Judas Priest legend Rob Halford is a married man. The legendary heavy metal singer spilled the surprise news on an episode of the Queer the Music podcast hosted by Jake Shears in September 2025.
In the interview, Halford, 74, told Shears he wed his longtime partner, Thomas Pence, in an intimate ceremony—years after he stopped asking him to tie the knot.
“We got married by the cactus outside on December the something or other, about a year or so ago,” Halford revealed on the podcast. “It was obviously me and him and an officiant, as they call them, who are legalized to marry people. 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,” he continued. “And it was over in an instant. But it was just a beautiful, simple ceremony.”
The ”Living After Midnight” singer revealed that his longtime love brushed off the idea of marriage for a long time due to his conservative upbringing.
“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 said. “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 added that it was a “nice thing” to take his 35-year relationship to the next step with marriage.
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Halford publicly came out as gay during a 1998 MTV interview on MTV’s Superock. “I think that most people know that I’ve been a gay man all of my life,” the heavy metal frontman said in an unplanned moment. “It’s only been in recent times that it’s an issue that I feel comfortable to address.”
In the years since, Halford has addressed his romantic relationship and what has made it work for so long. In addition to writing about his relationship in his 2020 memoir, Confess, in an interview with British GQ that same year, he talked about his “other half, Thomas.”
“Thomas and I have been together about 1,000 years, but here’s a simple equation,” he said. “He does the cooking, and I do the dishes. It’s as simple as that. And you can take that through to every other level in your relationship. It has to be 50-50. If it’s 75-25 it’s wonky and you have to be perfectly balanced. You have to constantly work at it and that can be hard.”