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Freddie's intertextual star image is portrayed through a variety of agents, highlighting the Freddie Mercury persona as both an individual and collective identity.

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TV ad for Cadbury Dairy Milk - Queen - Don't Stop Me Now

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Despite the controversy the film received surrounding the dismissal of Freddie's queer identity, it nonetheless was a major box office success and led to the mainstream exposure of Freddie and Queen to a brand new generation of fans, and particularly, a younger audience. So much so that shortly after the film's release, 'Bohemian Rhapsody' became the 'most streamed track from the 20th century', hitting 1.6 billion streams globally. This highlights not only the shift in media landscape and its ability to diversify and expand fandom (such as through the access to streaming platforms in the 21st century), but also Freddie's role as a multi-medial transitional figure who posthumously helps younger audiences who may also be struggling with their identity or feel oppressed by society through their teenage years.

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Alex Bailey/20th Century Fox

Of course, a teen discovering the music of Queen in 2019 faces an incredibly different media environment and fan ecosystem than a teen picking up an album in a record store in the 1970s. Besides the easy access of streaming platforms -- in December, Universal Music Group announced that the song "Bohemian Rhapsody" was the most-streamed track from the 20th century with more than 1.6 billion global streams -- teens also experience a band's history through the prism of YouTube k-holes, Reddit threads, TikTok videos, and Instagram posts. In the case of Bohemian Rhapsody, the interest in the band is also tied to the actors portraying them in the film.

That appears to be especially true in the world of Queen fan fiction, which you can find countless examples of on the community-based writing platform Wattpad. (Netflix's teen-favorite romantic comedy The Kissing Booth originated as a story on the site.) The " Bohemian Rhapsody" tag reveals many stories centered around the group's drummer Roger Taylor, played in the film by 28-year-old British heartthrob Ben Hardy. Somebody to Love, one of the most popular BoRhap fanfiction titles on the site, follows the story of Rebecca Jackson, a young woman with a dull life ("She goes to work, comes home, and that's pretty much it.") who, in the words of the synopsis on the site, meets "a very handsome blonde-haired, blue-eyed drummer named Roger and suddenly, her life isn't so boring anymore." It currently has 44 chapters. "I don't know why I wrote it," wrote the story's author, Wattpad user STACEEEEERS, when reached via private message. "Thought it'd be fun."

The potential blending of the actor, the real-life band member, and the character of the film makes it especially ripe for fan-driven reinterpretation. (Some of the Roger Taylor specific titles on Wattpad have sub-titles like "A Ben Hardy Story" and they often feature Hardy's face on the covers.) One writer of multiple Queen tales, a Wattpad user going by the username "sebasstan," said they were inspired by how "amazing" the band's story was. According to sebasstan, fan fiction reading devotees of Queen are drawn to Hardy because of how he portrayed Taylor in the movie, specifically "his arrogant personality" and "how he was a womanizer."

"My readers are excited about my characters getting together," writes sebasstan, who was a Queen fan before Bohemian Rhapsody arrived in theaters. "I like to take my time on building the relationship of my characters and not rush it immediately. [Readers] also like the funny moments and the emotional moments in the chapters."

The internet is not the only place for Queen fans to express their excitement about the band. As part of its promotional push for the film, 20th Century Fox held sing-along screenings of the movie in select cities and even organized a karaoke bus tour in markets like New York, Austin, Las Vegas, and Los Angeles. (A reporter for Jezebel attended the New York one and described the experience as "the bus to hell.") According to John Goehrke, the Director of Visitor Engagement at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, Ohio, young fans increasingly type the band's name into the museum's "Voice Your Choice" interactive voting tool, which lets visitors take a stand on who they'd like to see admitted into the Hall of Fame. When the computer tells them Queen was actually inducted in 2001, they end up voting for Freddie Mercury as a solo artist.

"Freddie Mercury as a solo artist is now in the top five in our current 'Voice Your Choice' standing, among artists like Iron Maiden, Rage Against the Machine, and Dave Matthews Band," says Goehrke in a phone interview. "And it's young kids who must've seen the film, maybe saw it with their family. Kids that are 10, 11, 12, 13, or 14 years old, they're the ones who are submitting Freddie Mercury's name."

Alex Bailey/20th Century Fox

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How the Controversial Biopic 'Bohemian Rhapsody' Is Turning Teens Into Queen Fans

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Of course, a teen discovering the music of Queen in 2019 faces an incredibly different media environment and fan ecosystem than a teen picking up an album in a record store in the 1970s.

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The most telling moment in Bohemian Rhapsody, the Golden Globe-winning Queen biopic that occasionally stops singing to zoom in on its ostensible subject, Freddie Mercury, is almost certainly an accidental one.

It arrives at the end of the film - July 1985, in the film's historically inaccurate timeline - when Mercury (Rami Malek) decides to tell the other members of Queen the truth about himself shortly before the biggest concert of their lives.

"I've got it," he says. And they have no idea what "it" is.

Of course they don't. Though Bohemian Rhapsody spends most of its runtime paying lip service to the idea that Queen is a sort of dysfunctional misfit family, in that moment, the distance between Mercury and his bandmates is undisguisable. "It" has been looming over Mercury's life for years. "It" has been stalking his community, stealing away people he loves, constantly reminding him of his mortality. Freddie Mercury's reality, in 1985, was one in which " People just vanished, and everyone was in some kind of panic." For Mercury, there was only one "it": AIDS.

But the other members of Queen had no idea what he was talking about. How could they? They were all straight.

This moment is one of several in Bohemian Rhapsody that almost gives you a glimpse of the profound paradoxes of gay life before and during the AIDS crisis, when queer culture, subversive and life-embracing, built itself triumphantly at the edges of a society that refused to legitimize queer identity even as it gleefully exploited queer entertainers like Freddie Mercury. The film almost portrays Mercury as a fully aware part of that exchange; it almost makes a connection between the forced isolation of Mercury's life and the marginalization of queer people at large.

But ultimately, it fails to do either. The film is no more conscious of Freddie Mercury's reality than his Queen bandmates are in that scene, because it isn't trying to be a biopic about Mercury's life. (In reality, Mercury received his diagnosis in 1987.) What it really wants to be is a Queen concert, and what it really wants Freddie Mercury to be is a rock god instead of a real, queer human man.

The result is far more hurtful than your average unconsciously homophobic film. Bohemian Rhapsody is a movie that consciously tries to position a gay man at its center while strategically disengaging with the "gay" part as much as it can, flitting briefly over his emotional and sexual experiences and fixating on his platonic relationship with an ex-girlfriend instead. It strips Mercury of a part of his identity that was as vital to his success as his four-octave vocal range. After all, it was his choice to live at the crossroads of mainstream culture and queer culture, to subvert the cultural exploitation of queerness by transcending it and embracing his personal and sexual power, that made him who he was.

It takes a hell of a lot of work to make a queerphobic film about one of the greatest queer icons in history, but even though Bohemian Rhapsody was sort-of directed by Bryan Singer, who himself is openly gay, the movie somehow retreads queerphobic stereotypes instead of giving us a fascinating, complex look at a real gay man. And it's worth discussing why, both because Hollywood should really be better at this by now and because so many of the problems the film has in depicting Mercury's story are endemic not just to the film itself, but to the way society continues to view queer identity.

Bohemian Rhapsody's toxic depiction of queerness is subtle but pervasive - and completely avoidable

If film critics have sounded especially exasperated with this film, it's because any screenwriter with even a passing interest in queer identity and an understanding of the history of queer cinematic erasure should have been able to avoid perpetuating that erasure. Yet Bohemian Rhapsody screenwriter Anthony McCarten, a two-time Oscar nominee, seems to have given zero thought to these issues.

The movie reduces queer identity to a series of promiscuous sexual encounters, which it consistently frames as sordid, shameful, illicit, and corrupting. It also builds a whole annoying subplot around the "predatory gay villain" trope, which is a tired, obnoxious cliché that in Bohemian Rhapsody is even more problematic than usual because it's used to imply that Mercury, a real-life gay man, was somehow corrupted into becoming queer by an opportunistic music industry parasite who doesn't really care about Freddie at all.

The movie is so unwilling to treat Mercury's queerness with any degree of respect that it doesn't even bother to get the timeline of his coming-out right, let alone explore that process with sensitivity or interest. At one point, Mercury is shown gazing contemplatively at a seedy bathhouse, but viewers don't see whether he goes in, with the clear implication that he's questioning himself and what he wants. Then in the very next scene, he confidently describes himself as a "hysterical queen" to his other bandmates. And then, a few scenes later, he haltingly confesses to his wife that he might be bisexual; she is the one who has to inform him, in response, that he is gay.

