A heavy metal icon just came out as a Drag Race fan, says he wants to be a guest judge
Judas Priest’s Rob Halford. (Getty)
Judas Priest frontperson Rob Halford said that he loves RuPaul’s Drag Race and issued an open plea for a place on the judging table.
“Get all the drag queens in full-on metal. Let’s do it, Ru,” Halford said in an interview with Yahoo.
“I am a RuPaul’s Drag Race fan,” he added.
“I just love that show just for every emotional dimension of what’s being presented… the interaction, and the support, and the fun, and the bitchiness, and all this kind of stuff. It’s great.
“It’s a beautiful insight to a part of our world and it’s really important. It has a tremendous amount of value.”
Get all the drag queens in full-on metal, Ru
Halford spoke as Judas Priest was nominated for the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.
Should the nomination carry, Halford would join Debbie Harry and Chris Stein as the only Drag Race guest judges in the Hall of Fame. The Blondie co-founders guest-judged a punk themed episode of the show back in 2016.
Judas Priest frontman came out as gay on live TV.
Halford came out as gay in a live interview with MTV in 1998, something he said was a spur of the moment decision.
“Even now if I think back, I can hear the producer’s clipboard falling on the floor,” he said.
“After I did the show, I said, ‘Oh my God, I just came out in the strongest possible way. What’s going to happen?'”
Addressing how far the landscape has shifted in the 21 years since, he called LGBT-themed shows such as Drag Race and Queer Eye “wonderful opportunities for people that don’t know about us”.
“That whole thing [is] about we are your bus driver, we are your nurse at school, we are your judge court,” he said.
Halford, who was born in Birmingham but lives in the US, said that it is important to “destroy this horrible pushback that we have”, referring to Donald Trump’s attempts to erode LGBT+ rights.
“We’ve been practically ignored by this current administration,” he explained.
“We were forging so far ahead with the previous administration, and now we are pushed to the sidelines, and I think that’s a terrible disservice. It’s insulting. And thank God that [Trump] won’t last forever.”
