No one understands me ... fans at Camden's Deathfest. Photograph: Linda Nylind
When I was 16 I was the only gay in the village. Except I wasn't gay. It didn't stop the local kids throwing stuff at my head and calling me a poof every day because I had long hair. As a teenager I was into death metal. I loved Obituary and Carcass; I wore T-shirts emblazoned with inverted crosses and rotting corpses; I had hair down to my arse. I don't think I did it to be different - I hated being lonely. I did it because the sensitive, OCD-addled, spotty dorks who made this music seemed to have more in common with me than anyone who went to my school.
So I was interested to hear about Egyptian artist Nader Sadek basing his new exhibition, The Faceless, around his own experiences as an ostracised metal fan. With traditional Arabic musicians and players from Deicide, Emperor and Morbid Angel, he created a soundtrack for his set of drawings depicting a Muslim woman in an album sleeve version of hell.
"The Faceless," Sadek explains, "grew out of years of walking the streets of Cairo dressed as a full-on death metal fan. Then, in a twisted reversal, I decided to walk the streets of New York's Times Square in the black garb of a fully veiled woman. The intense reactions I got in each case confirmed the potential of this project. By reflecting back to the audience their paranoid fantasies, which totally oversimplify Middle Eastern and death metal culture, my work will get them to question their own prejudices."
Similarly, I later romanticized that my years in the social wilderness as a metaller had lent me an exotic empathy with homosexuals - that like them, I was an outsider. What rubbish. Living in self-imposed exile because of a childish obsession with pointy guitars and pentagrams does not give you any legitimate claim to persecution-sympathy. There are no support groups aimed at promoting goth integration and a Cannibal Corpse T-shirt is not a burka. The parallel between Muslim women, tormented for veiling themselves in a totem of their faith and Sadek, gloomily haunting downtown Cairo, is useless because when an American sees a burka in Times Square they think "terrorist" and when an Egyptian sees a Butchered At Birth T-shirt they just think "twat".
Even considering the biggest case of metaller persecution so far, the prosecutions of Cradle Of Filth fans for wearing their offensive slogan-bearing T-shirt, you have to realise that Cradle wanted their fans to go to jail, as much as those kids wanted to shock their parents.
Today I earn a living as a metal critic and I'm still a defender of the faith. I just don't want metal to end up having the biggest army of self-righteous crybabies this side of a Morrissey convention.
