It ain’t my fault that I’m out here gettin’ loose.” While his lyrics can often be misconstrued as homophobic, Young is not anti-gay, and doesn’t speak negatively about gay men in his music. When he first formed the band, in San Francisco’s music scene in the mid-80s, the members were often gay men like himself who bonded through their struggles with being misunderstood and marginalized. The band’s latest album is a homage to that time and place. “We were always a bunch of homos, if you wanna know the truth. … We weren’t just some homos you know, we wrote our own rules,” Young tells The Advocate. One of the band’s members, Dave “Boy” Koz, says Young is “very compassionate and accepting” to his fellow gay men, but not so much to women. He says Young doesn’t treat him any differently than any other woman. “We always got along, but he didn’t really know a lot about gay women,” Koz says. “I remember when he first heard I was gay. He was sitting on a couch in his living room, and he told me it was too bad I wasn’t bisexual.” When Koz asked him about it later, Young added that perhaps he wasn’t bisexual, because if he was, he wouldn’t have a band with Boy Koz. Koz admits that the band had an “element of homophobia” — as do other artists in the music scene of the day — but it was never directed at him. However, there are examples of homophobic lyrics by Koz, Korn, L7, and others. Young says he was an avid reader of the gay newspaper The Advocate, which was a focal point for the gay community during the Stonewall Riots in 1969. He also wrote many letters to the editor, arguing against stereotypes of gay men. He didn’t expect them to help the community, but he felt he had to do it. “I loved to write and argue about politics and the gay movement,” Young says. “They really got to me. I love debating the gay thing. … This was before AIDS. It was bad, but the community wasn’t really that mobilized yet.” What angered Young, however, was a letter by someone claiming to be a former member of the band whose mother had left him on the streets to die because of his sexual orientation. He didn’t give a name, but Young recognized his writing style — referring to himself in the third person and using the passive voice. “I have a way with words and can take things apart,” Young says. “I wrote this little thing: ‘I see you’re doing a real good job of turning your life around, because I’m sure you’ve seen that we all are a product of our environment.’ The way it reads on the page, it’s a really great, elegant way of saying ‘fuck you.'” Young says he used the technique in his own compositions. “He [the gay man who’d written to The Advocate] took a horrible situation and tried to make it look like I was doing wrong in some way,” Young says. “This guy was angry and out to get me. He was saying something bad happened, but there’s no way he knows what happened.” Young is candid about his sexuality, while Koz, who grew up in Los Angeles, was closeted in the late 90s, trying to find fame in the music scene as part of the hip-hop band 8Ball & MJG. His identity was revealed in 2000 in Out Magazine when the article came out. “I didn’t even know that article was about me,” Koz says. “I’m the kind of person, I don’t like being put on display. I just didn’t want it out, because I thought I was a big time star. I didn’t think I’d be in the papers.” Koz says he knew his partner for years before they finally got married — in 2011. But he doesn’t mind sharing how he first met him — at a party thrown by Mötley Crüe’s Vince Neil, when Young was still in the band. He’d been invited to play with Neil’s band — yes, that Mötley Crüe — and Koz was to do vocals on one of the songs. However, when Young walked into the room, Neil didn’t bother to introduce him to Koz. “There were about 75 people in there, and he just walked in, didn’t say a thing, walked to the back, and played,” Koz says. “I had to go in there in front of 75 people and sing this song.” That was back in 1985. He didn’t know who Young was, but years later, when he was a star in his own right, and had just turned 30, he ran into Young at a party at Neil’s home. “He walked up to me and I walked up to him, and he said, ‘You know my music?’ And I said, ‘Yeah.’ And he says, ‘You really didn’t know who I was? I thought you knew who I was,’ ” Koz says. “He thought I was being a jerk about it, but I didn’t mean to be. It really wasn’t important to me.” Koz says it’s “hard to tell” what Young thinks about being gay, other than that he thinks his sexuality should be celebrated. “As far as his personal relationship with his sexuality and his sexuality with the world and what’s happening with homosexuality, that’s a totally different subject,” he says. “He has a great interest in the civil rights movement and the civil rights movement of gay people, but the fact is he’s never experienced any of that. So, it’s hard to tell.” Growing up in San Francisco in the late 80s, Koz says he wasn’t aware of any discrimination. He lived in the Castro, in the historic gay neighborhood, and his friends were gay men. He says he doesn’t recall any instances of bigotry — perhaps because he was lucky enough to live in a more tolerant city. But he remembers the anger he felt after he was beaten by two gay men who told him to “get your faggot ass home.” He says he still has the scar from the incident on his arm. “That’s why I put that story in my music, because there were people who were so angry about the gay thing, and would get in your face,” Koz says. “I had to go through a lot of hatred and violence as a young man. I thought people who were attacking gay men were evil. I hated them.” Young also says he does not recall any instances of homophobia. However, he thinks he may have been unfairly judged during the early days of Korn. He and his bandmates were young when they formed the band, and he says he was just trying to find his footing in the music industry and make the most of the time he had with his bandmates, Koz included. “I was into being in a band that I loved,” he says. “I was in a band with a bunch of beautiful young men, and we were all trying to make it. … I never wanted to be an asshole. But I didn’t know that in order to be friends with gay people I would have to be one.” As for Koz, he knows he has gay fans — though he’s not sure how many. He says that when Korn was getting a big reaction from gay people, there was one fan that kept messaging him, saying he loved his music. “He went out of his way to talk to me. He told me he liked me and loved my music and was going to buy my record, and then I learned that he was gay,” Koz says. “He was into me. I’m not going to think less of him for it. You gotta be a gay for that. But I’m sure there were gay people who didn’t like me, but I was too worried about making it to worry about that.” Koz didn’t want to discuss this — and neither did Young — but it was later revealed by those involved that both men have gay fans. The two talk about it in separate videos released in 2012 when Korn toured with Guns N’ Roses. “There was one girl who had a picture of me in her handbag with her keys, and she was like, ‘I love you, I think you’re amazing,’ ” Young says. “There was a lot of young women who were coming up and hanging on me all night. I was surprised at how much they loved me.” In 2013, Young got his first tattoo with a pair of wings, to celebrate the birth of his son, Zev. “It’s great having a young man who cares about his father and wants to be a part of him,” Young says. “I was just thinking he’s got the right stuff.”