Bohemian Rhapsody also refuses to depict gay men having meaningful and deeply emotional relationships. The emotional development of Mercury's romance with Jim Hutton, his partner of seven years, is relegated to a single conversation. Their entire loving, monogamous relationship is reduced onscreen to a single kiss and a brief hand squeeze.

This minimization makes it an even worse offense that the film does take the time to depict Mercury having a series of promiscuous sexual encounters, which it paints as sordid and shameful. Because Bohemian Rhapsody only equates queerness with sex, and because it frames his queer lifestyle as bad, Mercury's subsequent AIDS diagnosis is inherently set up and portrayed as a punishment for his queerness.

Not only is all of this negligent, it's actively harmful. There are numerous real-world examples of how equating queerness to sexually explicit content continues to hurt and marginalize people - such as the many YouTube vloggers and creators who are constantly fighting against algorithms that incorrectly flag their queer content as "explicit" and "not safe for work" solely because it concerns queer people. And the depiction of AIDS as a punishment for gayness, which has found voice in everything from doomsday preachers to Stephen King novels, has historically contributed to the deaths of millions by creating a huge stigma around the disease, making it difficult for researchers to gain public support in the fight for the cure and causing considerable obstacles for many who are diagnosed to receive equitable treatment.

It boggles the mind that this needs to be said at all, but queer people have deep complexity that has nothing to do with sex or dying. Freddie Mercury, a man who wrote a song to his cat and once snuck Princess Diana into a club after disguising her in drag, had so much more personality than Bohemian Rhapsody allows him to have.

Bohemian Rhapsody spends more time on Mercury's wife than any other character, including Mercury himself

To be fair to the film, Bohemian Rhapsody hardly wastes time on characterization at all; there's almost no onscreen interiority in the film, despite star Rami Malek's best efforts.

Most of what's there, however, is devoted to showing us how much Mercury loves his common-law wife, Mary Austin, who's portrayed as personifying virginal beauty and traditional wholesomeness - everything Mercury could have, the film implies, if only he weren't tragically queer.

There's a troubling pattern of movies like this one - for example, the Alan Turing biopic The Imitation Game, or the Cole Porter biopic De-Lovely - that diminish the real queer experiences of their subjects in favor of elevating their platonic friendships with the patient, chaste women in their lives.

It's true that Austin and Mercury had a meaningful and long-lasting friendship in real life. But Bohemian Rhapsody isn't interested in exploring the positive aspects of their friendship, because it would apparently rather portray Mercury as lost, confused, and fixated on her, just as a straight man might be.

After they break up - because Mercury is gay - Mercury pines for Austin. He longs for her to keep wearing her wedding ring. He's jealous of her boyfriend. At one point, he begs her to come live with him again, only to be informed that she's pregnant. This moment is portrayed as a catastrophe that will keep them apart forever - as if it's unfortunate timing that's at issue, rather than Mercury's queer identity.

The only overt sexual moments in the film - which, as it's rated PG-13, are nearly nonexistent - are between the two of them. In one scene, she's framed in a diaphanous gown against soft pastel backlighting, while he gazes at her lovingly and then tells her how beautiful she is. It's a completely straightforward iteration of the (straight) male gaze.

The camera never repeats this framing when Mercury is looking at the men around him, so we're not allowed to see the queer men around Freddie Mercury as he would have seen them - as beautiful, as lovable, as human. (For the record, there are zero queer women onscreen.) It's as if Bohemian Rhapsody is afraid of taking us too deeply into Mercury's mind for any length of time in order to show him actually feeling like a queer man, getting to know other queer people, experiencing the complex personalities of other queer people.

It's absurd and insulting, and it serves to depict Mercury himself - a legendary creative genius - as infantile and petulant. In the film, he only seems to care about two topics, Mary Austin and his music, because those are the only parts of his life the film seems to feel safe approaching.

The film paints Freddie Mercury as somehow choosing his own isolation

Because heteronormative society in the '70s (to say nothing of society today) denied queer people access to the benefits of monogamy, of nuclear families and all the myths about true love and lifetime happiness we allow straight kids to have, queer men of the era were often forced to seek found families in the bathhouses, through high-risk behaviors with low emotional stakes. Bohemian Rhapsody has to deal with these very real aspects of Mercury's life, but it doesn't know how to, because that way lies homosexuality.

So instead, it depicts Mercury as consciously sacrificing himself for the greater cause of entertainment. Repeatedly, he implies that the only thing that matters to him is music, because the film wants very badly to be about the music rather than the musician; it wants very badly to be about Freddie Mercury's voice (which was dubbed over Rami Malek's lip-syncing) instead of Freddie Mercury's whole identity.

The effect of this is that the film strongly implies that Mercury chose to be gay, to surround himself with other queer people, at the risk of losing his "true" friends, his "family." We're never actually shown what the other members of Queen really thought about Mercury, or if they even liked him at all, because the film doesn't care about those relationships either. It nonetheless depicts Queen, as well as Mary Austin, as becoming increasingly exasperated with Mercury's extravagant lifestyle, his parties, his huge circle of friends - in other words, with all the things that signal his embrace of queer culture and his increased acceptance of his queer identity.

In the film, though, these things aren't confidence boosters - they're morally sketchy behaviors that detract him from his true calling. The film wants viewers to be okay with that because it wants Mercury himself to have ultimately been okay with being seen primarily as a rock god and not as a human being. It presents Mercury's famous performance at Live Aid as his ultimate triumph, the moment when he - or rather, his voice - transcended earth and, as his character puts it, "touched the sky."

But in that telltale scene I mentioned above, that one word - "it" - betrays the lie behind this entire idea. Mercury could no more escape his identity than could any other queer man of his era. And because Bohemian Rhapsody hasn't done due diligence in portraying queer identity as something more than shamefaced fashion choices and surreptitious visits to clubs, "it" becomes the only thing the audience is allowed to take away from Mercury's queerness. Not that it made him beautiful, made him erotic, made him a rock star, but that it left him dead.

It's rare that straight culture has to contend with the deep ironies of queer life and queer identity that have been forced onto queer people by the very society that ostracizes them. Straight culture loves a fun-loving queen but rarely allows her to stick around after the party (unless it's to go shopping). It demonizes queer culture as being promiscuous but perpetually fights against allowing it the legitimacy afforded to monogamous relationships. It perpetually relegates queer identity to the celluloid closet and then is baffled when queer people wind up identifying with horror film villains and writing fanfiction that recasts straight characters as gay.

All these paradoxes reside at the margins of Bohemian Rhapsody, because Freddie Mercury was a real person who lived with and was shaped by these ironies every day. We glimpse his awareness of them through Malek's wonderful performance, but like so much of queer cinema, they ultimately remain subtextual. In the hands of a more conscientious screenwriter, Bohemian Rhapsody could have afforded an opportunity for all of Queen's fans to better understand their hero by showing us how his choice to embrace his queerness shaped and informed his art.

Instead, the film winds up being the last thing Mercury himself would have wanted it to be, given his own embrace of the queer community: an erasure of that community, and of Mercury's own uniqueness, as well as a flimsy, demonizing stereotype of queer men. All fans of Freddie Mercury, but especially the queer ones, deserved better.

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Bohemian Rhapsody loves Freddie Mercury's voice. It fears his queerness.

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The most telling moment in Bohemian Rhapsody , the Golden Globe-winning Queen biopic that occasionally stops singing to zoom in on its ostensible subject, Freddie Mercury, is almost certainly an accidental one.

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For some critics, the film "played it safe" when it came to depicting Freddie's queerness and queer identity, arguing that the film 'treats Freddie's personal life- his sexual-romantic identity, his loneliness, his reckless adventures in gay leather clubs- with kid-gloves reticence', and instead fixating primarily on his relationship with Mary Austin. Many critics pointed out that when the film does allude to Freddie's queerness, it is reduced to stereotypically negative queer tropes of promiscuous sexual encounters, therefore setting up his AIDS diagnosis as a 'punishment for his queerness'.

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Freddie Mercury was the most majestically debauched of all rock stars. A bad-boy diva with a famous overbite that made him look not just sexy but libidinous, he strutted around onstage with the come-hither flamboyance of a leering vampire prince. And, of course, no one in rock history had pipes like his. In his heyday as the lead singer of Queen, during the mid-to-late 1970s, Mercury crooned and wailed, but more than that he soared, like Robert Plant fused with the spirits of Cher and Tina Turner. He was as down-and-dirty as any rock 'n' roller, but his melodic glide could lift you to the heavens. Queen's iconic anthem "We Will Rock You" was written as a call-and-response between the band and its fans, but the way Mercury sang it, with his snaky grandiloquence ("Buddy, you're a boy, make a big noise playing in the street...") the song came off as his unholy credo. The message was: He will rock you.

