Words by Youth Music NextGen writer, N. Shehzad

Since I was a kid, I’ve been searching for ways to express my queer pride in a house that wouldn’t understand. I paint tapestries of invisible rainbows around my room before I close my eyes and when I wake up, I wonder why I can’t see them. Aged 12, I knew I was a closeted child. I’m a closeted child, too, aged 21. I refuse to grow up until I reach the reality I now realise is my birthright.

Can I still play with madness? In heavy music scenes, it’s clear that I can.

Metal and punk scenes have historically both pushed and shaped the boundaries of ‘normal’. Through the imagery and ideology of transgression, they’ve always been rebellious. They question a culture that sometimes seems like the only option. Spanning horror and witchcraft to socio-political rage, they invoke madness and play with it. It’s disheartening, then, that they often reproduce the normative masculinities they strive to reject. Heavy music still carries expectations about who belongs and what they're supposed to look like. While acceptance is on the rise, these spaces still burn red with the remnants of heteronormativity and hypermasculinity.

But they aim to fail. They aim to reject the status-quo, pushing the limits of transgression to violent and uncomfortable ends. They become obverse to mainstream society. They embrace uncertainty. Pockets of the scene form kintsugi sculptures left unfinished. You certainly don’t feel like a failure when you’re standing alone in the middle of a crowd, in a room too sweaty because they didn’t turn the AC on. Screaming lyrics everybody else in the room knows by heart. Splinters of red light flash on-off as you scan the crowd. Patched jackets. Dyed hair. Piercings. Screaming and crashing.

The first time I tried on the staple skull-and-bones t-shirt I felt like a fraud in somebody else’s costume. As a Pakistani kid, there was nothing new to feeling out of place, even amongst the uniforms of alternative culture. Was I alt enough to validate my existence? Was I tough enough to fit in with the metalhead bros? Was I queer enough to challenge society? Heavy music promised me rebellion but left me with the same questions I carried everywhere else. What surprised me was that I never found someone who had all the answers. I found people instead who felt comfortable having none of them. Performances extended past the stage, and we all played our part. When the lights went down at gigs, my queerness was just another layer that didn’t seem to matter. A dark room doesn’t judge; it simply watches as everyone becomes everything and nothing at once, without even realising.

It’s not failure when tech malfunctions at a punk festival, pushing back the schedule of an entire stage. It’s how I’ve discovered some of my favourite bands. It’s not failure when you trip and fall into a moshpit. There’ll always be someone ready to lift you back up. It’s not failure when you sit in silence at the dinner table the day after a show, after screaming your lungs out. You might think nothing’s changed, but it always has. There’s a stereotypical idea, particularly in extreme metal music, that failure means excess. If society is masculine, let's be hypermasculine. If horror movies are scary, let’s be scarier. But failure has always been, and will always be, a queer art.

As queer thinker Jack Halberstam reveals, in a society that constantly pushes the goalposts towards heteronormativity, queer people must work twice as hard to build a ‘successful’ life. Marriage. Kids. Stability. Play with madness; why not try failure instead?

So when I say that I’m failing, I’m really just surviving. Heavy music had already taught me a lesson that queer people often learn one way or another: that we’re never going to be ‘successful’ to them. If success means becoming someone else, let failure look like freedom. I spent years as a child thinking I simply ‘wasn’t queer enough’. I’ve never been out. I’ve never attended a pride parade. As I write this, London Metal Pride is taking place. I’m at home searching my wall for those invisible rainbows I painted eight years ago. I’ve never felt legitimate enough; I don’t think I’ve earned the right to pride. I wish I’d realised sooner how wrong I am, because pride doesn’t begin at disclosure.

Rob Halford spent twenty-five years fronting one of metal's most iconic bands in the 70s before publicly coming out as gay. Whether you’re on-stage or in the crowd, you’re never hiding something just because you aren’t saying it. I still paint rainbows in my room. I still can’t see them. I know some closeted people feel like they don’t ‘deserve’ pride. I was you. Chained by the idea that you have to be loud or ready or open or complete. But I see rainbows in the way the guitars hit the mix. I see rainbows in the bodies colliding in front of the stage. Queer art exists in the silhouette of a performer mid-scream.