Queerness in Heavy Metal Music: Metal Bent

"The tragedy of this book is that it has been published as an academic hardback in the way publishers often do, so it is very expensive and really designed for library purchase only. Hopefully there will be a paperback edition, although that won’t be particularly cheap either. Far from being in an inaccessible tome, this is a delightful read and also one that, like Walser, challenges a lot of misconceptions about metal in a radical way. At first it looks like it’s a book about the minority of people in metal who are openly or secretly gay, but Clifford-Napoleone is actually making a more fundamental claim about what metal is. Namely, that metal is essentially queer in a very deep way. That far from being a homophobic music—although there is homophobia within the scene—it can be very queer friendly and even reproduce queer ways of being. For example, she looks at how black leather in metal, which is a central aspect of the style, comes directly from post-war gay subculture. “Black leather in metal, a central aspect of the style, comes directly from post-war gay subculture” She interviews and surveys queer metal fans, and shows that while they didn’t say there was no homophobia, they find it a much easier space for queer people than that many would expect. But she also argues that a lot of what is central to metal is gender play. These spectacular versions of masculinity that you find in metal have a queer element to them. She is not talking about camp, although I personally think that metal is extremely camp. She’s talking about something different to that. It’s a really mind-expanding read. I don’t agree with all of it. I think that homophobia is maybe a bigger problem in metal than she allows for, but nonetheless, it confirms what that I had always suspected but never quite had the courage to pursue as an argument. There’s a queerness to metal that is liberating. That is an important aspect of metal, but sometimes not quite as important as one might think. Metal people balance transgression with mundanity—the mundanity of everyday life with the desire for a transgressive metalness. One of the things that my research showed is that a lot of them are perfectly well integrated into everyday life, with careers and families, but still have a strong outsider sense, as well as those who feel totally alienated from the rest of society. For most people, that is the case. For a small number it isn’t, but for most it is."