Faith No More keyboardist and co-founder Roddy Bottum recently sat down for a conversation about his experiences as a gay man navigating the hyper-masculine world of 1980s hard rock. Appearing on the “Beardo & Weirdo” podcast, hosted by Five Finger Death Punch bassist Chris Kael and comedian Craig Gass, Bottum discussed the release of his new memoir, “The Royal We,” and reflected on the culture clash he experienced during the height of the hair metal era.
Bottum, who came out publicly in 1993, described the cognitive dissonance of the time. He noted that while many popular bands adopted feminine aesthetics through makeup and hair, their lyrical content and attitude were often aggressively misogynistic—a difficult environment for a gay musician to exist in.
“Yeah, it was the era. It was the ’80s, ’90s,” Bottum told the podcast hosts (as transcribed by Blabbermouth). “I don’t know how old you guys are, but when Guns N’ Roses came out, just the sort of look of those bands and sort of the hair metal vibe that was going on, it was a really intense, kind of a funny juxtaposition because those guys, even Guns N’ Roses or Poison or Warrant or whoever, they were very feminine. I mean, teased hair and a lot of makeup and costuming, but super, super misogynistic. And it was a really weird world to be in at that time, and it was just sort of taken for granted. MTV and the videos that we watched were really just so over the top, misogynistic like crazy. It was ugly to women. We can say that now and we can recognize it now but when we were in the thick of it, we just kind of took it for granted. Like, ‘Oh, this is what people, and this is what sort of gets people off.’ Sl**ty girls and just so many levels of it. But it was an intense place to be for a gay man in that world. ‘Cause we didn’t start off as that kind of a band. But at one point we got kind of lumped into sort of those kinds of bands, and that was a hard place to navigate.”
Bottum also explained how Faith No More—an eclectic mix of funk, alternative, and rock—ended up being marketed to a heavy metal audience. He credited the band’s association with Metallica as both a blessing and a source of confusion for fans.
“We had this guitar player at the time who had sort of long hair and he played a flying V guitar. And he was really good friends with Metallica. So Metallica kind of like took us under their wings in some way at that time and wore a Faith No More shirt on a Metallica record. They were wearing Faith No More shirts, so suddenly it was, like, ‘Oh, that’s how we market this band. They’re a metal band. That’s what they are.’ Which wasn’t really the case, but it opened up our band to a whole new realm of fanbase that we hadn’t had before. We were really like a weird freakout band and we could have just as easily been marketed kind of in a pop way or in a more traditional rock way, but I think that with that connection with Metallica, we sort of got sidelined into this world of metal, which was odd too. We weren’t really that kind of a band, and we didn’t go over well in those kinds of scenarios. Metallica and Guns N’ Roses would take us on tour and we’d play and we’d open up and people were just, like, ‘What is this?’ It never worked.”
When asked if he had any role models who had “come out and owned it” before him, Bottum admitted that he felt like a pioneer in that regard, noting the silence surrounding sexuality in the rock world at the time.
“Not really. I really feel like I was a pioneer in that regard. Really, honestly, [Judas Priest‘s] Rob Halford did not come out of the closet until a couple of years after I had. Queen, Freddie Mercury never publicly even came out and said — albeit he’s in a band that sings opera music and they wear tight clothes and long hair and they’re called Queen. So many examples. Elton John too. But I remember when I was little, I was a fan of Elton John and I remember hearing him on the radio and he was talking about his wife. And I was, like, ‘Wait. What?’ As a young kid, I was looking for anyone that I could relate to in that way, but there really wasn’t. And then even sort of as time passed, I remember R.E.M. — ‘Oh, I heard Michael Stipe is gay,’ but he wasn’t out of the closet and didn’t talk about it. Bob Mould, I remember, Hüsker Dü, or whatever, but people just didn’t talk about it. The first person that I met, who’s still a really good friend of mine, who was kind of out and open about it, was Patty Schemel who was in Hole; she was the drummer of Hole. And she’s a really good friend of mine still. But we kind of had that bond, that we were both open about being gay and in that world of rock. It’s kind of funny for kids to sort of hear this now and imagine that, but it wasn’t done. It was kept quiet.”
