never straight and narrow

in which a song gets stuck in my head and prompts a tangent about gay people, trains, and british heavy metal.

in retrospect, i think it's telling how many of my favorite bands and artists in my pre-coming out years turned out to be queer. there's an oddly specific collection of musicians whose works really, really resonated with me- which held true well before i learned that either of us were queer. i'm not necessarily saying that's why i was drawn to their music, but i think it's interesting to look back on.

one of those artists is the british metal band judas priest.

i fell in love with rob halford's distinctive vocals and the driving drumbeats that can be found in almost every priest song. i liked the strange, abstract imagery that arose from the lyrics and the melodies.

i bought halford's autobiography "confess" on a whim one day.

reading it was an experience. 

i was fascinated by his account of growing up in walsall, england during the '50's and '60s. some of the things he described reminded me vividly of my own childhood in the marble valley. in confess, he talks about the driving, incessant sounds of the foundries and metalworking factories that were a cornerstone of walsall's economy during halford's childhood and how those sounds found their way into priest's distinctive drumlines.*

suddenly, the comfort those patterns brought me started to make more sense; i grew up hearing a similar steady, rhythmic sound from the trains going to and from the omya quarries on the tracks not so far from my house. that sound is strangely soothing to me, and i think hearing an echo of it in priest's songs is part of why i'm so drawn to their music.

maybe some part of it is also that strange pull i tend to feel towards queer artists, even before i know they're queer. much of confess talks about halford's journey in discovering his own sexuality, his life as a closeted gay man both pre- and mid-international stardom. he mentions the steps he took to prevent his parents from discovering his sexuality in his teenage years, something deeply familiar to me. 

it's pretty much impossible for something as central to one's identity as their sexuality to not be reflected in the art they create, even if they may go to great lengths to avoid this happening. halford has joked about how, much like post-freddie mercury queen, judas priest would have been an entirely different band if it had been fronted by a straight man. although explicit references to his sexuality are almost completely absent from priest's earlier works, in good time, halford's sexuality becomes more evident with songs like "grinder"** (i'm not spelling this one out; the lyrics speak for themselves) and "raw deal", which is about halford's escapades in famously queer fire island.

when i first read confess, i was still fairly well-known in my native part of vermont as a cross-country runner, not quite a "hometown hero", but recognized by a lot of people in a lot of places. and i was still so deep in the closet i should've applied for narnian citizenship. obviously, these experiences are far, far from identical. when priest's first album "rocka rolla" was recorded, only six u.s. states had decriminalized gay sex. their early years of mainstream success coincided with the reagan era. at least at the time of writing this, queer people enjoy a number of legal protections unheard of in the time halford writes about. 

but still, even though our respective experiences are far from comparable, some part of me empathized with halford's stories of anonymous hookups and hanky code. i knew the feeling of walking on eggshells, weighing the perils of expressing queerness against the damage it could do to one's public perception. the fear of coming out and being seen as a completely different person. 

my teammates approached my queerness in a manner similar to how halford's bandmates approached his- keeping it to themselves and not being unaccepting, but largely preferring to turn a blind eye to it. they left me to my own devices, my own tiny, hesitant forays into queer flirting- usually on the starting lines of races and oftentimes more anxious yapping or an attempt to throw opponents off their game than actual attraction, although for a brief stretch of time, i was talking about going out with another runner in my league before she and her girlfriend got back together. the rule of the land was that as long as it didn't affect them, they had no reason to address it. i knew the feeling of keeping queerness carefully under wraps while also exploring it as much as circumstances would allow.

it would be irresponsible to talk about judas priest and queerness and leave out all discussion of kink. while i'm not about to overshare (read: incriminate myself) much further, it would be wrong to suggest there's no connection between my relationship with one and the other. the band's stage presence is one of their defining traits, and it comes up in confess and in their music. although halford swears up and down that the leather, studs, and fetish wear of the band's stage outfits are just that- stage outfits- the culture surrounding metal has come to be defined by the same textures and textiles that priest raised eyebrows with. my first brush with anything that could even possibly be tied to kink came with my discovery of their music. i was still deeply sex-averse at that time (possibly also related to being closeted?), but i think being exposed to the subculture built around kink through an avenue that wasn't strictly sexual allowed me to approach it with much less apprehension. if anything, i thought their outfits were really fucking cool. not only were they unlike anything i'd seen before, but i was intrigued at the idea that aspects of their stage attire can still be recognized in heavy metal fashion decades later. and halford talks about this as well- how the defining traits of a musical genre largely perceived as "macho" even today have been shaped by the voice, writings and stage attire of a gay man.

i want to talk about priest and censorship, how their music is part of the reason for the "explicit content" labels slapped on albums that venture outside perfectly acceptable family-friendly subject matter, the backmasking trial, and so many other things. but this is already way longer than i intended, and i need to go do the work i've been avoiding. 

but anyways, "rocka rolla" (the song, not the eponymous album) popped into my head out of nowhere, and after months of not listening to judas priest, i realized i really wanted to hear them again, so i queued up the entirety of "rocka rolla", "british steel" and "painkiller" and wrote out all my thoughts about a band i'd almost forgotten my love for. 

*- for some examples of this sound i'm referring to, see:

"dying to meet you", 3:50-4:10

"rapid fire", 0:20-0:40; 1:55-2:00

"night crawler", 0:25-0:40

**-  the title of this piece comes from this song's lyrics.