Beartooth's Caleb Shomo Opens Up About Coming Out to His Wife

Sometimes the biggest breakthroughs happen in the smallest moments. For Beartooth frontman Caleb Shomo, 33, that moment came in the shower—a literal pep talk to himself before finally doing something he’d been avoiding for years.

On the June 10 episode of Katie Maloney and Dayna Kathan’s“Disrespectfully”podcast, Shomo got candid about the night he came out to his then-wife Fleur Shomo, 32. He described the internal struggle that led to that conversation: years of pushing down feelings, of running from a truth he couldn’t quite face.“I was in the shower trying to talk myself into saying something as I had been many times. And thankfully, I kind of smacked myself in the face. I was like,‘It’s f***ing time,'”he recalled. What followed was a raw, messy, emotional conversation during a trip to Palm Springs where he felt safe enough to finally speak his truth about his feelings for men.

The weight of that moment wasn’t lost on him.“I was just bawling my f***ing eyes out, trying so hard to verbalize and I really struggle to verbalize things,”Shomo admitted. He’d spent so long suppressing these feelings that finding the words felt nearly impossible. But he managed to tell Fleur what he needed to say:“I don’t think I want to run anymore.”And with those words, something shifted.“Then after that, the f***ing hinges got ripped out.”Suddenly, pieces of his life that had never made sense started clicking into place, and the shame and self-doubt he’d carried for years began to lift.

In May, Shomo made his sexuality public through an Instagram statement.“There has been a lot of speculation surrounding my personal life as of late and I feel compelled to set the record straight before it affects those I love any further. I am a proudly gay man,”he wrote, describing a journey of“unpacking and reckoning”with this part of himself. Fleur responded with grace, posting about their nearly 14 years of marriage and the genuine love they’d shared. It was a respectful ending to a chapter—not a tragedy, but an evolution.

Looking back now, Shomo feels a weight lifted.“I’m very happy I did it and it feels like a weight lifted,”he said on the podcast. But the experience also opened his eyes to something harder to swallow: the depth of resistance and hostility toward LGBTQ+ people, particularly directed at someone in his position within the music scene.“Let alone me being the position that I am in and the music scene that I am in and frankly my life leading up until it,”he noted. It’s a reminder that visibility in rock and metal, spaces traditionally coded as hypermasculine, still carries real stakes. What Shomo’s doing—living honestly and speaking openly about his journey—matters more than he might realize.