Colton later admitted. “Like I hated myself or I hated the gays, which was never the intention at all. I was just young and trying to make it in this town and doing what these people were telling me to do.”
He got the career he’d worked for. The question is what it cost him to keep it.
The Toll of Playing Straight
Behind the scenes of his rising star, Colton was quietly falling apart.
In his memoir Miss Memory Lane – praised by Elton John and David Furnish as “brutally honest” – he describes the years of fame on Teen Wolf and then Arrow on The CW as a period of profound loneliness.
Too afraid to be seen in public as himself, he spent much of his time alone in apartments in filming cities like Atlanta and Vancouver, drinking.
His demeanor on screen was chipper. His voice was low. His mannerisms were, in his own words, “on mute.”
Something had to give – and eventually, it did. Though it started not with a press release, but with a single Tumblr comment.
Coming Out – and Coming Back to That Photo
In January 2016, a fan posted on Tumblr: “When I found out Colton Haynes had a secret gay past I got so excited.”
Colton responded directly on his own Tumblr: “Was it a secret? Let’s all just enjoy life and have no regrets :)”
It wasn’t quite an official statement, but it cracked the door open. A few months later, in May 2016, Colton came out formally in an interview with Entertainment Weekly.
“I should have made a comment or a statement, but I just wasn’t ready,” he said. “I didn’t feel like I owed anyone anything. I think in due time, everyone has to make those decisions when they’re ready, and I wasn’t yet.”
He also got married – to celebrity florist Jeff Leatham in October 2017, in what looked like a fairytale wedding. They divorced, reconciled before their first anniversary, and eventually separated for good. It was complicated, like most things in Colton’s story.
Then came the moment that really mattered.
In June 2021, during Pride Month, Colton posted the XY magazine cover on Instagram for the first time – the photo he had spent years trying to erase.
The caption read: “I’ve never posted this picture before. In fact, I spent a big part of my career trying to erase it from the internet while I was still in the closet.”
He went further, reflecting on who that teenage boy in the photo actually was. “It made me sad to see these pictures I had taken as a teenage model… before I was placed with voice and movement coaches to straighten me up for the cameras… before I learned to see my queerness as a liability. I was jealous of him. The boy in these pictures was so open, so free. He had to be taught that it wasn’t ok to be who he was.”
He ended the post with the words that have stayed with a lot of people since: “Being gay is worth celebrating. I wish I’d figured that out sooner, but I’m so glad I know it now.”
Where Is He Now?
Colton – now 37 – has emerged from the roughest years of his life with what looks like hard-won steadiness.
He reprised his fan-favorite role as Jackson Whittemore in the 2023 Teen Wolf: The Movie on Paramount+, giving fans the reunion they’d been waiting for.
In August 2025, he signed with Innovative Artists Entertainment for representation across branding, voice over, and talent – a signal that he’s actively building the next chapter of his career.
He continues to show up for the community that was always, quietly, his own – attending events like the Elton John AIDS Foundation’s annual Academy Awards Viewing Party.
And he’s talked openly about being in recovery, about his mental health, about all the things his team once told him would make him unemployable.
The boy who sold his gay magazine cover from a high school locker turned out to be right all along. His teacher was the one being homophobic. His manager was the one who was wrong.
It just took the world – and Hollywood – a little longer to catch up.