I Was One Of The Most Famous Pop Stars In The World. No One Knew The Secret Pain I Hid.

The year is 1997, and talk show host Rosie O’Donnell is interviewing me about the smash hit “I Want You.” It’s a song Rosie helped make a Billboard Top 5 hit, having played what she affectionately nicknamed “The Chica Cherry Cola Song” incessantly during her show’s intro segment for months prior to us even landing a U.S. record deal.

Rosie’s obsession led to U.S. airplay, then a bidding war between major record labels, and suddenly, there I was, Darren Hayes, this inwardly shy kid from Brisbane ― a blue-collar, conservative, hyper-masculine city in the north of Australia ― sitting comfortably on the couch of the biggest daytime television show in the United States, oozing star power as half of the hot new Australian pop duo Savage Garden.

To the casual observer, I appeared confident, full of swagger with my vaguely ’70s blow wave and a blue-black dye job that could rival Elvis in his prime. But my bravado was a carefully crafted persona, built to protect me from years of bullying at school, denial and shame about my sexuality, and a mask to hide the rapidly increasing depression that would soon become overwhelming.

I was beginning to experience the full force of a mental illness that had seeded itself when I was a child, partly inherited from my mother’s side of the family but mostly activated by trauma that had begun incubating from the age of 3 after my exposure to extreme violence growing up with a violent, alcoholic father who physically and emotionally abused my mother.

Nobody could have known any of this as they watched me on Rosie’s couch. Savage Garden was on the precipice of global fame and would go on to sell 26 million albums, have two Billboard No. 1 singles and tour the world. Yet no one knew I was deeply unhappy, barely containing secrets that would soon devastate me emotionally and send me to the brink of suicide at the height of my fame.

I like to think that, even at the beginning of my career, I had a healthy fear of celebrity, so much so that I was able to curate a very particular kind of fame, one I refer to as “Google-able.” When I walk down the street, nobody stops me. I almost never get asked for an autograph unless I’m performing, and even at the height of my chart success, the paparazzi were always following someone else.

I like to think I designed my strange secret celebrity to be that way because of my sense of foreboding about what might happen to me should someone dig too deep and find out the horrors that lay beneath. I was completely unguarded and transparent in my music, in my lyrics, and when I performed, but there was this anvil of shame over my head for so long that I had learned to keep a very healthy distance between the real me and the public persona.

I guess I was used to keeping secrets.

Darren Hayes performing on stage at Melbourne Park in 2000 in Melbourne, Australia. (Photo: Martin Philbey via Getty Images)

Although most of my childhood memories involve extreme violence and imagery that still haunts me ― a blur of blood, violence, fists through walls and my mother’s black eyes ― I instinctively knew we were forbidden to speak about this. It was the ’70s, and at that time, domestic violence in Australia was a shameful secret, and there was little reprieve even if you went to the police. There was zero financial support from social services. Within our family, the stigma of what other people thought of us seemed more painful than the lives were living, perpetuating the abuse. So, we suffered.

The other secret brewing in me was my sexuality.

I remember the first person to ever call me a faggot was my father. Then it was other school children. I was called “gay” before I knew what the word meant.

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The ’80s were a horrible time to be a queer kid. We were inundated with warnings about a so-called “gay plague,” and popular culture was littered with negative stereotypes of what a gay person was. I had no public role models I identified with. I saw nothing but death on the news, and although I’d never even told a soul about my crushes on boys, I had convinced myself that by sheer thought alone, I had contracted AIDS.

I convinced my mother to take me to a doctor and feel my swollen glands ― a symptom I’d read about in Time magazine. I remember waiting in the doctor’s office as he examined my neck ― red from my constant rubbing ― almost wishing for him to tell me and my mother the terrible news. I thought anything would have been better than the terrible dread I felt in my stomach every night and knowing that I was ― according to everything I knew in my tiny world ― going to hell.

I had a brief window of happiness at the age of 13 when I had an epiphany that would change the trajectory of my life. I remember being at a Michael Jackson concert. It was 1987, and by sheer luck, I ended up near the front row where I found myself gazing into the eyes of the perfectly androgynous pop star onstage and seeing someone who, for the first time, looked how I felt.

Even though I was mocked for screaming his name ― even kicked and called gay slurs during the concert ― it was in that exact moment in time that I decided the way out of my own personal hell was to become a star, too.

I made an impossible, magical pact with the universe that I would become an entertainer and that I would one day make an audience weak at the knees and make an entire auditorium forget their problems. I would fill this awful, horrible wound in my heart with the love of an audience. And whaddya know? For a while, it worked!

Ten years later, Savage Garden sold out that same arena. Twice.

Though the success of the band came with extraordinary riches and accolades, it did not fill the God-shaped hole within me. There was a massive part of me ― the still-terrified child, the imposter still afraid the world would be repulsed if it knew who I truly was inside ― that could never receive the love and attention heaped upon me. It was as if I had created an avatar; a facade behind which the real me could hide but also a filter that kept any sense of pride or validation from ever truly sinking in.

By the time Savage Garden was a household name, I had married my college sweetheart and essentially tried to pretend my attraction to men was just another secret. I believed that since I’d never acted upon it, this part of me was something I would never have to deal with.

But my true nature had other plans.

Soon, I began to meet actual gay people (they existed!), and my heart sank knowing that my life was going to change whether I wanted it to or not. I actually re-created this feeling in my recent music video for my song “Let’s Try Being In Love,” and the tears I cried on that set were as real as the ones I cried 20 years ago. Ending a marriage, even though it was the right thing to do, felt like destroying innocence.

After just two albums, our band broke up. For me, it was a devastating blow. The work was the only thing keeping me sane. I was still the 13-year-old desperate to fill the emotional void from never having bonded with my father, only now, I had accepted that I was gay and trying to navigate a post-divorce world that was not kind to gay people.