Out Rocker Roddy Bottum Dishes On How Elton John’s Closeted ’80s Era Left Him Feeling Abandoned
Roddy Bottum, the keyboardist for Faith No More, made a massive impact when he came out as gay in 1993. At the time, his band was enjoying huge success, with hits like Epic from their album The Real Thing dominating the charts.
Coming out to The Advocate during that period was a significant move. Bottum famously said, “I would never have thought as a gay teen I’d be in a band that would be considered heavy metal or hard rock.” He directly challenged the norms of a genre that, at that point, had very little space for openly queer voices.
A new memoir details his story.
Decades later, Bottum is telling his full story in a new memoir, The Royal We. The book covers his upbringing as a queer kid in 1980s San Francisco. While he found a community in the city’s underground art and punk scenes, it was also a difficult time defined by the growing AIDS crisis and widespread fear.
“It was such a slap in the face”.
In a new interview with the Australian publication Wall Of Sound, Bottum explains how few queer role models existed back then. This lack of visibility made him feel he had to keep a large part of himself secret. He points to major music stars who, despite their flamboyant stage personas, avoided any real conversation about their sexuality.
He specifically mentions Sir Elton John. “When I was super young, Elton John I wasn’t a big fan of,” Bottum tells Wall Of Sound. “I remember listening to him on the radio… and he was talking about getting married… it was that phase when he was really hiding his sexuality.”
This felt like a personal blow. “As a young kid, I knew he was gay, but seeing him hide that… It was such a slap in the face for me,” he says. “All I wanted was a direction and a person that would say ‘yeah, this is okay, you can be this way’ but there just wasn’t that.”
He felt similarly about Queen’s frontman, Freddie Mercury. While the band’s songs had queer undertones, Mercury remained private. “They wouldn’t come out and talk about being gay,” Bottum recalls. He references an old quote where the band essentially said, ‘well, we’re guys, our band is called Queen, and we basically sing opera music, so you do the math’. For Bottum, this was not enough. “They were saying they were gay, but they weren’t saying it.”
Sharing secrets for the first time…
This public silence from his idols taught Bottum that being queer was something to be hidden. He says he kept many secrets, which he finally shares in The Royal We. “I was a really sexually promiscuous kid and I’d always kept that secret… That was kind of a tough thing, writing down [everything,]” he admits. “I was fully transparent… and at the end of the day, I had this beast that was really revealing and super vulnerable.”
Fortunately, when Bottum did come out, his Faith No More bandmates were supportive, and it did not slow his career. He also found success with his other band, Imperial Teen. Today, he performs with his partner Joey Holman as the duo Man On Man. His memoir, The Royal We, is available now.