How do you cast the role of Freddie Mercury? It's like finding someone to play Mick Jagger or Michael Jackson - at every moment, you're going up against the real thing, a pop deity who has never stopped living inside our imaginations. Yet in the scrappy and sprawling rock biopic " Bohemian Rhapsody," Rami Malek, the 37-year-old Egyptian-American actor from "Mr. Robot," takes on the role of Freddie Mercury as if born to it. Swarthy and insinuating, if neither as tall nor as serpentine as Mercury, Malek has been outfitted with a set of fake front teeth, a recreation of the jutting Freddie overbite that works well enough, though it's often a bit distracting, because there don't appear to be any spaces between the pearly whites - it's like seeing a Freddie who got his teeth capped. That said, Malek winds up looking, and inhabiting, the part to a remarkable degree. Watching " Bohemian Rhapsody," we always feel like we're seeing Freddie Mercury standing right in front of us.

Onstage, Malek's Freddie is a studded leather peacock, swoony and liberated, letting the life force pour out of him in a glorious tremolo, most extraordinarily during the film's climactic sequence, a song-for-song, move-for-move reenactment of Queen's legendary reunion set at the London Live Aid concert in 1985 (though the film drops the infectious Elvis bop of "Crazy Little Thing Called Love"). Malek, wearing a wife beater and arm band and Mercury's signature honcho mustache, with liquid dark eyes that drink in the crowd and stare it down, struts and poses and leads the audience in vocal chants as if he owned the world (which, at that moment, Freddie sort of did).

Offstage, Malek nails the star's fusion of charm and ego with a suavely nervy command. Freddie, born in Zanzibar (as Farrokh Bulsara), spends the early scenes, set in London in 1970, toggling between his proper Parsi family and the nightlife that lures him like a flame. When he learns that Smile, a local band he's been following, has lost its lead singer, he belts out an impromptu croon in front of the band's other members, guitarist Brian May (Gwilym Lee) and drummer Roger Taylor (Ben Hardy), just outside their club gig, and as soon as they hear what Freddie can do they hire him.

He already has the scarf-tossing pansexual darling bravado of a post-glam rock star, yet Freddie, in his way, is also a tea-time British gentleman. He becomes the band's leader, renaming them Queen and getting them to sell their rickety touring van to make enough money for a demo tape, and he possesses an awesome belief in his own talent - right down to the four extra teeth on his upper jaw, which he proudly claims add to his vocal power. Yet the way Malek plays him, there's a captivating sweetness to Freddie. He treats everyone with the same soft-edged, velvet-voiced regard (at least, until he becomes a drugged-out rock-star prima donna), notably Mary Austin (Lucy Boynton), the playful and loving lass he falls for and forms a tender domestic union with. When he struggles to keep the relationship going after he discovers, on the road, that his essential attraction is to men, it's not just because he's concealing his erotic drive (though that's part of it). It's as though he can't bring himself to break Mary's heart.

So with a performance as commanding as Rami Malek's at its center, why isn't "Bohemian Rhapsody" a better movie? Directed by Bryan Singer, who is now officially credited (after rumors that his name might be taken off the picture due to his failure to show up on set during the final weeks of filming late last year), the movie, despite its electrifying subject, is a conventional, middle-of-the-road, cut-and-dried, play-it-safe, rather fuddy-duddy old-school biopic, a movie that skitters through events instead of sinking into them. And it treats Freddie's personal life - his sexual-romantic identity, his loneliness, his reckless adventures in gay leather clubs - with kid-gloves reticence, so that even if the film isn't telling major lies, you don't feel you're fully touching the real story either. Freddie Mercury was a brazenly sexual person who felt compelled to keep his sexuality hidden, but that's no excuse for a movie about him to be so painfully polite.

As a director, Singer has always been a big-budget short-order cook, the kind of filmmaker who brings more energy than texture to what he's doing. "Bohemian Rhapsody" creates a watchable paint-by-numbers ride through the Queen saga, yet it's rarely the movie it could or should have been. As scripted by Anthony McCarten ("Darkest Hour," "The Theory of Everything"), it lacks the cathartic intimacy, the rippingly authentic you-are-there excitement of a great rock-world biopic like "Sid and Nancy" or "Get On Up" or "Love & Mercy." Yet the film's limitations may not end up mattering all that much, since its once-over-lightly quality could prove to be highly commercial (and Malek's captivating performance is pure awards bait). The movie can work for mainstream audiences as a jukebox musical pegged to a heart-tugging semi-synthetic version of Freddie Mercury's rise and fall.

In a strange way, it's Queen's music, delectable as it is, that's most underserved by Singer's one-thing-after-another sketchbook approach. In terms of the Queen songbook, the movie gets a few things wonderfully right, like the Live Aid performance, or the recording - and marketing - of "Bohemian Rhapsody," the one-of-a-kind existential rock-opera mash-up ("Nothing really matters..to me") that, in 1975, became Queen's signature six-minute radio masterpiece. The marathon recording session exuberantly evokes the song's shoot-the-works quality, and there's an irresistible sequence, built around the in-joke of casting Mike Myers - yes, Wayne Campbell himself - as an EMI executive, in which the members of Queen try, and fail, to convince the label to release "Bohemian Rhapsody" as a single. The rest, as they say, is history.

Yet for all the attention it lavishes on its title song, "Bohemian Rhapsody" doesn't show much interest in how Freddie and Queen came together to carve out their heavy-metal/pop-echo-chamber wall of sound. The first true Queen single, "Killer Queen," in 1974, becomes the occasion for a squabble between the band members and the producers of "Top of the Pops" about why the band has to lip-sync their performance of it on television. But even if that really happened, who cares? What we miss is how the band came up with "Killer Queen" in the first place - the merging of Mercury's Tin Pan Alley jauntiness and Brian May's guitar-god power, backed by the insane multi-tracking of Mercury's voice into an infinitely mirrored chorus. That's the invention of the Queen sound, and it's barely an afterthought in the movie.

As much as that, we miss the formation of what Freddie was onstage. Partly because the film doesn't want to upstage the Live Aid sequence, there's hardly a moment where we see Freddie discover who he is as a performer. And here's why that's a crucial omission. It wouldn't be homophobic - in fact, it would be homophobic to deny - that Freddie Mercury brought a spark of gay sensibility to rock 'n' roll. He envisioned the concert stage, and the recording studio, as a thunder-rock cabaret, and his vocals projected a newly naked male emotionalism that was stunning in its larger-than-life intensity.

"Bohemian Rhapsody" has a good time showing how Queen conceived a handful of their iconic hits, from the ominous funk of "Another One Bites the Dust" to the gladiatorial surge of "We Are the Champions." But for most of the film, the awesome expressiveness of Freddie Mercury, the way he used his voice as an enraptured instrument of agony and ecstasy, isn't front and center. It's telling that Queen's 1976 single "Somebody to Love" isn't featured in the movie (it's just background music), because not only is it one of their greatest songs, it's one of Mercury's most ardently autobiographical. It could have been an epiphany - but the film backs away from it, because it's backing away from the emotional bravura of what Freddie Mercury was singing.

As "Bohemian Rhapsody" goes on, the band falls apart and comes back together in inevitable, if not always historically accurate, melodramatic ways. The camaraderie among the members of Queen is fun to behold, because the film captures what different cloths they were cut from, and the actors fill in their roles - Gwilym Lee is especially good as Brian May, with his Louis XIV mane, virtuoso guitar licks, and jovial straight-arrow crispness. When Freddie reveals to the band, during rehearsals for the Live Aid show, that he has HIV (even though he wasn't, in fact, diagnosed until two years later), it's moving, because at that moment the film touches the truth of all great rock bands: that they're brothers. Freddie's Live Aid performance gets reconfigured into his secret way of fighting back against the disease. He's sick, with an ailing throat, but he looks and performs as though he's in his prime, a show-must-go-on mirage that's a testament to his rock 'n' roll fervor. In a sequence like that, "Bohemian Rhapsody" nails Queen's majesty. What eludes the film is Freddie Mercury's mystery.

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Freddie Mercury was the most majestically debauched of all rock stars. A bad-boy diva with a famous overbite that made him look not just sexy but libidinous, he strutted around onstage with the come-hither flamboyance of a leering vampire prince. And, of course, no one in rock history had pipes like his.

