UK based extreme music magazine Terrorizer has published a call to end homophobia among heavy metal fans, arguing that the genre is totally gay already.

The op-ed piece features in the August issue of the magazine and comes a month after Terrorizer interviewed Judas Priest frontman Rob Halford who became one of the first people in a heavy metal band to come out as gay in 1998.

‘It’s a predominantly male audience watching predominantly male bands act as butch and masculine as possible,’ Terrorizer editor Tom Dare wrote of the heavy metal genre.

‘It’s leather, denim, tight trousers … and a bunch of other shit that has more to do with 1970s San Francisco gay clubs than anything vaguely hetero. It’s all phallic metaphors, homoerotic imagery and sweaty (frequently topless) men grappling each other in a dark room. And yet we are amongst the most homophobic sets of music fans in the world.’

‘’There seems to be this odd perception amongst metallers of gays as mincing queens effeminately cocking a limp wrist. And while gay men like that certainly exist, it is far from the majority… gay men are still men. They like football, gaming and action films as much as anyone else with a Y chromosome.

‘The stereotypes portraying gay men as soft, sensitive, delicate flowers who only want to talk about fashion and feelings are as wide of the mark as the stereotype of metalheads as stupid, drunken, unwashed, uneducated Satan worshipers who are more likely to go on a killing spree than hold down a job and function in normal society.’

Dare wrote that some of the homophobia among metal fans was just an extension of homophobia in the wider society but also that he thought metal fans had their own specific issues with gay people to work through.

‘It is undoubtedly true that a section of society thinks it’s OK, or even funny, to use “gay” or related terms and epithets as negatives, as terms of abuse, and that this spills over into metal,’ Dare wrote, ‘But metal also has some aspects of its homophobic tendencies that are purely our own problems.’

Dare also referenced Cynic band members Paul Masvidal and Sean Reinert who came out as gay in an interview with the LA Times earlier this year after releasing their third studio album..

‘[Homophobia] leads people to deny their identity, to battle with their own psyche, and is a significant part of why depression and suicide amongst LGBT people is still such a problem,’ Dare wrote.

‘It is why Rob Halford was in the closet for 25 years, why the Cynic guys only publicly spoke about their sexuality this year, and why there are so few openly gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender musicians in high profile metal bands.’

Dare also wrote that there must be many other gay men in heavy metal bands who are still in the closet and that fans should be able to accept them.

‘There is scant representation of LGBT individuals in heavy metal, Dare wrote, ‘statistically, if we accept the percentage of the male population who are gay as around the seven per cent it is reported as, and if we take the average number of male musicians per band as four … then the Bloodstock [music festival] main stage should feature eight gay musicians (to the nearest whole number), or two entire bands. In fact, there is a flat zero of publicly out men performing. That’s none. Zip. Nada.’

‘We, the metalhead community, have been throughout our history, even to this day, fucking rubbish at challenging it, about sorting out our own house, at saying “you like metal? You’re in. Who you fancy doesn’t matter.” We need to fix this. For our lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer family.

‘And because metal’s so fucking gay, we’ll look bloody stupid if we don’t.’