With marriage equality and LGBTQI+ rights at the forefront of our minds right now as we stare down the barrel of the Turnbull government’s postal plebiscite, Judas Priest icon Rob Halford has talked about the difficulties he’s faced in life as one of metal’s most prominent gay figures, talking about the moment he came out to the public almost two decades ago.
In an interview with Fox Sports (via Blabbermouth), he mentions that his coming out was almost by accident, and that he feared the fallout from the casual admission almost immediately.
“I was away from Priest at the time, I was fronting a band called Two with John 5, who’s now with Rob Zombie,” he begins. “And [in 1998] I was doing an interview with MTV and talking about music and blah blah blah, and very off the cuff, I said, ‘Speaking as a gay man in metal…’, blah blah blah.
“Well, the guy dropped his clip, the producer, because it was big news at the time. In reflection, would I have said that while was in Priest?
“The thing about gay people is that until we come out of the closet, we’re always protecting other people: ‘I can’t do this, because it’s gonna hurt so-and-so,'” he continues. “We’re trying to live the lives of other people, and that’s the worst thing you can do. You’ve gotta learn to love yourself and live your own life. Then you can go out in the world and try and figure everything else out.
“So I said that thing, and I went back to the hotel, and I thought, ‘Oh, what have I done? There’s gonna be a fallout.'”
Sadly, LGBTQI+ people are still seen as breaking the law by many apparently civilised countries
Despite his fears of a backlash from the metal community – one that is often unfairly stigmatised as being violent and anti-social – he was actually heartened to find just how accepting and loving his fans were of his coming out.
“I’d never seen such an outpouring of love from people in all my life,” he says, “the letters, the faxes, the phone calls from everybody in the metal community: ‘Rob, we just don’t care. We want you to be who you are. We want you to sing those songs. We wanna come see you.’ And that was a tremendously uplifting moment for me. And it was also a tremendously uplifting moment for metal.
“Because, for the longest time, metal was the underdog in rock and roll, metal was never getting any respect, metal was always at the back of the line. And so I thought, ‘Well, isn’t this great?’ This just goes to show you that we in the metal community, as we call ourselves — probably because of the pushback that we felt because of the music that we love — we are the most tolerant, if you wanna say, the most open-minded, the most loving, the most accepting of all the kinds of music that we know in rock and roll. So it was a great moment.”
Unfortunately, while he was pleased with the reaction at the time, Halford is shocked at the lack of progress we’ve seen since then in the wider community, with gay people still having to fight for basic rights in many countries.
“I just get so frustrated and I get angry that here we are in 2017,” he bemoans. “I mean, growing up as a kid and suddenly realizing about my preferences… Well, it’s not really a preference — it’s who you are. You don’t make a choice. I am who I am. And because of the society that I grew up in, and to a still great extent today, we have this tremendous pushback in equality.
“I always kind of felt, as I was going through my teen years and my twenties and thirties, things would be better, but they’re not,” he adds. “There’s still a long way to go in America, and in my home country. And in some parts of the world, people like me get thrown off buildings, people like me get hung, just because of who we are. So the injustices that are put against gay people, much like the injustices against people of color, or people that have tremendous difficulties with accepting religions…”
“It’s a crazy world, isn’t it? You’d think that by now we’d have just figured things out and live and let live and love each other and just accept each other for who we are. Life is short.”
Halford has previously discussed the gay marriage debate at length when America faced its own challenges for marriage equality, and now with the postal plebiscite on its way, Australians are about to find out just how accepting we are as a country.
Rob Halford of Judas Priest talks about what it was like to come out as gay to the metal community
