Queer Steel

 

This is a rehearsal of photoshoot techniques in a domestic environment, as much as a tribute to my own personal interests and two of my greatest musical influences of the past 25+ years: Gen, lead singer from the Genitorturers, a US industrial BDSM performance band, and Rob Halford, legendary gay frontman of British metal group Judas Priest. Halford's legacy as a musician is undoubted but his contribution to gay and queer culture seems to have been ignored - is it because metal is too symbolic of angry, straight white male culture to even be talked about? For me, the irony is hilarious - that decades of angry, straight white male musicians and fans have taken to wearing black leather, studs and chains in imitation of Halford's early 1980s hyper-macho stage outfits - which were in truth derived from gay BDSM boutiques and reflected his personal queer S/M lifestyle. As a skinhead for much of his career, he has also stood out as an individual among the legions of the longhaired and is probably second only to Freddie Mercury in terms of queer male rock icons who managed to 'pass' in the mainstream.

Both of my arm tattoos (inked in 2000) were derived from the Genitorturers - the one visible here is a cartoon of Gen herself (drawn in the late 1990s) and the other is derived from a tribal design from their first album, and which she also has inked in red on her own arm. Hers was the first female voice I ever heard in rock music which attempted a gruff, barking masculine style, on their first album '120 Days of Genitorture', closer to thrash or even death metal style than anything I'd ever heard from a female throat before. Their extreme stage show, which I first saw discussed on a late-night Channel 4 programme in the 1990s involved body piercing, sexual acts, flagellation etc. and for me now resonates in the same way as the work of Bob Flanagan and Annie Sprinkle in terms of public performance art which is also reflective of the performer's own psychosexuality, and desire to expose to the public what is usually kept very private - in the same way that Rob Halford revealed his (secret) lifestyle attire in front of millions.