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Therefore, the notion of Freddie Mercury as not only the lead singer of Queen but also a persona, is constructed throughout, in which his flamboyant and eccentric, yet carefully crafted, public image consistently informs his private self, acting as a mask to the outsiderness he feels within himself as an immigrant struggling with his sexuality and true identity. For me, this scene where Freddie meets Jim Hutton, his future partner, clearly illustrates Freddie's public persona as a mask and the struggles he faces with it. He confides in Jim, explaining how he finds his friends 'intolerable', and how the 'darkness you thought you left behind comes creeping in' when he's alone.

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Bohemian Rhapsody - Freddie Meets Jim Hutton Scene (Rami Malek Freddie Mercury)

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Here, it is important to consider the accuracy of the film in terms its portrayal of Freddie's image. As a whole, we can expect the events of the film to be highly dramatised for entertainment purposes. The film is grounded in the pure joy Freddie feels while performing, in which he can be his authentic self without judgement or oppression. In the film, this pure joy and freedom Freddie feels as his on stage persona is portrayed as the very thing that has made him globally successful and a household name; 'display[ing] rock music as the one place where a total outsider such as Mercury could completely belong'.

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It may be that the only way to experience a full measure of Queen nostalgia is not to have heard the band the first time around-to indulge in vicarious nostalgia, a homecoming to somebody else's home. If so, " Bohemian Rhapsody," a superficially clichéd yet thematically unusual bio-pic about the band's lead singer and guiding spirit, Freddie Mercury ( Rami Malek), delivers that secondhand rock memory by rooting its story less in the primary experience of the band's performances than in a subtly revisionist, sharply current view of Mercury's life and work. The movie has been criticized for its lack of attention to the specifics of his sex life. In fact, it is clear about Mercury's sexual orientation. (In the movie, Freddie-as we'll call the character, to distinguish him from the historical Mercury-states that he's bisexual and is shown to be in two long-term relationships with men, though it only hints at any casual ones.) But "Bohemian Rhapsody" isn't a comprehensive bio-pic, nor a full-spectrum consideration of Mercury's life-it is a clearly and carefully oriented vision of his career. It's mostly interested in his private life in relation to a single big idea: success and its price.

"Bohemian Rhapsody" offers nothing of Mercury's childhood in Zanzibar, his schooling in Bombay, his lifelong devotion to rock and roll. The movie shows no years of dedicated practice or earlier musical life or ambition; his sole primordial effort is a song that he scribbles on a piece of paper and keeps folded up in his pocket while working, as a young man in London, as an airport baggage handler. Mercury, who played piano and guitar, is of course depicted as being possessed of a formidable vocal technique, a remarkable near-operatic voice-but it's presented as a natural gift that's also a curse. He was born, as Freddie says, with four extra incisors, and the larger oral chamber is the reason for his large vocal range. Freddie first shows off that range in a parking lot outside a club, where he's trying to get members of a local band to take one of his songs. But the band has just lost its lead singer, and so Freddie does a spontaneous audition for them-not, however, before they make fun of his facial deformity and suggest that it's an insurmountable obstacle to his becoming a band member, let alone its front man.

A protruding mouth isn't the only trait for which Freddie endures insults. Born Farrokh Bulsara, he's an ethnic Parsi, a descendant of the Zoroastrians who fled Persia for India more than a millennium ago; in Great Britain, he's frequently insulted as a "Paki." (At his airport job, he meekly replies that he's not from Pakistan.) He's also a bisexual man in a country that had only recently decriminalized homosexuality, at a time when it was widely considered shameful, or at least indecent. And he's from a poor family whose struggles he relates to discrimination. In one of the movie's exemplary scenes, Freddie is at home with his parents, planning an escape into music (and declaring that his name is no longer his given one of Farrokh but, rather, Freddie); his father instead preaches to him a credo, exhorting him to pursue "good thoughts, good words, good deeds." Freddie's retort isn't a variation on "boring"-it's, "And how has that worked out for you?" His father's virtuous modesty hasn't brought success in the face of prejudice; Freddie's bold self-assertion is meant to do so.

When the band's music begins to crystallize, Freddie masterminds its path to success. He decides that the band should sell its van to finance the recording of an album, and, in the studio, he orchestrates its production as well as the unusual studio techniques with which they create it. He gives the band the new name of Queen; he arranges the crucial meeting, with Elton John's manager (Aidan Gillen), that will put the band on the map; and, at that meeting, he sells the manager on the band's future hit-making successes. The scene offers Freddie one of the script's great arias, on the subject of his ambitions, as he tells the businessman that he's playing "for the outcasts in the back" because those are the people with whom he himself identifies.

The direction of the film (credited to Bryan Singer, who was fired late in the production and replaced by Dexter Fletcher but is granted sole credit) is often oddly denatured, flip, and incurious, and its lack of vision keeps the movie far short of its-and, above all, of Malek's-finest inspirations. (The filming of Malek's onstage performances as Freddie, which are chopped to bits and reduced to cliché-riddled snippets, is particularly insensitive.) But at its best the film is spare and clarifying, and ideologically unambiguous: its strength is in the positioning of Mercury as an artist who confronts opposition throughout society-including from the very institutions that he needs in order to succeed. The script offers Freddie another great aria to deliver, to a record-company executive (played by Mike Myers), in which he declares his ambition to make music with the power of opera, "the wit of Shakespeare, the unbridled joy of musical theatre," intending to offer "something for everyone." "We'll speak in tongues if we want to," he says. The song "Bohemian Rhapsody," which the record company hesitated to record and then wouldn't issue as a single, of course became a hit, at which point the movie offers a remarkable montage featuring quotes from reviews of the song, all negative. The very source of Freddie's popularity-his keen insight into the humiliations and the frustrations of listeners, their strivings and their dreams, their search for love and visions of stifled grandeur-made him rich, famous, and artistically fulfilled, but critically derided.

For that matter, it's only in those moments of performance, of communion with people who, each in their own way, share his sense of oppression and humiliation, that Freddie feels himself to be truly himself. His joy in performance is a joy in solidarity, and his life offstage can hardly match it. (He speaks of his partying life as a quest for distraction from the "in-between moments" when "the darkness comes back in" and, later, explains his drug use: "Being human is a condition that requires a little anesthesia.") Yet for his success he's not just beloved-he's also subjected to the aggressive prying of gossip-mongers and paparazzi, the brickbats of critics, and the betrayal of intimates. And then he discovers that he's sick; he's diagnosed with AIDS; he realizes that he's dying.

More than most bio-pics (more than most movies), "Bohemian Rhapsody" is carried by the performance of its lead actor, because Malek offers more than a skillful impersonation-he offers an imaginative interpretation. Malek does an impressive job of re-creating Mercury's moves onstage, but the core of the performance is Malek's intensely thoughtful, insight-rich channelling of Mercury's hurt, his alienation and isolation even at the height of his fame. While watching the movie, I found his performance eerily reminiscent, as if based less on Freddie Mercury himself than on some other movie actor's performance. Then it struck me: Malek wasn't just channelling hurt; he was channelling Hurt-Malek's quiet and nearly abashed delivery of lines, in a way that emphasizes both Freddie's extra teeth and the emotional effect of being singled out for them, reminded me of John Hurt's performance as John Merrick, in David Lynch's "The Elephant Man."

Still, for all its pain, the movie is about the virtue and the quality that inhere in success. It displays rock music as the one place where a total outsider such as Mercury could completely belong. The movie "Bohemian Rhapsody" evokes a Warholian concept of success, of commercial and mainstream success as a personal statement, a mode of artistic expression. Criticize the music's simplistic emotions, earworm hooks, instant clichés, and crowd-pleasing exhortations as much as you'd like, the movie suggests, but don't misunderstand it as insincere or inartistic, as selling out or pandering. Freddie, as depicted, aims at commerce with a dead-set sense of purpose and principle.

What's more, Freddie's work is, in the movie's view, as sincere in its synthetic aspects as it is in its plain ones. In this regard, "Bohemian Rhapsody" is also a virtual rebuke to the veneration of the singer-songwriter as seen in Bradley Cooper's version of " A Star Is Born " (which regrettably dismisses the very kind of persona-crafting that is central to Lady Gaga's own art). Freddie is certainly both a songwriter and a singer, but he's also a persona from the start, whose elaborately crafted masquerades are as central to his creative personality as is his vocal and instrumental self-presentation. (Whether Mercury's work matches a Warholian originality of artistic form is debatable, though the movie comes down strongly in favor, as in the episodic oddity of the song "Bohemian Rhapsody.")

