27/05/2026
Why do metal-heads send death threats to musicians when they come out as gay? The mosh pit was always for everyone. 🖤
There is something almost cosmically (distrubingly) funny about a subculture built entirely on being misunderstood, cast out, and sneered at by polite society, that then turns around and does exactly that to its own musicians the moment they come out as gay. The irony is so thick you could stage dive onto it.
Beartooth's Caleb Shomo just came out as gay. He received a wave of slurs from people who find music about death and destruction perfectly wholesome but a man existing honestly is where they draw the line! 😳
I'm a Sydney therapist who works with shame and intimacy and I spent decades as a vocalist screaming in crust bands across Europe and Australia since the 1990's... I've performed on stages at grind-core festivals in Czech Republic, festivals in New Zealand and forests in Finland. I have thoughts on this from both directions.
The crust world I came from grew out of anarcho-punk this was explicitly, ideologically anti-homophobia. Not as branding but as foundational bedrock.
So now back to the metal scene..
Metal has always presented itself as the music for the ones who didn't fit. The freaks, the loners, the kids who got beaten up, the people who found in volume and darkness a community that polite society denied them. The entire mythology of the genre is built on the romance of the outsider. And then those same people, forged in rejection, turn on q***r musicians with the practised precision of everything they claimed to hate. The bullied becoming the bully. The outsider appointing themselves gatekeeper with the enthusiasm of someone who has finally, finally, found someone they're allowed to look down on.
Homophobia in hypermasculine spaces is rarely, at its actual root, about gay people. It is about the terror of being perceived as insufficiently hard. Of having the armour cracked. Of being that word yourself. The death threats to Gaahl, the comment sections under Shomo's posts.... they are maps of the sender's own unexamined interior. Terrain they haven't been given the tools, or perhaps the safety, to approach..
Freud would have a lot to say about men who spend their leisure time in leather, screaming, with other men, who then become apoplectic when someone calls it ho******ic. The reaction formation angle basically writes itself.
Reaction formation is where you take an unacceptable internal impulse and perform the exact opposite of it, loudly and publicly, as a defence mechanism. It's why the most aggressively homophobic voices in any room are frequently the most interesting case studies. Freud was many things (a product of his time, occasionally spectacularly wrong, famously preoccupied with his own ideas) but on this particular mechanism he was onto something that has held up remarkably well in clinical practice.
Jung adds the Shadow which is relevant here I reckon. Everything we cannot consciously accept about ourselves, projected urgently outward onto whoever is available to carry it.
Take the legendary Rob Halford. The Judas Priest frontman dragged heavy metal out of the pubs and into the global arena, but it took him twenty-four years from their first album to finally say, "Yeah, I’m gay" in 1998. He even had to leave the band to do it. Halford gently noted that he forced some folks to confront issues they weren’t ready for. And while he eventually got his crown back in 2003, others got the medieval pitchfork treatment. When Gaahl from Gorgoroth or Otep Shamaya came out in the mid-2000s, they faced a literal siege of death threats.
Why does a genre that literally worships the devil get so easily spooked by a rainbow flag?
The death threats to Gaahl, the slurs directed at Shomo .... they are not really about those people. They are a man screaming at his own reflection and calling it an enemy.
As a therapist, I look at the defense mechanisms used by these aggressive keyboard warriors, and it’s pure textbook regression. Look at the vocabulary. Kerry King of Slayer once dismissed Machine Head by saying their singer "sang like a f*g." Zakk Wylde throws the word "gay" at anything he thinks lacks heavy riffs.
If you are an adult with a fully formed prefrontal cortex and an allegedly massive vocabulary for writing songs about gore, mutilation, partying and/or ancient mythology, you can find a synonym for "bad" that doesn’t target someone's s*xuality. It’s not just a habit; it’s learned, defensive posturing. It’s the fear that if the music lets its guard down, it loses its masculine "edge."
There is some light at the end of the mosh pit. Members of Anthrax and Kiss posing for the No H8 campaign shows that the metal mainstream is finally growing up.
If we can survive a wall of death, we can survive a musician being happily in love. It’s time for the scene to take a deep breath, look in the mirror, and finally grow up.
The mosh pit was always for everyone.
Cat O Dowd
