Paul Masvidal and Sean Reinert from Cynic publicly come out as gay
In an article that took many metalheads by surprise, Cynic’s Paul Masvidal and Sean Reinert have now come out as gay. The information was revealed in an article in the LA Times. Masvidal never hid the fact, being very open with when a fan once asked him about his sexuality on Facebook. The two were open about their sexuality to friends and associates but have decided to go public with the news for the first time in the insightful news piece.
The article talks about how the two struggled with their identities, but Paul was the first to come out, in 1991. While on tour, he began exploring drag bars and gay nightclubs. Reinert wanted to join him but was not comfortable with it yet saying: “I knew that, secretly, I wanted to go to those clubs too,” Reinert, 42, said. “But back then, my stereotype of how to be gay was wearing dresses and tank tops. I didn’t have any masculine, metal role models who were gay.”
But Cynic being on tour as the opening act for Cannibal Corpse was not making their coming out process any easier, with the audience not exactly embracing their “anti-macho stage presence.” “That tour was really traumatic for us,” Masvidal says, recalling anti-gay epithets being yelled at them. “We were wearing Indian garb and we had a girl keyboardist, and we were playing to this Paleolithic crowd throwing bottles and yelling ‘Get off the stage…’ It was our first big tour and all we could think was, ‘We don’t belong here.'” What made things worse was then Reinert went on a date with a guy who blogged about it on his website. He says “So for years, if you typed my name into Google, the second thing that came up, after ‘Sean Reinert Drummer,’ was ‘Sean Reinert Gay.'”
The two musicians, who are now in their mid-40s, have decided to be public about it, and to show the world that gay men can play metal too. The article also states that Rienart is currently living with his longtime boyfriend. “Gay people are everywhere, doing every job, playing every kind of music and we always have been,” Reinert said. “It’s taken me years to finally be brave enough to say, ‘If you have a problem with that, then throw out our records. That’s your problem, not mine.'”