The movie "Bohemian Rhapsody" makes the case that Mercury is more interesting than his music-and, by extension, that popularity itself, the ability to become a mainstream star and hitmaker, is itself no fluke or by-product but a conscious creation and a mark of genius. The movie's vision of Mercury's life embodies a phrase by Stendhal cited by Nietzsche in " Beyond Good and Evil ": "A banker who has made a fortune has a part of the character that's needed to make discoveries in philosophy, that is, to see clearly into what is." Freddie, the movie suggests, wrote, sang, produced, and performed, from his constrained and petty life, from his multiple public and private oppressions and humiliations, all the way to the bank.

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In "Bohemian Rhapsody," Freddie Mercury Is More Interesting Than His Music

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It may be that the only way to experience a full measure of Queen nostalgia is not to have heard the band the first time around-to indulge in vicarious nostalgia, a homecoming to somebody else's home.

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"We made a film about a gay man, an immigrant, who lived his life unapologetically himself, and the fact that I'm celebrating him and this story with you tonight is proof that we're longing for stories like this"

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Rami Malek wins Best Actor | 91st Oscars (2019)

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Rami touches on Freddie's distinct on stage persona here, and the intricate details he had to learn in order to accurately and authentically embody Freddie's image, such as his mannerisms and the way he moves on stage, and how to perform whilst wearing his iconic teeth, which was another distinct quality of Mercury's identity.

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Rami Malek Made a Gold Grill Out of His Freddie Mercury Teeth

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Freddie's legacy as one of the most iconic rock stars of all time and continued relevance throughout mainstream media and pop culture was further demonstrated through the release of the film Bohemian Rhapsody in 2018, which mainly focuses on telling the story of Freddie's life and subsequent rise to international fame and success as the lead singer of Queen, as well as the internal struggles and challenges he faces within his personal life, most namely his AIDS diagnosis. Freddie is played by actor Rami Malek, who went on to win a multitude of awards for his performance.

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Bohemian Rhapsody | Official Trailer [HD] | 20th Century FOX

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An analysis of how Mercury's collaboration with Montserrat Caballe in 'Barcelona' was a marker of his authenticity as a versatile and mobile performer by bridging the gap between rock and opera, which are often viewed as contrasting musical genres.

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Queen's Freddie Mercury at Slane Castle 1986. Picture: Independent News and Media/Getty Images

30 years on from his tragic death, we look back at the statement the Queen frontman gave on HIV and the impact it had on the world.

This week marks 30 years since Freddie Mercury tragically passed away on 24 November 1991.

The Queen frontman is considered one of the most legendary British artists of all time and just before losing his life, he released a statement revealing his HIV+ status to the world.

It marked a watershed moment, with Mercury's brave decision helping to somewhat tackle the stigma towards AIDS, while leading to chain of events which helped fund research and bring about more awareness for the once deadly disease.

Find out the heartbreaking final message left behind by the Queen frontman and the impact of his passing today.
READ MORE - Freddie Mercury: In his Own Words
When did Freddie Mercury die?

The Queen frontman died from bronchial pneumonia relating to AIDS on 24 November 1991.

How old was Freddie Mercury when he died?

Freddie Mercury died at just 45 years of age.

What was Freddie Mercury's final statement?

Freddie Mercury's released a statement just one day before he died, which read: "Following enormous conjecture in the press, I wish to confirm that I have been tested HIV positive and have AIDS.

"I felt it correct to keep this information private in order to protect the privacy of those around me.

"However, the time has now come for my friends and fans around the world to know the truth, and I hope everyone will join with me, my doctors and all those worldwide in the fight against this terrible disease."

Fans leave tributes for Freddie Mercury 30 years after his death. Picture: DANIEL LEAL/AFP via Getty Images

What was the impact of Freddie Mercury's message?

Freddie Mercury's brave press release and his subsequent passing not only led to mourning from his millions of fans across the globe, but it helped catapult the topic further into public consciousness.

Shortly after, Queen's Bohemian Rhapsody single was re-released and went to Christmas number one, which raised over £1million to support the work at the Terrence Higgins Trust.

Most notably, Freddie's passing led to The Freddie Mercury Tribute Concert, which raised further awareness and funds for the disease.

His untimely death also led the surviving Queen members to launch The Mercury Phoenix Trust, which still raises funds and awareness for the cause today.
READ MORE: The biggest factual inaccuracies in the Bohemian Rhapsody film
Speaking on the immediate impact after his death, Deborah Gold, the chief executive of the National Aids Trust told PA: "Freddie Mercury has really had a lasting legacy.

"He's one of a small handful of people who is truly enormously internationally well-known, and so at the time his death had a huge impact.

"In the short period of time before he died, he was open about the fact that he had Aids, and when those moments happen, it's possible to grab hold of them and use them for something else.

"I think the other members of Queen and his friends really did that through their work at the Mercury Trust.

"They were able to take a really upsetting and sad situation and used the learning from that to really impact change."

Freddie Mercury in 1974. Picture: Gijsbert Hanekroot/Redferns/Getty

When was The Freddie Mercury Tribute Concert?

The Freddie Mercury Tribute Concert took place on Easter Monday, 20 April 1992 at Wembley Stadium, less than five months after the Queen frontman had passed away.

The likes of David Bowie, Elton John, George Michael, Liza Minelli, Annie Lennox, Seal, Slash, Lisa Stansfield, Bob Geldof famously took part.

What is The Mercury Phoenix Trust?

The Mercury Phoenix Trust was set up by Queen members Brian May, Roger Taylor and their manager Jim Beach in memory of the iconic frontman Freddie Mercury.

According to their website, the organisation has since raised £17million for over 1500 projects in 57 countries and counting.
Freddie Mercury: The Final Act - Everything we know so far about the documentary
What was the lasting legacy of Freddie Mercury's passing?

Freddie Mercury is still considered a world-famous music legend and his legacy has continued to positively impact the AIDS crisis in countless ways.

CEO of the Terrence Higgins Trust, Ian R Green, wrote in the Metro: "Freddie wanted his death to save others and to galvanise people across the globe in the fight against HIV. And it did. His death heightened awareness, inspired action and - as importantly - raised a huge amount of money to fund research, support those affected and to educate."

Today marks 30 years since the world lost the incomparable Freddie Mercury to an AIDS related illness.

30 years gone, but never ever forgotten.

"If it could happen to Freddie, it could happen to me," our CEO @ianrgreen remembers for @MetroUK. https://t.co/L4od2YmoN8
- Terrence Higgins Trust (@THTorguk) November 24, 2021

Thanks to research, being HIV positive is no longer a death sentence and those who contract it will live a normal lifespan if given the right treatment. Children can now be born without contracting to HIV positive parents.

The development of PrEP means millions of people can protect themselves from ever contracting HIV just by taking a pill, and those living with HIV on effective treatment are seeing their viral loads reduced to the point where they can no longer pass the virus on to others.

Plus, attitudes are changing too. In the 30 years since Freddie Mercury released his statement, more public figures have come forward to reveal they're living with HIV.

Everyone from US Basketball legend Magic Johnson to Welsh former rugby player Gareth Thomas have revealed their HIV status, with Pose star Billy Porter disclosing his HIV status just this year.

It's hard to quantify how much Freddie Mercury has influenced the fight against AIDS over the decades, but it's clear that the Queen frontman, and global figures like him have helped change the face of what was once a fatal disease.

For more information and support on HIV and sexual health, the following organisations offer support:

Terrance Higgins Trust

Positively UK

https://positivelyuk.org/

National Aids Trust

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Freddie Mercury's final statement and the impact of the Queen legend's passing 30 years on

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30 years on from his tragic death, we look back at the statement the Queen frontman gave on HIV and the impact it had on the world. This week marks 30 years since Freddie Mercury tragically passed away on 24 November 1991.

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According to the MPT, the organisation has raised a total of £17 million in the fight of HIV/AIDS worldwide, over 1,500 projects in 57 countries. The website also has an educational function, in which information is available on HIV/AIDS statistics and how to get involved in the cause.

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Anita Dobson speaks about the Mercury Phoenix Trust's support of Indian charity Snehalya.

Snehalya means The Home Of Love and provides Rescue, Rights & Rehabilitation to Women & children. Raising awareness and understanding for people living with HIV is a key part of their work. The Mercury Phoenix Trust supports Snehalya in their incredible task.
Watch Anita's Video here

Robbie talks about his persona on stage being geared around Freddie Mercury and why it is important to support the MPT.

Since 1992, The Mercury Phoenix Trust has been raising millions to fight AIDS worldwide and thanks to advances in treatment, many are able to live longer with the disease, but there is still no cure. Around the world, mainly in countries stricken with poverty and lack of education, people are dying. The fight is not over yet.
Watch Robbie's Video here

Queen and Freddie Mercury fan Matt Lucas introduces the Mercury Phoenix Trust message for 2013.

