Is Heavy Metal Becoming More Gay-Friendly?

Motley Crue’s current “Carnival of Sin” reunion tour might seem as exciting to most gay men as the NBA finals, a point that was reinforced by a recent experience I had at a gay bar in San Francisco.

Wearing an old Crue concert T-shirt, I was approached by a guy, awestruck by the fact that a “brother” would be caught out in metal gear. He thought he was the only gay metal fan. Demystified by his erroneous assumption, I began reminiscing with him about the many metal bands, Metalica, Motley Crue, Guns N Roses, that served as soundtrack to my youth, all the shows I had seen and how I’d dressed as Guns N Roses frontman Axel Rose last Halloween. As we proceeded to trade metal memories over beers, he even announced that he would be heading to Sacramento in the next couple of days to catch the Crue show.

A few hours later, as I contemplated his seemingly ridiculous statement, I began to think he was right. He was the first gay metal fan I had ever met.

Even Motley Crue, for instance, never had a gay following–at least until the infamous Pam and Tommy Lee sex tape was leaked in the late 1990's, which exposed Lee's massive member.

This made me wonder: teased hair, bondage gear and make-up jokes aside, is heavy metal gay-friendly? Not so, according to its history.

Heavier than hard rock, the genre's screaming vocals, aggressive, driving rhythms, highly amplified guitars, sexist lyrics and dark obsessions have for the most part never appealed to a gay audience in the same way that disco, R&B and handbag house have.

And it's not like metalheads have ever ingratiated themselves with their gay brethren. Who can forget John Heyn and Jeff Krulik's 1986 film heavy metal Parking Lot, about a bunch of testosterone-fueled rednecks at a Judas Priest concert tailgate party say that you're gay if you like any other band?

But the ultimate insult to the gay community came from Skid Row frontman Sebastian Bach who appeared on MTV back in the early 1990's at the height of the AIDS crisis, wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with the slogan "AIDS Kills Fags Dead."

The exclusivity of straights in the metal arena has been so prominent, prompting German metal cabaret act Pink Steel’s satire of the hetero-dominated genre with tunes "We Fight For Cock," "I'm Comin' Out (All Over You)" and "Sausage Party" across albums like Mouth Full of Magic, Creaming for Vengeance, and Out at the Devil (a humorous take on a Motley Crue album).
More recently, however, the genre seems to welcome gays.

Rumors of nu metal group Korn’s lead singer Jonathan Davis’s homosexuality have done little to quell interest in the band, even after the band’s controversial tune “Faget” off their 1994 self-titled album, where Davis screams, “All my life, who am I? I'm just a faget! Faget!” as he describes years of verbal abuse by his high school classmates.

Although a lot of listeners missed the point and imagined the song to describe Davis’s sexual confusion, they stood by their idol, who even has an HIV tattoo on his arm.

Finally, although Davis is married, he often jokes about his sexuality in interviews. In an interview with Spin magazine, Davis set the record straight, so to speak: "Everyone thought I was gay my whole life... so I have to joke about it just to deal with it," he said.

But that didn’t stop Ozzy’s wife Sharon Osbourne from telling Rolling Stone in 2002 that "Korn Are Gay" meaning they suck, and replacing them on the Ozzfest Tour with Judas Priest, who actually have a gay lead singer.

Priest's frontman, Rob Halford, came out of the closet in the late 90s, when he was not actually with the group (Halford was replaced by Tim Owens for a number of years, eventually rejoining Judas Priest in 2003). Despite being openly gay, Halford has actually been embraced by fans more than his replacement singer, if their recent packed touring gigs and successful new album Angel of Retribution (2005) are any indication.

There are a few openly gay women in heavy metal now, too, like the lead singer of metal band Otep.

Even more striking is a recent Blender magazine interview with Motley Crue drummer Tommy Lee, where he admits to at least contemplating a gay experience with a friend, who groped him, high on E. "Maybe if he was really good looking I may have slightly considered it,” he said. “But he was not my type."

Maybe straight heavy metal groups and fans are becoming more tolerant, and maybe, like Lee’s friend, certain gay men are fans of the genre because we’re attracted to these leather-clad performers’ machismo.

Or maybe as with all generalizations about gay men, there are exceptions to the rule.

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