Savage Garden's Darren Hayes Says Homophobic Music Executives Controlled His Image: 'I Was Muted'

Mar. 15, 2025

Darren Hayes.Photo: Lindsay Adler

After a decade away from music,Darren Hayesrealized he had some unfinished business.

In recent years, the 50-year-old Australian singer-songwriter observed openly queer acts fromLil Nas Xto MUNA rise to fame whilst remaining entirely themselves and felt the itch to return to music. “I felt a sense of grief because I just thought, ‘Wow, I love how proud, how joyful and how fully formed this generation is,’ and that was not even a possibility for me,” Hayes tells PEOPLE, from the Los Angeles home he shares with his husband of 17 years, Richard Cullen — living a life that seemed unimaginable during his decades in the closet.

Now, Hayes is back with a new album about his journey titledHomosexual, which was written, produced and engineered entirely on his own. “I always felt like I never really was able to have as much control as I wanted to,” he shares ahead of the honest and reflective body of work’s release. “It took me years, but I was determined to make a record in the vein of the wayGeorge MichaelmadeFaith.”

Darren Hayes.Lindsay Adler

Growing up in Brisbane to a family with a long history of depression, Hayes and his two siblings spent their childhoods learning to protect themselves and their mother, Judy, from extreme levels of physical and emotional abuse at the hands of their father, Robert. “The first person who called me — I hate saying this word — ‘faggot’ was my dad,” he says, recalling nights when he and his siblings would fight Robert with hockey sticks to stop him from “coming after” Judy.

“We would have to almost knock him out so that we could get my mother into a car. We were too young to drive, but my sister would drive the car to motels,” details Hayes. “We were children that learned how to patch up walls, so there would never be a social worker or anyone that could know.”

Learning to conceal the at-home violence from outside sources helped inform Hayes' long-held instinct to hide his sexuality from everyone — including himself. He faced homophobia from not only his father but bullies at school based on mere speculation, leading him to suppress inklings that he could be gay for decades. “I didn’t know any gay people. I’d never had any sexual experiences,” he says. “I just thought, ‘I guess this is just what it is.'”

Hayes then “dramatically” ran out of the theater and into a phone booth to call an emotional support helpline. After pouring his heart out to “the sassiest, most hilarious woman” on the other end of the call, he recalls being told: “‘Oh honey, you’re gay. You need to go home and tell your wife.'”

Confident in his relationship with the “incredibly progressive and cool” Taylor, he went home and told her everything. She was receptive, and they concluded that he was likely bisexual, not yet considering the potential fate of their marriage: “She thought I was expressing to her, ‘Hey, I’m into men,’ but I don’t think she realized I was really saying, ‘No, I’m realizing that my whole life up to this point has been this thing to please other people.'”

“What’s really lovely is actually the music and the band was my wonderland. That was my escape,” explains Hayes, who notes that Jones was “incredibly accepting” of his identity. “It was when [Savage Garden] ended that my mental health really took a dive. The band was the only thing that was keeping me from really dealing with the fact that, ‘Wow. I have to deal with my sexuality.'”

Thanks to antidepressants and regular sessions with secular therapists, Hayes persevered and crafted his first solo album, 2002’sSpin, via Columbia Records, the label that housed Savage Garden. But Hayes, who came out to close friends and colleagues around the same time, says the company was nervous that his flamboyant and fashionable appearance would give away his identity and, in turn, hurt record sales.

“They were obsessed with controlling my image in a way they had never been before,” says Hayes, recalling a time when Columbia filmed an alternate storyline for his “Insatiable” music video featuring a scantily clad woman sexually pursuing the singer — without telling him. “It was almost as though I was muted, and that video was put onmytab. It was a million dollars.”

At that point, Hayes had begun privately dating director and screenwriter Cullen, 52, after meeting on the now-defunct Gay.com — “How inventive,” he quips. Cullen wasn’t familiar with his career, which Hayes appreciated: “He’s never been a Hollywood person. He’s just a decent human being.” The pair quietly married in 2005 and have lived in a happy union ever since. “He’s been a rock, and he’s been there for the highest of highs and all the lows,” says Hayes. “He would live with me in a dirt shack.”

Utilizing his preschool-teaching experience, Hayes volunteered to watch the infant during Menke’s weekly performances and continued doing so for about five years, which proved especially healing. “I got life, and that managed to pour itself back into my music and gave me that space to look back on my own childhood,” he says. “I’m so proud of the fact that there’s never been a moment where she’s ever felt anything but loved in my care, and I’m so glad I got to prove that to myself.”

Understandably,Homosexualfeatures introspective lyrics about intense topics from Hayes’ family life, music business experiences and relationships to overcoming suicidal thoughts and paying tribute to queer lives that’ve been tragically lost. “It was terrifying at points,” he says of the disco-tinged project’s creation. “They’re heavy things to say on a pop record.”

source: people.com