Since 1992, The Mercury Phoenix Trust has been raising millions to fight AIDS worldwide and thanks to advances in treatment, many are able to live longer with the disease, but there is still no cure. Around the world, mainly in countries stricken with poverty and lack of education, people are dying. The fight is not over yet...

Bono reflects on the loss of Freddie "...taken from us all in 1991 - stolen from us actually. This larger than life, dynamic vocal genius - stolen from us...stolen by a little virus, HIV". He goes on to say, "last year for the first time since AIDS appeared four decades ago more people were put on the treatment than contracted the virus.

"The balance is slowly tipping in the right direction... dreams of a world free of AIDS are no longer just dreams."

"But...we have to keep up the pressure and one of the ways of keeping up the pressure is by donating to the Mercury Phoenix Trust."

Following the moving and hugely successful Tribute Concert in 1992, Brian May, Roger Taylor and Jim Beach set up The Mercury Phoenix Trust (MPT) in memory of the iconic Freddie Mercury who died from HIV/AIDS in 1991. The Trust is a core part of rock band Queen and Freddie's legacy, with the passion and power behind the music forming the bedrock of the MPT.

The MPT has reached millions in the fight against HIV/AIDS worldwide, providing £17 M to over 1.5 K projects in 57 countries (and counting!). The MPT predominantly funds smaller organizations it assesses and vets as they effectively work at grassroots level, where governments, larger NGOs and markets don't often reach.

The current MPT overheads are just under 7p in the £/pound, which means that for each pound donated, over 93p goes to funding the work of the global charities FIGHTING AIDS WORLDWIDE - and we intend to keep it that way. In fact, the more that is raised and the more donations we get in, the more our overheads go down.

With an estimated 37.7 M people living with HIV/AIDS and 1.5 M more becoming newly infected with HIV in 2020 alone, the battle is far from over.

Freddie was taken from us too young, but there is still time to make a difference and change the destinies of millions around the world.

JOIN US AND GET INVOLVED

FREDDIE FOR A DAY SEPTEMBER 5

Fans and advocates around the world dress up Freddie style to remember the legend on his birthday and during other times of the year.

We also have a super partnership with Hard Rock Café which ensures people across the globe can Get Ready to Freddie each September!

DO SOMETHING CRAZY TO RAISE FUNDS

The fundraising never stops, and it can be done all year round in the most outrageous of ways.

Run, dance, swim, cycle, rock out, draw or bake cakes, we have even had somebody throw themselves out of a plane (with a parachute!) Any way you do it, just make it fun as you know Freddie would approve!

FREDDIE MERCURY BIRTHDAY PARTY

Each September The Mercury Phoenix Trust throws an annual birthday party in Freddie's honour in Montreux, Switzerland. You are invited to come and join us!

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Mercury Phoenix Trust, Freddie Mercury, Roger Taylor, Brian May, Jim Beach

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Anita Dobson speaks about the Mercury Phoenix Trust's support of Indian charity Snehalya. Snehalya means The Home Of Love and provides Rescue, Rights & Rehabilitation to Women & children. Raising awareness and understanding for people living with HIV is a key part of their work. The Mercury Phoenix Trust supports Snehalya in their incredible task.

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The Freddie Mercury Tribute Concert (1992)

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The Freddie Mercury Tribute Concert (1992)

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On 20th April 1992, a benefit concert to raise awareness for AIDS in honour of Freddie was held at Wembley stadium by the surviving Queen bandmates Brian May, Roger Taylor and John Deacon and manager Jim Beach. The concert was attended by 72,000 people and globally broadcasted on live television in 76 countries, amassing a total audience of up to one billion. As well as a full length Queen concert, some of the biggest musical stars at that time such as David Bowie, George Michael, Elton John and Guns 'n' Roses also participated, many of whom were close friends of Freddie's. The profits raised from the concert were used to launch the Mercury Phoenix Trust, solidifying Freddie's impact as a vehicle for increased AIDS awareness and action on a wide scale.

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Queen & George Michael - Somebody to Love (The Freddie Mercury Tribute Concert)

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1 Logan Place, Freddie's home, became a cultural landmark and a practice of identification for fans in mourning, in which the walls were covered with letters, and fan created memorabilia and flowers were placed for years after he passed, moulding his home into a makeshift shrine.

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Freddie's lasting legacy as one of the most legendary British performers of all time is evident through his impact not only at raising awareness and funds for the AIDS crisis, but his continued relevance and prominence in mainstream media, as a cultural intermediary and symbol of authenticity, often being described as one of the greatest rock 'n' roll stars of all time.

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Freddie's significance as a cultural and sociological sign for his audience and the parasocial relationship fans had with him was highlighted through the global reaction to his sudden death. The diversity of Freddie's fanbase portrayed his role as a transgressive and aspirational figure who not only was a role model for older fans who have been following his career from the start, but also younger teenage fans, who used Freddie's fearlessness and defiance within his star image as a collective identity and symbol of rock and youth culture. Moreover, Freddie's connection with his fans was often rooted in the participatory nature of his live performances, in which the audience was fundamental in making the songs what they were (for example, in 'We Will Rock You', the audience create the sole beat for the song by clapping and stamping their feet).

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Fans gather at home of Freddie Mercury to commemorate anniversary of singer's death

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UK TV News Report - Freddie Mercury Death

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Here, the significance of Freddie's performance at Live Aid is ascertained to the portrayal of his body as 'conform[ing] to notions of idealised masculinity often exhibited through the bodies of, for example, manual labourers and athletes', connoting 'strength, hardness, control and endurance' (Connell 1995). This in turn juxtaposes the images in the media of his 'thin, fragile body' just days before he died.

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Mercury's interplay with gender and sexuality played a crucial role in constructing his image as a dynamic and gender-bending cultural commodity. His interchangeability of both feminine and masculine qualities were displayed through characteristics such as his stage costumes, his love for drag, and his mannerisms, in which he was known for calling people 'Darling' as part of his public persona.

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Due to Freddie's camp and flamboyant image, and the homophobic attitudes of many publications at the time, Freddie was subject to a variety of scrutiny throughout his career, often facing criticism surrounding his extravagant dress sense, but mainly, discussing his sexuality and connoting Freddie as a wild and promiscuous rock star with many 'gay lovers'. In this article, titled 'Freddie's Gay Fury', he is depicted as reckless and secretive, with ex-manager Paul Printer supposedly exposing all of his 'gay secrets'.

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In the early hours of 25th November 1991, the day after Freddie passed, the news became publicly known and took the media by storm. For many weeks following his death, the tabloids published notably cruel and malicious articles surrounding Freddie's love life and sexuality, and his private home was bombarded by press and photographers for many weeks.

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PinkNews | Latest lesbian, gay, bi and trans news | LGBTQ+ news

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On 24 November 1991, Freddie Mercury quietly passed away at the age of 45 in his Kensington home. His death came just 24 hours after he publicly announced that he had AIDS.

Just like that, the queer icon who had defined much of '80s rock music in the UK was gone. Mercury's death sent shockwaves across the world - and it's not hard to see why. Throughout his life, the Queen frontman was so full of life, so exuberant - the idea that he was dead seemed hard to grasp, and even harder to accept.

In the weeks after his death, Freddie Mercury's legacy was dragged through the tabloids. In one newspaper column, he was described as a pervert, while other journalists zoned in on his sexuality and his AIDS diagnosis as a cruel moral critique.

That fraught time is explored in the new BBC 2 documentary Freddie Mercury: The Final Act. The film tracks the final months of the singer's life and culminates with the Freddie Mercury Tribute Concert, which was held on 20 April 1992 in Wembley Stadium.

Through interviews with Freddie's bandmates, his sister, his friends, and with others who lived through the AIDS epidemic, Freddie Mercury: The Final Act gives a view of what it was like to live through a moment in time when being gay or bisexual turned you into a social pariah.

Director of new Freddie Mercury documentary was horrified by salacious, cruel headlines about the singer

James Rogan, director of Freddie Mercury: The Final Act, was just a child when Mercury died. He was shocked to discover just how vicious the tabloids were in their assessment of the Queen frontman in the days and weeks after his death.

"I'm essentially a human rights filmmaker, so I'm quite used to observing human rights abuses and I've documented many over the years," James tells PinkNews. "But I find it unconscionable - one wonders how somebody writes into print some of the things that were said about Freddie after he died, and what the conversation is with oneself - what that journalist is saying to themselves as they write this stuff.

