Judas Priest frontman Rob Halford has revealed that he got married last year.
- READ MORE: Judas Priest legend Rob Halford: “Coming out happened in the right way – it wasn’t premeditated”
Halford shared the news in an interview on Scissor Sisters‘ Jake Shears’ Queer The Music podcast.
The 74-year-old, currently on the road with Priest in North America on their co-headlining tour with Alice Cooper, said that, despite being together for 30 years, he and his partner Thomas had put off getting married.
The musician explained that it’s because Thomas is “from the South. He’s from Alabama — extremely conservative, God.
“I stopped asking, ‘Let’s get married.’ ‘No, I don’t want to get married.’ ‘Oh, let’s just get married. We’ve been together forever.’ ‘No, I don’t want to get married,’” Halford said. “And then suddenly on one of our night walks, he goes, ‘I think we should get married.’ [I went] straight home [and got] on the phone to get a pastor.”
He went on to detail the “simple ceremony,” which only involved a handful of guests.
“It was obviously me and him and an officiant, as they call them, who are licensed to marry people. Two of my dearest friends, Jim Silvia, who was Priest’s [tour] manager forever, and his wife. There were just four of us around the pool, around the cactus, the heavy metal cactus. And it was over in an instant. But it was just a beautiful, simple ceremony.”
Halford also explained his views on marriage. “Is marriage important? I’ll leave that up to you,” he said. “You decide whether you think a piece of paper is valuable. In some cases, it is, it’s extremely valuable. But for us to tie the knot, it’s just nice. It’s just a nice thing.
“It seems like you’ve completed something in your relationship, more than anything else. The commitment goes to another level when you get married. It’s a great thing to do. And if it doesn’t work, that’s life. But I think after being together for 35 years, it’s working.”
Elsewhere in the interview, Shears asked Halford, who came out as gay on MTV in 1998, if he thought attitudes towards sexuality had changed in the years since.
“Oh, yeah, although depending on where you’re at,” said Halford. “America is still incredibly homophobic. I’ve lived here for a long time and I’ve seen a lot happen since the ’80s.”
“It really gets me angry and upset. But when I go on stage and perform with Priest, some guys will say, ‘I love Judas Priest, but I’m not gay,’” he added, laughing. “You know that thing – ‘I’m a huge fan of Priest, but I’m not a gay guy’ – that still lives with me now to some extent. It might be a fraction.”
He described the feeling of coming out as being “very natural” due to it not being premeditated. “It was just a pure stream of consciousness, just talking away. And so it just came into the conversation, and that was that,” he explained.
Halford also looked back on the moment with NME in 2024. “Everybody in the band knew I was gay, everybody at the label knew I was gay and management knew I was gay,” he said. “And wouldn’t you believe it? All the fans were like, ‘Well, we always thought you were gay anyway.’”
He went on to speak about the impact of his coming out due to his platform and level of fame as the singer of a long-running and successful band, but also about homophobia in metal. “Being a gay man and coming out into a metal world, at the time, that was really difficult because of the homophobia and the pushback,” he said. “And I still get it now.”
And in an interview with the Edmonton Journal in 2019, he spoke about not being able to go back to places where he’d be “stoned to death” due to his sexuality. When asked if he was worried about losing fans after coming out, he replied: “Oh yeah, absolutely. I was surrounded by homophobia, which still exists today. There are places I can’t go back to because I’ll be stoned to death.
“As far as that whole business, I discovered when I did come out that I was in this trap gay people find themselves living in that you’re living your life for everyone else, but not yourself. During the ’70s and ’80s it was incredibly difficult.”
