The Lord won't mind: King's X singer Doug Pinnick talks about his years in the metal Christian closet--and the joy of coming out. (music).

"At age 45, I believed that I was a vessel made for destruction and that God was going to do just that," says Doug Pinnick. To hear these words coming from a man in a heavy metal band may not surprise the average music fan. But considering that Pinnick's band, the positive spiritual metal trio King's X, is about as far away from the faux-satanic likes of Dio and Ozzy as a group can get, it's a bit of a shock.

The members of the Texas-based King's X--Pinnick, Ty Tabor, and Jerry Gaskill, three evangelical Christians who had paid their dues in Christian rock bands including Petra and Servant--spent the early '90s on the cusp of mainstream success. The group's album Faith, Hope, Love charted respectably, and the single "It's Love" received its fair share of rock radio airplay. But while superstardom didn't happen, the band did win a devoted following among thoughtful metal fans and Christian audiences.

Meanwhile, lead vocalist Pinnick kept his homosexuality quiet with all but his closest friends.

"My friends and band mates accepted me anyway, although I hadn't even trusted them to, at first," he recalls. "When you grow up in a Christian environment, you believe everyone's going to hate you. But my friends all turned out to be very supportive. I didn't lose any. So I finally got to the point where Ty and Jerry told me, `Go ahead, be honest.'"

What Pinnick did next was a little too honest for the band's core audience. He came out in a 1998 interview in Contemporary Christian Music magazine. "It was a big mess," he says. "Our records got banned from the Christian bookstores; I got hate mall. But they had put me on a pedestal and just expected so much out of me, and I just finally couldn't do it anymore. I hated myself. I had a big panic attack and thought about killing myself. Then I thought, I can't do that. I'm too chicken. It was time, and I decided that if I was going to come out, I was going to come out to my `family.'"

Pinnick also chose to make a clean break with Christianity. "I just decided that I wanted nothing to do with it anymore," he says. "Even though a lot of Christians I knew would take the position that they loved me and were praying for me, they would say how they didn't `agree' with my sexual orientation. It's always, `We don't agree.' Oh, yeah? Well, fuck you. My Christian friends wanted me to still believe in God, but I said, `If your God is true, then he understands what's happening with me.'"

King's X has continued to record and tour, remaining a tightly knit unit, unbroken in spite of its leader's divorce from religion. Of his still-Christian band mates, Pinnick says, "Ty and Jerry have always been there, and they paid the same price I did for my coming-out. They were treated the same way I was. That was hard for them."

And if leaving one subculture was difficult for the biracial 52-year-old former Christian rock star, entering a new one has proved similarly challenging. "I have no idea what my place in the gay community is," he says. "I'm still figuring that out. I've put one foot in, but then I think, What door do I go through? So my life hasn't changed all that much. I've never had a lover. I don't know how to do that. I felt set aside for so long that I feel a deficiency there. Sometimes when the band's not touring and I'm home in Houston, I'll go down to `Boystown' and go to a couple of bars and have a beer and get ignored. In bars I get looks that say, `Please don't come near me.'" He laughs, then adds, "I don't even know that many gay people yet. I have one bisexual friend, and that's it. So maybe someone will come along and help me figure it out--or at least tell me they've been hot for me all these years."

White has written for ifilm.com and L.A. Weekly.