Rob Halford has revealed that, in his youth, he masturbated to a picture of Sean Connery.

"I used to have a massive crush on Sean Connery as a child," the Judas Priest frontman said on an episode of The Dennis Miller Option, which you can hear below. "I wasn't a child; I was a teenager. I had a little cropped out color photograph of his hairy chest. And I used to pleasure myself looking at this picture of Sean Connery when I was in my early teens."

Halford publicly came out in 1998, and he spoke of the positives of the moment in December 2019. “First of all, you become extremely powerful because you're in control," he said. "And then you don't have to lie anymore. You don't have to hide. You take away the innuendo, the whispering. It's all gone. It floats away. I tell you, it's the best thing you can do for yourself and you. You live a much better life after you've stepped forward and proclaimed who you are.”

But he noticed that he inadvertently spilled the beans two decades earlier, on "Raw Deal," a track from 1977's Sin After Sin. “When I wrote the lyrics to that song, I’m sure there wasn’t an agenda on my part. It just felt like a very natural thing to do. It talks about Fire Island, which is the big gay hangout in New York. And I talk about these guys in the bar and everything.”

The lyrics didn't faze his bandmates, however. They simply thought it "fit with the mood and the atmosphere" that they were going for. "But you listen to that song," Halford continued, "it really is almost like a coming-out experience for me. And it never really registered. It's only been in recent years that people have picked up on that song.”

Listen to Dennis Miller's Interview With Rob Halford

 

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