"There were headlines like, 'I'd shoot my son if he had AIDS,' and ones where they'd catch you unawares and you'd read it and think: 'How did this manage to make it into print?' I just can't get my head around it. And then you hear Margaret Thatcher saying children are being taught they have an inalienable right to be gay as if that is a bad thing, and you realise it's very much a product of its time."

Dan Hall is a producer on Freddie Mercury: The Final Act - and he was also a young gay man who was in the process of coming to terms with his own sexuality when the singer died in 1991. Looking back on that time, he thinks people used Freddie's celebrity to dehumanise him in the weeks and months after his death - which is why they set out to dispel that fame and remind audiences that behind the performer was a man who was suffering, just like so many others who were facing AIDS-related illnesses.

"There was this sense of, 'Well, I wasn't that happy with his promiscuity' - whatever that means - or, 'I didn't really like the gay thing, but I forgave him because he entertained me,'" Dan explains. "That's just appalling, and it reduces him to not being a human being, to just being an entertainer. And so, therefore, it doesn't really matter when he dies, which is why immediately after he dies people start running foul headlines about his dirty, sordid life, because he's not a man - he's not a person who's died in pain. He's a celebrity whose only role is to entertain.

"By equating him with [other people who lived through the AIDS epidemic] - and by equating him with his sister, to whom he's not a celebrity, just a brother - he becomes a person who is in pain and who is shamed by society. And in that way, he's the same [as other people with AIDS]. We were so keen in the edit that everybody's stories were treated with equal respect. Just because one of you sells lots of records, your voice is no more or less valid than anybody else's."

Queen members Brian May and Roger Taylor were horrified by the tabloid's treatment of their friend

Nobody could have been more disgusted by the tabloids' mistreatment of Freddie than his bandmates, Brian May and Roger Taylor. Both appear in the documentary, and both speak movingly and honestly about their close friend. Throughout the film, Brian and Roger reflect on some of the worst examples of the tabloids hounding Freddie.

Newspapers published probing, speculative pieces questioning whether he had contracted HIV, while others drew attention to his increasingly gaunt appearance in a bid to find out what was going on behind the scenes. The message from Brian and Roger is clear - what the tabloids forgot was that Freddie was a human being, a man who was suffering and struggling and likely terrified of what was then a terminal diagnosis.

"[In the documentary], Roger Taylor says, 'We were very angry about what happened to our friend,' and my response to that was, 'Damn right,'" James says. "We're angry. We're very angry about what happened. You cannot look at that situation and not be angry. People died alone. People died without an acknowledgement of their humanity. People were shamed after they died, and I don't think you can respond to that with anything but anger - and also with slight alarm that these behaviours still exist very much today."

Dan points out that, at its core, Freddie Mercury: The Final Act is a story about allyship - it's a documentary that centres those who loved Freddie for exactly who he was, and it serves as a powerful reminder of the power allies can have when they stand up for their queer friends.

At a simple human level, that band was a family of sorts and they had lost a loved one and they wanted to express their love publicly.

"Things like It's a Sin are fantastic, and there are lots of amazing HIV/AIDS documentaries around that, but a lot of them feel like they are very aimed at a queer audience," Dan says. "What I really realised on a very personal level about our film is that it felt like my queer story but with members of the heterosexual community, members of the allied community, stepping in and saying: 'You are not shamed, you are not wrong.'

"For me, my two favourite moments in the film are the bit of interview we had with Roger [Taylor], who said, 'We had to stand up for our friend, for our best friend,' and that's a straight man saying that. The other moment is Brian May going on TV-am in 1991, going: 'We've got to stop saying that being gay is wrong.' As a closeted man, seeing a very, very influential, very world-famous heterosexual man say that - the power and importance of allies can't be understated."

James hopes the love of those allies shines through in Freddie Mercury: The Final Act.

"At a simple human level, that band was a family of sorts and they had lost a loved one and they wanted to express their love publicly, and I think that's the most human thing in the world. And that was a beautiful response to what was an extraordinary life."

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The cruel way newspapers treated Freddie Mercury's death will chill you to the bone

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On 24 November 1991, Freddie Mercury quietly passed away at the age of 45 in his Kensington home. His death came just 24 hours after he publicly announced that he had AIDS. Just like that, the queer icon who had defined much of '80s rock music in the UK was gone.

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Peter Freestone, Mercury's personal assistant, recalls the moment Freddie decided to release a press statement and why it took him so long to announce his diagnosis, stating:

"Freddie had thought about releasing a statement at various times during recent years but was always held back by his feelings and concern towards us and his family, the people closest to him. He wanted to protect us as much as himself from the glare and scrutiny that going public would have created"

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Freddie Mercury: An Intimate Memoir by the Man who Knew Him Best

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An intimate memoir of the flamboyant Queen singer by the man who knew him best.Peter Freestone was Freddie Mercury's Personal Assistant for the last 12 years of his life.

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On 24th November 1991, Freddie tragically died from bronchial pneumonia relating to AIDS at just 45 years old, after being diagnosed in 1987. On 23rd November, just one day before he passed, he released a statement finally confirming that he has AIDS, after much media speculation about Freddie's ill-health for many years. Despite his diagnosis, Freddie continued to record with Queen up until the very end of his life. Subsequently, Freddie's AIDS related death inevitably complicated his image outside of his control, as external forces such as newspapers and television attached Freddie to the prominence of the AIDS crisis in the 1990s as a result of him being one of the first and most well-known star to die from the disease- catapulting the topic into the public consciousness.

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Here, Freddie's image has shifted once again, now sporting a more formal and sophisticated look with a tuxedo and bow tie, as well as a clean-shaven face; conforming to a more traditional heteronormative style, which appears unusual given Mercury's history as an overtly camp and flamboyant style icon.

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Mercury: "The kind of image I put across is not planned or anything, it's something that has progressed over the years. It's something that I live by. It's authentic. It's not forced at all. I just feel that it's a natural part of my life. I don't go out of my way to be controversial, not at all, but what a lot of people find outrageous is quite normal for me!"

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With his flamboyant costumes and commanding stage presence, Freddie Mercury was one of the greatest showmen of the 20th century. Across a series of iconic pictures, we chart how the shy teenager became the fully-fledged rock star who sported some of the most memorable stage outfits of all time.
Listen to the best Freddie Mercury songs on Apple Music and Spotify, and scroll down for our visual history of Freddie Mercury.
The shy youngster

Though the young, introspective Farrokh Bulsara grew into the global star Freddie Mercury, he never forgot the reticent youngster, with the usual insecurities, that he had once been. "Underneath it all, I'm quite shy. Very few people know what I'm really like," admitted Mercury. "I don't like the way my teeth protrude."

Piano playing

Music became an outlet for Mercury at boarding school - and transformed his life. "I took piano lessons at school and really enjoyed it. That was my mother's doing," he said. "She made sure I stuck at it and I did it up to Grade 4 classical, practical and theory. At first, I kept up the lessons because I knew she wanted me to, but then I really grew to love playing. I basically play by ear and I can't sight read at all. I always liked to sing. I used to sing along to things and it evolved from there."

Art school

Though Mercury admitted that he decided soon after getting a diploma at Ealing Art College that he would not chase a career as a graphic designer, the art training was useful for his future work as a musician. "Art school teaches you to be more fashion-conscious, to be always one step ahead," said Mercury. He said that when he joined up with students and would-be musicians Brian May, Roger Taylor, and John Deacon to form Queen in the early 70s, appearance was a key part of their strategy. "The concept of Queen was to be regal and majestic. Glamour was part of us, and we wanted to be dandy. We wanted to shock and be outrageous," said Mercury.

The white "wedding dress" cape

Mercury said that "Queen never copied anyone" in the way they dressed, and were into from the very start. Mercury had worked on a clothes stall in Kensington market with his girlfriend Mary Austin and had his own clear ideas about fashion. In 1974, Mercury met fashion designer Zandra Rhodes and was captivated by her outfits, including a cape shirt in heavy ivory silk that had an embroidered bodice and giant pleated butterfly sleeves. "It was the top of a wedding dress idea I had," said Rhodes. She created the white satin stage outfit that Mercury wore during 1974. In the 2019 biopic Bohemian Rhapsody, Rami Malek, playing Freddie Mercury, wore a reproduction of the outfit, created by Rhodes herself.

The Japanese style

"I always loved touring in Japan, particularly with all those geisha girls - and boys. I loved it there; the lifestyle, the people, the art," said Mercury. When Queen played the Nippon Budokan in Tokyo in 1976, the Queen frontman wore a traditional kimono on stage.

