The Thorn Within: How I Found My Queerness Through Metallica

“I like the album version, but, man. I just think it’s so much better when he screams MOTHERFUCKER…! at the end of the line in the live version, it’s just so much more kickarse, y’know?”

I find myself manically nodding and agreeing in a show of false enthusiasm, earnestly mumbling some version of ‘Fuck yeah, totally’.

I’m listening to one of my friends talk about Metallica. He’s the only other person in school who loves them anywhere near as much as I do. So, naturally, I have to keep agreeing with him. But, I don’t. He’s talking about the live version of ‘For Whom The Bell Tolls’ on the band’s 1999 orchestral collaboration album S&M. And, really, I think James Hetfield bellowing ‘motherfucker’ at the end of a key line is actually dorky, somehow. It makes me feel uncomfortable and embarrassed.

This isn’t the first time I’ve had this strange, unspoken disagreement with my friend. He’d previously spoken about the power of the chorus of 1991’s ‘Don’t Tread On Me’, referencing how it drew its inspiration from the confederate ‘underdogs’ of the American Civil War.

Again, I was left feeling strangely uncomfortable and embarrassed. To me, it seemed like my friend was praising the worst parts of Metallica’s music. Or, somehow, praising them incorrectly. Inside, I have this weird thought — that isn’t what Metallica’s for.

The Unnamed Feeling…It Comes Alive

Children know themselves far better than most of us can even imagine — far better, in some instances, than some of us know ourselves today.

Most children, for example, will have a semi-concrete idea of their own gender identity before they turn three. While they may later learn that their authentic gender identity is not ‘appropriate’, this generally includes transgender children.

For queer adults, that childhood certainty can lead to some complex memories; memories of your childhood self clearly knowing who they were and trying to connect with their authentic identity, even as you remained somewhat in the dark. As a trans woman who came out in her thirties, I have an abundance of these memories.

When I was eight or nine, I told my mum I was queer. I learnt the word from the Garbage single of the same name. When my mum quizzed me on what the word meant, I told her ‘strange or different’. She later explained the cultural connotations.

Around the same age, I fell in love with White Town’s ‘Your Woman’. When I heard the chorus a couple of weeks ago, I laughed out loud. The song is sung in a seemingly male voice: “Well I guess what they say is true… I could never be your woman.”

Whenever I have this conversation with other queer and trans friends, I find new threads. One of the big surprises for me was the discovery that young adult sci-fi book series Animorphs had played a key role in the childhoods of thousands of trans kids around the world. Unfortunately, too many of us learn to repress that certainty. We learn to stop doing things because we like them — and start doing things because they’re what you’re supposed to like doing. If you’re anything like me, you probably didn’t even realise you were doing it.

One of the most surreal parts of transitioning as an adult, for me, was the discovery that I didn’t actually like a whole bunch of stuff I thought I did. It wasn’t just a process of elimination, either. Transition showed me some of my tastes were pure branding. I drank scotch because that’s what Manly Men were supposed to drink, for example. I liked Christopher Nolan movies for similar reasons. But, transitioning also showed me certain things meant far more to the ‘real’ me than I ever thought.

Do You Take What I Take? Endurance Is The Word

I learned from a relatively early age that Metallica were often something of a Rorschach test; your interpretation of the band’s work was often subject to your own context. However, even allowing for the surprisingly vast array of possible interpretations of Metallica’s work and career, their catalogue remains rife with supporting threads for young queer kids — kids like me.

From a distance, the lyrical preoccupations of Metallica are quintessential heavy metal. Frontman James Hetfield writes about war, religion, mythology, fast cars, and being a badass. There’s literally a Metallica song with the refrain ‘What Don’t Kill Ya Make Ya More Strong’. But the way in which Hetfield engages with these subjects is actually quite unique within the genre.

Taken in its entirety, Metallica’s forty years of music consistently speak to ideas of control, autonomy, and inevitability. Those themes differentiate Metallica from many of their peers and descendants in a surprisingly crucial way. A lot of the time, James Hetfield isn’t celebrating power or masculinity or manliness — often, he seems to actually be afraid of it.

For queer listeners, these ideas of stolen control and surrendered bodily autonomy can carry a profound resonance.

‘Battery’, opening what is generally considered the band’s masterpiece album Master of Puppets, is popularly believed to be about the power of the band’s live concerts. But on closer examination, it’s filled with lines of condemnation over a violent loss of control: “Hungry violence-seeker, feeding off the weaker, breeding on insanity.”

Throughout his lyrics, Hetfield reveals a consistent fear of having his control or autonomy ripped from him by either corrupt institutions or his own actions. 1988’s ‘One’ tells the story of a soldier in a hospital bed who, while conscious, has no control over his body or speech. In the title track of 1984’s Ride The Lightning, Hetfield screams while being dragged to the electric chair.

For queer listeners, these ideas of stolen control and surrendered bodily autonomy can carry a profound resonance — doubly so when coupled with Hetfield’s fixation on inevitability. Whether through the cosmic horror of lyrical influence HP Lovecraft or the recurring exploration of one’s own weaknesses, Hetfield often articulates the fears of truths beyond our ken dominating our existence.

The ultimate example of this may be the lesser-known ‘The Thorn Within’ from 1995’s Load. Beginning with the lines “Forgive me, father — for I have sinned/Find me guilty — of the life I feel within”. In both sentiment and vocabulary, it bears a striking similarity to Pet Shop Boys’ queer anthem ‘It’s A Sin’. Except, in Hetfield’s version, it is not a sin. He is the sin.

I grew up in rural Australia and attended a private boys school. I lived in literal fear that I might be gay. I used to sit at the back of the school bus and picture women naked to ‘test’ my body and ensure I wasn’t gay. (I didn’t even think I was — I was just scared of it.) Until I realised I was trans, I simply always felt there was a horrible dark secret within myself that should never be unleashed.

Metallica’s recurring tales of lost control and inescapable truths may not have been the healthiest avenue for that fear. But, at the absolute least, they acknowledged it. In songs like ‘Frayed Ends of Sanity’ from And Justice For All or ‘Until It Sleeps’ from Load or ‘The Unforgiven’ from Metallica, I shared the terror of losing control and the longing for someone to hold me and love me regardless.

Dreaming No More…

Even today (especially today, for some), growing up queer remains an exercise in survival tactics and improvised explosives. Genuine representation remains so scant and our growth is such a tangle of appeasement and liberation and conformity and rebellion that our cultural support system can end up a total collage of random sources.

Do we like these random parts of pop culture because they’re actually queer? Because they seem queer? Because we were supposed to like them but we liked them for the wrong reasons? Because it’d be kinda funny if we just decided they were queer? All of the above? None? Is Metallica queer representation now???

Personally, I take a strange comfort from the mess of it all. We are a community made up of people who built their own cultural life rafts. Confronted with a world of culture often designed to hammer us into shape, we reforged and reassembled that weaponry into our own inspiration and armour. Our own identities and hopes. Hopefully, today’s young queers are moving towards a world wherein they won’t need armour; a world where they don’t need to dig deep and find strength in unlikely sources.

But, in a strange way, Metallica tells me it doesn’t matter. Whatever is thrown at today’s young queer community, they’ll take it. Whatever we’re given, we find our way.

And, whether they know it or not, artists like Metallica will always help us get there.

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MJ O’Neill is a musician, comedian, and multinational corporate strategist based in Meanjin. You can find her various audiovisual electronic footprints here. She’s currently working on an hour-long public powerpoint lecture on Metallica‘s St Anger. Nobody has asked her to do this. 

Photo Credit: By Ralph Arvesen/Flickr, Unsplash