After coming out last month, Beartooth’s Caleb Shomo has opened up about his Christian upbringing and said that he was taught that being gay was “a sickness that you can cure with prayer”.
The frontman of the Ohio post-hardcore band shared an emotional statement with fans last month, saying that he was a “proudly gay man” and “trying to finally be proud of who I am.”
The update came after the singer deleted his Instagram account earlier this year, when Beartooth dropped the new single ‘Free’ – their first new music since 2023 – and some listeners posted homophobic slurs in the comment sections, speculating about his sexual orientation.
“I feel compelled to set the record straight before it affects those I love any further,” Shomo wrote in his post last month. “This is something I’ve been unpacking and reckoning with in my life for quite some time now. It’s been difficult to navigate the feelings surrounding the subject and figure out what to do with this fact.”
Caleb Shomo (Beartooth) has come out as gay in a new statement shared to his fans on IG.
"There's been a lot of speculation surrounding my personal life as of late and feel compelled to set the record straight before it affects those love any further. I am a proudly gay man." pic.twitter.com/CQyaZgoxCx
— State of the Scene (@SOTSPodcast) May 23, 2026
Now the singer has spoken about his Christian upbringing, and how the views of those around him made it difficult for him to accept his sexuality.
Speaking during a new episode of the Disrespectfully podcast, Shomo explained that he was raised into a deeply religious family and was the “son of a preacher who is the son of a preacher”.
“Essentially, with Christianity, you devote your life to Jesus,” he said, adding that the “Southern side of Christianity, where I come from” has a stricter stance when it comes to homosexuality and is more centred on “serving people”.
“To me, I have no self worth, no self love, no reason for being here other than serving other people and loving other people and following the playbook,” he explained. “So that’s a tough place to start, especially being gay.”
He went on to say that while he loves his parents and believes they were doing the best they could throughout his upbringing, their teachings of Christianity led to him having negative connotations with homosexuality, and made it hard for him to accept who he is.
Shomo said he grew up thinking that being gay was “a sickness that you can cure with prayer”, and then found it hard to come out as a teenager as he immediately got “involved in a music scene in that really wild Christian era of the mid-late 2000s” and started “hanging out with a lot of older people who were very evangelical devout Christians… and I was a Christian myself.”
He also recalled joining a group when he was 16 that were trying to “pray the gay out of one of our crew members”, and said that he found it “traumatising” and “terrifying” to come to terms with what he was feeling.
“I was trying my best and just trying to follow the path, [but] there was just so much I didn’t understand about myself,” he said.
Looking back at the first time he faced peer pressure when it came to expressing himself, Shomo recalled a time when he got a “girl’s ring” when he was around six years old, and eventually threw it out of the window of the school bus after he got “ridiculed by the kids” for wearing it.
“To me, that was this very strong feminine side that I have, but it’s just not the vibe in Ohio in the Christian world,” he shared. “And then, the older you get, [it gets worse by being around] conversations constantly reminding you how fucking weird it is to be gay or to do anything remotely gay or feminine.”
“So that feeling that I had, which I now understand was my sexuality, I just viewed and compartmentalised as just self-hatred,” he said, adding that it initially made him feel “evil” and want to “fight it with all of [his] might” and “pray about it”.
The singer was married to wife Fleur Shomo for nearly 14 years before he came out, and shortly after he announced his sexuality, she shared her own statement on Instagram, confirming that they had split up, but still on good terms.
Beartooth are now gearing up to release new album ‘Pure Ecstasy’ on August 28, which will be their first since 2023’s ‘The Surface’. Visit here to pre-order.
Around the time of their last release, Shomo spoke to NME about how he always has a “cathartic experience” when making albums with the band.
“Whatever kind of viewpoint they’re from… Some, obviously, being more painful than others,” he said. “Beartooth is the most intimate experience that I have with music. Beartooth and me are one thing. It’s just me talking about exactly what I’m going through, with no filters, at that moment.”