Garrett Clayton is Taking Center Stage

It has been a decade since actor/singer Garret Clayton made a splash with his Disney Channel debut in Teen Beach Movie. In those ten years, this multi-faceted entertainer has challenged himself with a variety of roles on the screen and stage and has become a viral social media phenomenon for his dancing and makeup videos. And though he maintains that boyish look and charm, he has grown into adulthood which includes an emotional coming out, marriage, and continued activism for the LGBTQ community.

Hailing from Michigan, he would live a nomadic life switching schools many times and living in five different states before the age of four, settling back in Michigan and starting to perform in high school shows and studying musical theatre at Oakland University. With a handful of screen credits, his star would start to rise with the Teen Beach Movie and would be followed with high-profile roles in The Fosters, playing adult film actor Brent Corrigan in James Franco’s King Cobra, Link in Hairspray Live!, and a critically acclaimed run at Pasadena Playhouse in God Looked Away with Al Pacino and Judith Light. With the success he was having in entertainment, his private life would soon come into the spotlight as questions about his sexuality started to murmur.

When I first moved from Michigan, I had already been out. I was in a BFA for musical theatre. I was gay, gay, gay, baby! I had a team of people who were very clear – “We either cannot represent you or you will not have opportunities if we don’t do something about you being gay.” Everyone thought that my big secret at the time was that I was gay and really, the biggest secret was that I was in a long-term relationship, and I’ll protect that egg over everything.

Think what you want to think about me, I know where my roots are. I know who my family is. I trust in this relationship I’ve built. The reality of the industry, when I moved here 12 years ago, is that if you were out, you didn’t have as much opportunity, which is still pretty much true today. I’ve seen in real time since coming out, the difference in opportunities. I’m lucky that I have built enough work and enough of a resume to still have opportunities since coming out. But I do see the difference in the opportunities that are given.

I had already “come out” but I just had to put it on pause because I knew that there was no way I was going to have the opportunity to speak about what’s going on if I didn’t have enough of a platform and a voice. Nobody’s going to listen if I haven’t gotten through somehow. And that’s just the unfortunate reality of the world we live in. If I hadn’t gone through that, I wouldn’t be where I am now. And it sucks that is the path that I saw that life had given me. It was like, I either put up with this bullshit or I don’t do that. I knew that there was no way I was going to get to this point where I am now being able to advocate for the people in the community that I love if I hadn’t gone through that to get here.

In an emotional Instagram post, Garrett came out as gay and as being part of a long-term relationship with his now husband, Blake. The post was inspired by his role in the film Reach, which dealt with issues of bullying and suicide. After experiencing those same issues in his personal life, he decided that in order to be true to the film and to his audience, he had to share all of the reality of his life. He had been in a relationship with Blake even before Teen Beach Movie came out. While we were seeing the happy Garrett singing and dancing, there was the pressure of maintaining a relationship in the dark.

I tried breaking up with him so many times because I thought, ‘you don’t deserve this… I don’t want to ask you to go through this.’ I felt bad and there was a lot of checks and balances and talking about boundaries. And if we’re at this point, what do we want? How do we want to handle it now if we’re at this point?

It did take a toll on me mentally. I went to therapy for a few years to kind of work through that. And I’m very proud of getting to this space and this point in our relationship. Honestly, we are so happy and we’re so in sync with what we want in life together. And I’m just proud of where we are and all of the crap that we had to go through to get to it. But it was absolutely a big, big struggle going through that. There were a lot of times when I would be asking him to come to do something with me. And he’s like, honestly, I’m just not comfortable going to this event or this party and pretending to be your friend. And I was like, yeah, and I don’t blame you for feeling that way. We literally had a very small group of friends that knew about our relationship and everyone else was on the outer circle. So, there were times when I’d be in a room full of people legitimately thinking to myself, no one here really knows me, but there are certain people in this room that I know really do want to be my friend and would be there for me. But I had too many past experiences of trying to let people in and then them using that information against me. It was a very hard balance at that time to really find out who genuinely wants to be my friend or who likes hanging something over it.

His personal coming out happened years earlier when Garrett was in high school. His mom continued to be his rock, the foundation he needed to start his career. His coming out to his father didn’t go as well, although the two have reconnected in the last few years and are in a good place. Shortly after coming out at 16, he would sneak into the clubs, finding his safe space in the gay community.

I’d be doing dance battles. It was so empowering. And I remember just falling in love with the gay community, being able to just on the weekends go and run off and fully be myself. In high school, people vandalized my house, made fake MySpace accounts about what a fag I was, or tried to fight me. It was just relentless. So then on the weekends, I got to go and celebrate existing with all of these other people who just wanted to be happy.

He would get into commercial modeling early on, becoming savvy in the business even at a young age. He instantly fell in love with showbiz.

