Heavy Metal Becoming More Gay-Friendly?

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 c**k," "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).