Outsider togetherness: on the changing tides of queerness in metal

“Do I respect metal?” asks Hunter Ravenna Hunt-Hendrix, the lead singer of black metal band Liturgy, in a video she uploaded to YouTube two years ago. Her answer was yes. Liturgy’s music is singular in the broadly termed “metal” scene, with Hunter listing Bone Thugs-N-Harmony and Three 6 Mafia as early influences, which don’t usually come up in relation to the genre. But Hunter is invested in a particular sound – she wrote a metal manifesto in 2010, in which she coined the term “transcendental black metal”, advocating for “a new soul, a soul full of chaos, frenzy and ecstasy” to animate the genre. And in her video, she goes on to describe metal as the highest form of music – rock-based, virtuosic, hard-to-play, and a genre where performance is paramount. But she’s left with the question: why is there no interesting metal being made? 

Hunter put forth some solutions to push the genre forwards. Metal should incorporate some of the styles that appropriate it – trap and electronic music, in particular – and make more direct contact with classical music. But most importantly, Hunter called for a feminisation of metal, a statement that cut deeper given that she had come out as trans just a few months earlier. “People associate metal with men, with being really masculine. It’s testosterone-fuelled,” she said. “That’s not true at all. I’ve never experienced metal as being a big masculine thing. It can be, but the fact that it’s mostly men who make and listen to metal is just random. It doesn’t need to be that way.”

There’s a certain stereotype that metal scenes are aggressively masculine spaces – think raucous mosh pits and white men in leather vests – and there are some justifications to support this take. Mainstream bands from the genre’s recent history haven’t typically broken new ground regarding gender politics. A 2006 study from Texas Tech University analysed 603 songs from some of the most popular metal bands since the early ’90s, including Megadeth, Limp Bizkit, Metallica, Slayer and Slipknot, and found lyrical themes they categorised as “masculine crisis” identity and a “traditional” masculine identity. The former relies on ideas around hopelessness, and the latter hinges on the idea that your inner strength will prevail against perceived adversaries. 

But if you take this hypermasculinity as a sort of performance, it opens up the floodgates to let in a whole spectrum of gender expression that hints at some of the genre’s latent queer underpinnings – and nods to the cadre of contemporary artists turning the metal landscape more progressive. The list includes Liturgy, Thou, Ragana, HIRS, Sunrot and SEED, and labels such as An Out Recordings, which explicitly describes itself as “anarchist, queer, feminist and anti-racist”. 

The founder of An Out Recordings, Võ, started the label in Portland in 2008 to explicitly offset the misogyny, racism and neo-fascism they experienced firsthand in the numerous scenes they were a part of. They cut their teeth in Sydney’s punk and metal scene before moving to Berlin and briefly Kathmandu, before settling in Portland. The New Zealand-born, non-binary artist recalls going to shows as a 14-year-old and getting harassed by men in their thirties and forties. “I can’t communicate enough how validated, visible and celebrated this behaviour was, in broad daylight,” says Võ. Meanwhile, some Australian metal bands were writing Islamophobic, anti-Black and xenophobic songs. “A couple of years later it became very trendy to be loudly anti-Semitic and a proud fascist in death and black metal scenes there, so I had no choice but to make my own label to release anarchist, socialist, anti-racist, Jewish, queer and women metal musicians.”

In some ways, metal has always been rooted in the expression of underrepresented groups. In her book, Queerness in Heavy Metal Music, anthropologist Amber R Clifford-Napoleone traces the origins of heavy metal to working-class industrial cities, including Birmingham (Black Sabbath), Walsall (Judas Priest), Detroit (Iggy Pop and Alice Cooper) and New York (Blue Oyster Cult and Kiss). These bands mixed the rhythms of Bo Diddley and the American blues with the industrial sounds of Detroit to birth something even louder and heavier.

Even in these early days, style played an important role in cementing one’s status within the broader metal community. Clifford-Napoleone credits one man with shifting the metal uniform from the bell bottoms and butterfly collars worn by Ozzy Ozbourne in the early days of Black Sabbath, to the leather harnesses and jackets that precipitated the all-black aesthetic that’s now inescapable: Rob Halford. As the frontman of Judas Priest, Halford wore leather vests covered in studs, and on one appearance on Top of the Pops, he donned a leather cap and carried a bullwhip. The band’s 1978 American tour was even called “Hell Bent for Leather”, and though most people read this in relation to biker culture – Halford didn’t come out until 1998 – the origins of Halford’s skintight black jeans and leather jackets were really in the gay leather bars he frequented in the ’70s.

