Who was gay in the who

Judas Priest frontman Rob Halford has always lived a loud and proud heavy metal life, but only in during an MTV interview did he become the first metal icon to announce he is gay. Rock memoirs are littered with tales of life on the edge, of course. Halford is now pushing back against the way these life-or-death realities are often minimized or even dismissed.

It's a tough thing to do even in today's world. You'd think it would be easy, but it's not for some people. I've tried to really emphasize the difficulty that I went through in being able to come to that point at the MTV studios and just come out in person in a very dramatic way.

Halford has always had a larger-than-life persona on stage, on album and in press appearances.

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He was asked by the queen of England why heavy metal was so loud. But amid these colorful stories are darker moments, both in terms of industry dealings and especially in keeping himself closeted for so long. In his youth and even early Priest years, Halford was sexually preyed upon, including by a friend of his father who got him a theater job.

He soldiered on, keeping his sexuality a secret to all but a select circle. Many officers in that precinct were Priest fans and kept the situation out of the press. The band who was gay in the who its management knew about his sexuality and were accepting, but he was advised to be discreet given the macho hetero nature of the metal world.

He was often lonely. In his young adulthood, he struggled for years with drugs and addiction, though after a one-month stint of rehab in earlyhe never drank or did drugs again. It's not, let's have a laugh about the guy that nearly killed himself last night.

It's deadly serious stuff. In recent times, it's been very apparent the issues that we have to deal with in rock 'n' roll, whether it's booze or drugs or some kind of mental issue. We're losing beautiful people. As chronicled in his book, Halford himself attempted suicide with pills back in late He immediately regretted it, and a close friend got him to the hospital in time to get his stomach pumped.

That led to rehab. Tragically, an ex-boyfriend struggling with depression and addiction shot himself in the head one night after Halford had quarreled with him over his drug use. And succeeded. His struggles also yielded some positive things, however, and helped feed his music.

That began early on with the smothering exhaust of the local ironworks Halford grew up near in Walsall, England, a region known as the Black Country. The gloominess and noisiness of that world, along with the frustration of limited employment options, were the perfect ingredients for the intense, anti-authority anthems that the genre would create.

Halford was born inand homosexuality was illegal in the U. While a few mainstream metal frontwomen like Otep and Lzzy Hale have been open in recent years about being gay or bisexual, Halford remains the only major gay male metal icon. But the other side of the coin is what matters more.

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