After roughly three decades together, Judas Priest frontman Rob Halford and his partner, Thomas, have married. The couple secretly wed last year, but Halford only recently shared the news in an interview on the Queer The Music podcast.
Speaking to Jake Shears (Scissor Sisters), Halford explained that the reason they waited so long is because Thomas is “from the South. He’s from Alabama — extremely conservative, God.”
“I stopped asking, ‘Let’s get married.’ ‘No, I don’t want to get married.’ ‘Oh, let’s just get married. We’ve been together forever.’ ‘No, I don’t want to get married,’” Halford recalled of their previous ongoing back-and-forth. “And then suddenly on one of our night walks, he goes, ‘I think we should get married.’ [I went] straight home [and got] on the phone to get a pastor.”
Halford shared that he and Thomas held a “simple ceremony,” only inviting a small handful of close friends and loved ones.
“It was obviously me and him and an officiant, as they call them, who are licensed to marry people,” he said. “Two of my dearest friends, Jim Silvia, who was Priest’s [tour] manager forever, and his wife. There were just four of us around the pool, around the cactus, the heavy metal cactus. And it was over in an instant. But it was just a beautiful, simple ceremony.”
Halford also expressed his views on marriage, saying, “Is marriage important? I’ll leave that up to you. You decide whether you think a piece of paper is valuable. In some cases, it is, it’s extremely valuable. But for us to tie the knot, it’s just nice. It’s just a nice thing.”
“It seems like you’ve completed something in your relationship, more than anything else. The commitment goes to another level when you get married. It’s a great thing to do,” Halford concluded. “And if it doesn’t work, that’s life. But I think after being together for 35 years, it’s working.”
The post Judas Priest Frontman Rob Halford Secretly Married His Longtime Partner a Year Ago appeared first on VICE.
