Cynic’s Paul Masvidal and Sean Reinert talk about their sexual orientation

Both men are gay and stars in a music scene where bands can wear corpse-paint makeup and leather S&M garb while singing about Satan and dismemberment — yet genuinely nonconforming sexuality hasn’t always been welcome. Though they’ve been comfortably out for years in their private lives, the two haven’t yet spoken about their sexuality in the context of their music.

As artists, they’ve pushed the edges of heavy metal music for most of their lives. Now they’re ready to challenge old stereotypes about sexuality in one of music’s most aggressively masculine genres.

“I see all those old dudes out there just banging their heads to our records,” Reinert said, wearing an imposing goatee and extra-large Miami Dolphins jersey. “And I have to think — ‘That stuff you’re banging your head to? That is some gay, gay metal, man.'”

Masvidal had come out to friends and family in 1991, and later began exploring drag bars and gay nightclubs while on tour. Reinert a bit took longer to come out. (And, they stress, they’ve never been attracted to each other.)

“I knew that, secretly, I wanted to go to those clubs too,” Reinert, 42, said. “But back then, my stereotype of how to be gay was wearing dresses and tank tops. I didn’t have any masculine, metal role models who were gay.”
cComments

I would think that those that follow “Metal” music would be more welcoming of all people…they, (the heavier metal bands)themselves have been on the outs with main stream music, I would think they would be the first people to not discriminate. Then again, I’m not a Metal fan, but both my…

Metal’s first openly gay star, Rob Halford of Judas Priest, didn’t come out until 1998. Gay extreme-metal peers, like Gorgoroth’s frontman Gaahl, were vanishingly few (and not exactly role models — Gaahl once went to prison for torturing a man and collecting his blood).

On Cynic’s first big national tour in the early ’90s, opening for the superstar death metal band Cannibal Corpse, the pair sometimes worried they’d get thrown offstage — or worse. Even if they weren’t publicly out, they still challenged audiences with an anti-macho stage presence.

“That tour was really traumatic for us,” Masvidal said, recalling anti-gay epithets being yelled at them. “We were wearing Indian garb and we had a girl keyboardist, and we were playing to this Paleolithic crowd throwing bottles and yelling ‘Get off the stage…’ It was our first big tour and all we could think was, ‘We don’t belong here.'”

Neither Masvidal nor Reinert was ready to include his sexuality as a part of the band’s identity. After those rough early tours, Cynic started winding down in 1994, having kept their sexuality quiet from their fans for their whole career.

The two eventually moved to L.A. and pursued other projects, together and apart. They started bands like the dreamy and pop-inclined Aeon Spoke, and played alongside members of Yes and King Crimson in Malone’s band Gordian Knot. Masvidal worked in composing and soundtracking (writing and playing for hit shows like “3rd Rock From the Sun,” “Smallville,” “That ’70s Show” and “Ice Road Truckers”), and collaborated on a children’s record with actor Jim Carrey.

Young fans emailed Masvidal and Reinert to beg for a reunion. Major acts cited “Focus” as a foundational album. “Cynic was a big thing for me personally,” said Tomas Haake, the drummer for the band Meshuggah. “They had something I hadn’t heard in metal up to that point, a kind of ‘jazzy’ approach to the songwriting [that] was really intriguing and influential.”

Some fans have always wondered about their sexuality. Interviewers pushed the point by asking about hypothetical wives and kids. Sometimes their metal-scene celebrity caught up with them in their romantic lives.

“I went on a date with this one awful guy who blogged about it on his website,” Reinert said. “So for years, if you typed my name into Google, the second thing that came up, after ‘Sean Reinert Drummer,’ was ‘Sean Reinert Gay.'”

Even in their 40s, and with gay marriage becoming law across America, Masvidal and Reinert (who lives with a longtime boyfriend) can’t quite shake doubts that their careers in metal are still at risk.

“It’s one thing to make out with your bandmates and just ‘play gay’ because it’s edgy,” Masvidal said. “It’s another thing to actually live it.”

They’re also nervous that coming out will take the focus off their music. “There’s definitely going to be a reaction, but it’s important that we be truthful,” Masvidal said.
lRelated Paul Masvidal and Sean Reinert of Cynic.

As the sun sets over Echo Park Lake, Reinert and Masvidal talk future tour plans (they’ll headline the El Rey Theatre on July 12) with the optimism of a rising act watching the world respond to its music and ambitions. In a way, Cynic is again living that out. Just with a whole new set of boundaries to push.

“Gay people are everywhere, doing every job, playing every kind of music and we always have been,” Reinert said. “It’s taken me years to finally be brave enough to say, ‘If you have a problem with that, then throw out our records. That’s your problem, not mine.'”

Source: The Los Angeles Times
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