Hiding in metal?

I just heard about a book called 'Hiding in Hip Hop' by Terrance Dean that tells of the author's experience as a gay man in the hip hop world and about the secret gay underground within it. It sounds fascinating. I'd love someone to write something similar regarding metal. However, my suspicion (and I may be totally wrong) is that there is barely any gay underground in metal. Not that there's no gay men and women in metal - far from it - but they are mostly isolated from each other. I also suspect that the mainstream gay community is pretty negative about metal and that doesn't help matters...

Comments

[Invisible Oranges]

Exactly - when I talked to Rob Halford, he expressed frustration at the lack of interest of the gay media in him. Gay magazines have straight people on their covers all the time, and yet they overlook one of their own in perhaps the most dominant position in a major artform.

[Cake&Sodomy]

This has been something that's baffled me for years, specifically in the black metal scene. So many songs about sexual depravity, sodomy and Satyrs, but all, it seems, from the point of view of a conservative reactionist outsider trying to get some attention by rubbing someone elses obscenities in the collective face of the general public. Ahem. I ran a Queer Metal/Alternative/Darkwave show on a queer radio station a coupla years back here in Australia (my nick I've chosen was the eventual name of the show - seemed most fitting, really), but most of the time had to make do with the misogynistic heteronormative product that was all too easy to find in those areas. Industrial culture is a bit more forgiving, owing at least partially to its more active affiliation with the fetish scene, which has always intrigued me, but I'd nevertheless still love to see a queer black metal band tearing up a stage, glorifying all manner of generally disapproved sexual practices covered under the kink/BDSM/GLBTIQ/polyamorous umbrellas, and, if nothing else, putting up a mirror to the rest of the BM scene, with all its painful machismo.

[Picard]

Back in 1992 or 1993, I read an article in the french magazine Actuel describing the various "urban tribes" and their appearances (clothes, haircut...). When describing the hard-rock fans (as called in France until the mid-nineties), the journalists said it was a community more open (understand: open to non-members of the "tribe") than others. They also wrote that there was a lot of homosexuals among the metal fans... A lot of hidden ones, I guess. It was just one line in a short text accompanying a photo and nothing more.
Hidding in Metal? I heard about some in my "extended social network".

[Picard]

Maybe not "hiding", but I just that Dan Martinez (guitarist and singer from Cretin) has begun a transition from manhood to womanhood. I hadn't been this amazed for a long time.