Halford once wrote that because heavy metal is larger than life, performers must translate this over-the-top sound to their onstage look as a visual representation of the music. “How else can I look other than the way I do? In what other costume could I perform heavy metal?” It wasn’t until 1998 that the subcultural underpinnings of this look became clear. “I’m a gay man and I’m into leather and that sexual side of the leather world so I’m gonna bring that on stage,” he told The Advocate. “So I came onstage wearing the leather stuff and the motorcycle, and for the first time I felt like, ‘God this feels so good. This feels so right.’” 

Halford remains a queer metal icon for many. But Võ thinks that looking at these aesthetics in a vacuum gives you a misleading picture of the gender politics of the time. “I think sometimes people refer to makeup, glam metal, lamé, leather and tight clothes as a way that metal has queered itself, but they forget that that was a cultural norm then,” they say. “People were just conforming to the status quo in the culture then – it wasn’t groundbreaking to put on mascara because that’s what your idols were doing. There’s a reason it took Freddie Mercury, someone with loads of social capital, so long to come out as queer.”

Despite this undercurrent of homosexuality in the metal mainstream, as in most music scenes, you find the most radical politics in the underground. “They’re two different worlds,” says Lex Santiago, who fronts the New Jersey post-noise power sludge band Sunrot. 

Sunrot’s always been outspoken about their politics. “We have a shirt that says: Sunrot on the front and ‘THAT GAY SHIT’ on the back… We have the trans pride flag when we play, and the Black Lives Matter flag,” Lex says. They stay connected to other queer bands, including Canada’s Vile Creature and New Hampshire’s Body Void, through the internet. “We promote each other constantly. It’s such a close-knit scene, and we really do care for each other.” They have a song coming out soon that will mark the first time they’re explicitly writing about being trans, non-binary and queer. “We’re going to get all queer metal bands to be on the split – no bands with just cishet people.”

The metal mainstream and the underground might be distinct cultural zones, but there is some cross-pollination. Lex brings up SOUL GLO, a hardcore punk band from Philadelphia now signed to independent label Epitaph Records, whose lyrics depict the realities of the Black and Brown queer and trans experience – there’s one lyric, in particular, laden with irony, about doing estrogen in a Chic-Fil-A.

Nicole, who is one-half of Oakland and Olympia-based “queer antifascist black metal/doom” band Ragana, says that they need to be extra-vocal about their politics because of the number of reactionary people involved in the wider metal world. “I don’t think it’s possible to be an apolitical black metal band – it makes no sense to me why any band that opposes fascism, racism, and other systems of oppression would not just say so clearly and loudly.” Her bandmate Maria says that there’s not only been a noticeable increase in the number of queer people playing in metal bands, but a greater push to speak on one’s values. “And [these] bands are being way more explicit about their politics and expressing that they oppose domination and oppression. I’m not really sure what things are like on a grander scale, but in my world I see a lot of positive change and a growing awareness on the part of marginalised people of how powerful this kind of music can be as a means of catharsis – expressing the rage and pain of existing in a world that is being killed and a system that wants us not to exist.” 

Even though many metal bands have become louder about their radical politics, Võ believes it’s still veering closely to a “replica of the wider world we live in,” where the pitfalls of “capitalism, patriarchy, white supremacy, ableism, transphobia and other echoes of the traumatic systems we are forced to endure daily,” are being reinforced. “I would love it if people didn’t see music, metal and art as a product separate from the struggles we fight daily. Punk and metal came as a form of protest against the status quo, and for me, that meaning still holds true,” says Võ. 

For Lex, there’s always more work to be done when it comes to the intersection of race and class in the scenes they’re involved in. “I definitely have way more privilege in my queerness and in my transness as a white Latin person. My experience is totally different from a Black trans woman,” Lex says. “There’s no queer liberation without Black liberation.” Sunrot donated $600 to the Trans Law Fund with their first LP, and with their last show, they raised $300 for Black Lives Matter Paterson. They give out fentanyl-testing strips and NARCAN at all of their shows. “I’m a fucking socialist, communist, anarchist piece of shit, so community is everything. And care and community mean nothing without inclusivity.” 

One of the many queer metal fans that Clifford-Napoleone surveyed said that metal evoked: “feelings of power and what I would call ‘outsider togetherness’”, which mirrors how Lex describes their identity in relation to their art. 

“Music is my whole fucking life,” says Lex. “It’s the only thing that’s pure and beautiful. There’s no part of me where music ends and I begin – it’s just a part of me. The people who take it at face value, the people who are like, ‘keep politics out of metal,’ they’re the same people who want us to keep gender and sexuality out of metal. Why does it have to be like that? Just shut the fuck up and keep scrolling or keep moving if you don’t like it.”