Gay metalheads

There is perhaps no single individual who personifies the genre more than Judas Priest frontman Rob Halford. All sites belong to their prospective owners, publishers, and editors etc. In Sad Wings of Destiny, Judas Priest stripped away the blues trappings to lay bare a bombastic sound of pure brute force. But those attitudes haven’t gone extinct exactly, either.

He paid a small fine and was released.

On February 4, 1998, Rob Halford came out as a gay man during an interview with MTV. It was a spontaneous decision on Halford’s part.

“I think most people know that I’ve been gay man all of my life and it’s only been in recent times that it’s an issue that I feel comfortable to address.”

Halford provided a deeper reason for leaving Judas Priest, saying that he felt held back and intimidated into remaining closeted.

As it happened, every cop at the station was a Judas Priest fan and they ensured Halford’s arrest was kept quiet. He was a self-styled heterosexual sex-obsessed Playboy, and his stories of backstage antics leaked into the greasy lyrics of his greasier hits. In 1992, Halford was arrested for public indecency after being entrapped by an undercover police officer while cruising in a public restroom in Venice Beach, California.

I had no interest in S&M, domination, or the whole queer subcult of leather and chains.

Metal will never die because metal is always changing.

And that includes getting queerer.

The Origin Story

Metal really began with Black Sabbath’s titular debut, decried at the time by lauded American critic Lester Bangs as “like Cream but worse.” Judas Priest were already a band by the release of that record, but they struggled to reach any semblance of commercial success until the early ’80s, when they released their masterpiece British Steel.

That album, one of the most important of the genre’s first decade, took the formula that Black Sabbath had already established — fast, heavy blues guitar; abrasive lyricism; sung-screamed lyrics — and doubled-down on the camp in a way that Sabbath had not.

Despite the band that they would eventually become, in those early days, Ozzy Osbourne and his mates styled themselves after gnostic groups like Hawkwind.

Women wore fishnet stockings littered with large holes. Metal is an umbrella term, and anyone who totalises the scene doesn’t understand it.

That’s true of the self-appointed moral gatekeepers of the ’90s who pretended that metal was the downfall of Western society, and that’s just as true of the misguided, bad faith internet trolls who assume that queer values are somehow a subversion of the genre’s entire project.

It was clear early on that Halford was cut from a more artistic cloth. To pretend that it’s exclusively the domain of leather jacket-wearing Slayer-fans is to lie to yourself. Both sexes wore eyeliner and adorned themselves with piercings. Barrie asked if the magazine belonged to Rob. When Halford, having been raised in a household where honesty was valued above all else, said yes, his father stormed out of the room.

The album laid the foundation for heavy metal as we know it today, without which bands like Iron Maiden, Metallica, Slayer, Megadeth, Anthrax, and Pantera would never have come to be.

Looking to take that next step, the band left their small-time record label and signed with the much larger and more established CBS Records. Key to that project was Helot Revolt, a hair metal avant-garde group led by the openly gay Jack Dubowsky.

Judas Priest began selling buttons that read, “I’ve been whipped by Rob Halford”, which became one of their best-selling items of merchandise. In interviews of the time, Six swore up and down he “didn’t care” about queer people one way or the other, while also dismissively referring to journalist Deborah Frost as a “lesbian bodybuilder.”

The problems weren’t just down to the Crüe, however.

At the time there was very little presence of a online LGBT community that liked heavier music. Rob Halford’s addictions fueled a series of dysfunctional romances, culminating in Halford’s relationship with a man named Brad who was also an alcoholic and cocaine addict. Downing and Hill invited Halford to be the band’s new lead vocalist, and in 1974, Judas Priest released their first studio album, Rocka Rolla.

Hopefully, you find these sites useful. Halford didn’t let that prevent him from sneaking hints about his sexuality into the lyrics of some songs, including “Raw Deal”, about Halford’s experience at a gay bar in Fire Island, New York, and “Jawbreaker”, now widely accepted as an allusion to giving blowjobs. Judas Priest realized they needed to update their image to match their aggressive music.

Heavy metal is an extravagant version of rock and roll.