I guess I came in just seeking joy. I was just always trying to find joy. I was doing three shows every summer in community theater. I was on the Greyhound bus going to auditions and any casting calls that were available. I just wanted to find the fun and everything. And I think that for a minute in my career, I lost that feeling. And since I’ve gotten back to just chasing joy and I’ve never been busier with work. I’ve never been surrounded by so many wonderful people.

In my early career I was told I didn’t walk right, act right, and that I had to do everything a certain way. I was listening to all these other people trying to tell me if I wanted my dream, I had to be different. And none of it was ever valid enough. I couldn’t ever pose enough the right way. I couldn’t ever answer enough the right way. I could never associate with good enough people. And it was always such a struggle trying to reach these unobtainable goals to be something that other people wanted me to be.

But, I have to come to a point in my life where I don’t care if you go away if you don’t like me. I don’t want to be in a space where I’m not wanted or unwelcome. I have to go to a space where we naturally feel good talking and being together and like sharing our hearts and wanting to just be honest and open about who we are. I have good intentions and I want people in my life to feel supported and to feel supported in their success and their joy. My success is your success. And my success is not your failure. And if people are insecure, and that’s something that I really realized was that there were people I loved that anytime something good happened, they had to tear me down. I have had to let all of those relationships go and make room for anybody who sees that there’s enough room for all of us to win. That’s a big phase of my life right now. I want to win and I want everyone I love to win.

Garrett’s come a long way since those early Disney days, but he continues to study his craft and challenge himself. He is a master at whatever he does – from nailing dance moves on TikTok, to stealing the spotlight in musical productions on both the East and West Coasts, to holding his own alongside Al Pacino, to hosting a successful run of A Gay Life podcast with his husband Blake on Spotify, to delivering powerhouse emotional performances on screen. Check out the short film The Letter Men based on the real-life love letters between two men fighting to keep their love alive in the face of war and loss during World War II. Garrett’s performance is spellbinding. Interestingly enough, the number of gay roles Garrett lands has decreased since his coming out.

He is a performer who finds joy in every project he does. In his words, if you aren’t having fun doing it, why do it? His joy literally leaps off the screen in the music video of his latest single, “Barbie Boys.” Boys just wanna have fun, and he certainly is.

Most everyone I know is in love with the Barbie movie!  I think a large part of the craze of the film is the nuanced and necessary social commentary they fit into the story.  I love it and I’m so glad it’s done as well as it has.  It’s well-deserved.  The idea for “Barbie Boys” was born from a time when I was kid when I used to play with Barbies and G.I. Joes.  My dad would get mad and my grandma would defend me saying, “He seems well-rounded to me.  Stop being a jerk!”  So I’ve kind of always loved the idea of a Barbie boy… It seems to me that Barbie is a bit beyond gender when it comes to self-expression and having that kind of freedom.  There’s also another section in the song that’s inspired by the idea that we can all be friends: “Big city boy and a mountain man / I’ll show you how to shop / Show me that farmers tan” refers to the fact that we can all be friends and learn from one another, no matter how different we might be. Growing up, my straight friends would get a hard time from their other straight friends because people who assumed I was gay would then ask my straight friends if they were… People used the term “no homo” a lot, but it’s kind of annoying.  God forbid straight men care about or show any sort of affection for people who might be gay.  That’s insane to me.  This song’s about freedom of expression, not having to make excuses for those you love in your life, and being able to step into who you are—whether you’re a Barbie Boy or G.I. Joe anything in between.  It shouldn’t matter.  And it doesn’t matter.  

It really is just about the joy and the collaboration of making something that makes us feel good at the end of it. You know, I can make a dramatic movie, but if we’re enjoying the process of what we’re going to create and come out the other end going, we made an honest piece of material and if it makes people feel real visceral emotions, then I’ve just done my job. And that to me is the joy of making this work.

Southern California audiences have seen a lot of Garrett lately. From his parody musicals to pop-ups with The Skivvies at The Bourbon Room, his musical theatre background is taking center stage.

I love how wild LA audiences can be, especially when it comes to live theatre!  A lot of the shows I’ve been lucky to do have been parodies of successful films, and LA is full of fanatics and cinephiles, so they’re always an awesome audience.  So much of the nightlife in LA was, sadly, done away with due to the pandemic, and so many great venues were forced to close… I’ve been performing in concerts, musicals, and other types of live entertainment in this city for over a decade, and it feels like home to me–especially in LA and working with so many familiar faces.  I’m so grateful to be back on stage with my theatre family and it’s great to be able to perform together again and share that kind of joy with everyone in the city.

Garrett is not taking a break anytime soon. At the end of September, he is performing in “Swingin With the Mouse,” a California big band/jazz concert series that covers Disney material. He’ll head back to the East Coast this October for Rocky Horror with OFC Creations in Rochester. And keep on the look for his “Barbie Boys” follow-up, “Electric Disco Lover.”

You can follow Garrett on IG: @GarrettClayton1