The shorts look

Mercury was never one to take himself too seriously. In 1976 he sported a different look: red-and-white striped tight shorts and matching braces. "The one thing that keeps me going is that I like to laugh at myself. If we were a different kind of band, with messages and political themes, then it would be totally different. That's why I can wear ridiculous shorts on stage and ham it up," said Mercury.

The sequin jumpsuit

Full-length bodysuits became a regular feature of Mercury's look in the 70s - including a black-and-white harlequin design that showed off his chest. The most iconic one from the period was the silver sequined, singlet-style bodysuit. The leotard with long sleeves was first worn on the European tour in May 1977, while the red short-leg version was worn on the European tour in April 1978. The silver sequin suit and mask combination embodied Mercury's love for theatrics - something he incorporated into his performances. He even starred in a collaboration with the Royal Ballet in 1979.

Lady Gaga, who wore her own take on the sequined jumpsuit on more than one occasion, is among those influenced by Queen, a band she said she "worshipped"; she followed Mercury's fashion trends closely. She once said she "hoped Freddie Mercury would have thought I was great."

The striped ballet leotard

Another professional musician who is a massive fan of Queen is Justin Hawkins, of The Darkness (he even has tattoos of the band members' faces on his hands). Hawkins has worn a skin-tight striped suit in honor of one of Mercury's most iconic outfits, the striped ballet leotard. "It's not a concert you are seeing, it's a fashion show," said Mercury of his work with Queen.

The leather period

In the late 70s, Mercury wore a lot of leather - including red leather trousers - but he sported one of his most famous leather looks for a video that was a spoof of the British television soap opera Coronation Street. Dressed in drag, and sporting a black leather mini skirt and fishnets, pink earrings, a black bobbed wig, pink knitted top, and heels, the mustachioed Mercury was filmed hoovering the floor. The video, for the 1984 single "I Want To Break Free," sparked a controversy. "The kind of image I put across is not planned or anything, it's something that's progressed over the years," said Mercury. "It's something I live by. It's authentic. It's not forced at all. I just feel that it's a natural part of my life. I don't go out of my way to be controversial, not at all, but what a lot of people find outrageous is quite normal for me!"

The deceptively casual Live Aid look

By the time Mercury was mesmerizing the world at Live Aid in 1985, he had changed his look totally. Gone was the long hair of the 70s; in was the sleeveless white T-shirt, white jeans, studded belt, and metallic armband representative of his new style as he took Wembley by storm.

The yellow military jacket

Mercury's military-style jacket, with multiple gold buckles, eyelets, and trims, and in a bright yellow hue, made its debut during Queen's Magic Tour of 1986, which included another famous appearance at Wembley Stadium. Mercury's yellow jacket was created by his friend and costume designer Diana Moseley, and was reportedly inspired by Spanish opera costumes. Mercury paired the jacket with white trousers which had a red stripe down both legs, embellished with gold. "I dress to kill, but tastefully," he said.

The great pretender

In the late 80s, as Mercury explored his own solo creativity with his album Mr. Bad Guy, the superstar singer demonstrated that he had lost none of his ability to laugh at himself. His 1987 video for the song "The Great Pretender" showed him parodying many of his Queen guises down the years. The video was directed by David Mallet and featured a clean-shaven Mercury.

Freddie goes formal

In his final years, Mercury channeled his instincts for the outlandish into daring musical innovation, including his extraordinary duet with opera legend Montserrat Caballé. When he worked with the Spanish singer, Mercury dressed in a stylish tuxedo, with a black bow tie. Mercury said it was the first time he had ever performed in formal attire. It was a long way from tight shorts, leather trousers, and jumpsuits.
The career-spanning Freddie Mercury box set, Never Boring, is out now. Order it here.

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Freddie Mercury Photos: A Visual History Of The Iconic Queen Frontman

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With his flamboyant costumes and commanding stage presence, Freddie Mercury was one of the greatest showmen of the 20th century. Across a series of iconic pictures, we chart how the shy teenager became the fully-fledged rock star who sported some of the most memorable stage outfits of all time.

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In this music video, released in 1987, Freddie parodies some of Queen's most iconic music videos, such as 'I Want To Break Free', 'Crazy Little Thing Called Love' and 'Bohemian Rhapsody', and the characters he plays in them. The concept behind this music video highlights the very essence of Freddie Mercury as an ever-changing and versatile performer who actively engages and constructs meanings for his audience. Looking more closely at the underlying message behind the song, to me Freddie's position as the 'Great Pretender' implies his reclusive nature and privacy regarding his AIDS diagnosis, in which he was rumoured to have been diagnosed the year this music video was released.

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Freddie Mercury - The Great Pretender (Official Video Remastered)

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Freddie Mercury & Montserrat Caballé - Barcelona (Original David Mallet Video 1987 Remastered)

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I Was Born To Love You - Freddie Mercury - 1985

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In 1985, while Queen were taking a break from recording, Freddie launched his solo career with his first solo studio album titled Mr. Bad Guy. The album featured eleven songs all written by Mercury himself, and was a change from the typical rock and roll Queen sound, with more synth-pop and disco influences, leaning into the growing dance scene of the 80s. His hit single 'I Was Born To Love You' was a huge commercial success, rising the album to Number 6 in the UK Charts and crowning it a gold record. This established Freddie not only as a successful frontman and lead singer of Queen, but also as a successful solo artist too in a totally different genre of music, expanding his multifaceted image and influence as a cultural commodity.

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Mercury's charisma and star quality is apparent here, as he is able to engage an audience of 72,000 people and incorporate them into his performance through vocalisations that should only be achievable by a musician like himself, highlighting the interpersonal relationship he shares with his audience and his energetic and vibrant stage presence, that distinguished him from other stars at this time.

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Arguably the most iconic and significant component of Mercury's star image, and Queen's establishment as one of the greatest rock bands of all time, was his performance at Live Aid, which was a charity concert held to raise funds for the African famine relief. For me, Mercury's stage persona and embodiment of camp certainly played a part in making this performance especially significant, with his use of call and response establishing an intimacy and connection with the audience through participation, which also added an element of humour and light-heartedness to the performance.

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Queen - Bohemian Rhapsody (Live Aid 1985)

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Queen's Great Pretender: A Psychohistorical Sketch of Freddie Mercury

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Queen's Great Pretender: A Psychohistorical Sketch of Freddie Mercury

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By the 1980s, Mercury moved away from the flamboyant, dandified image we saw throughout the 70s and more towards a casual yet direct approach that embodied the 'clone look' of homosexual, working class men at the time, and conformed to idealised notions of masculinity. This involved:

- A moustache
- Short hair
- A muscular upper body
- Tight-fitting denim jeans

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As Queen began making a name for itself and gaining popularity amongst wider audiences, Mercury's androgynous experimentation began to take shape. Signifers of Mercury's experimentation with camp were seen through physical elements such as:

- Extravagant and revealing costumes
- Makeup
- Platform shoes
- Painted nails

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May speaking about the controversy I Want to Break Free created at the time due to its homosexual implications (at a time when social attitudes towards homosexuality were still hostile), and how it damaged both the song's success on the American charts, and the band's overall reputation in the US.

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Brian May spoke to Fresh Air in 2010 about writing "We Will Rock You," recording the many vocals in "Bohemian Rhapsody" and getting a Ph.D. The biopic Bohemian Rhapsody details Queen's meteoric rise.

DAVID BIANCULLI, HOST:

This is FRESH AIR. I'm David Bianculli in for Terry Gross.

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "ANOTHER ONE BITES THE DUST")

QUEEN: (Singing) Another one bites the dust. Another one bites the dust. And another one gone, and another one gone. Another one bites the dust.

BIANCULLI: That's the band Queen, the subject of the new movie "Bohemian Rhapsody" starring Rami Malek as Queen's lead singer, Freddie Mercury. Brian May, a founding member and the band's lead guitarist, spoke with Terry Gross in 2010. Back then, he was concerned with a different kind of dust. In 2007, he submitted his doctoral thesis in astrophysics on the subject "A Survey of Radial Velocities In The Zodiacal Dust Cloud." He is now Dr. May and served as chancellor of Liverpool John Moores University from 2008 until 2013.

But that's not the only twist in his career that might surprise Queen fans. In 2009, he co-wrote a book - "A Village Lost And Found" - that features stereoscopic photos from the 1850s. To see these very early 3-D photos, you have to assemble and look through a viewer that Brian May designed which comes with the book. Last year, he published a 3-D book about Queen. An updated version was released last month.

In May's life as a member of Queen, he's famous for some of his guitar solos and for writing one of the band's biggest hits, "We Will Rock You." That's the song they're developing in this clip from "Bohemian Rhapsody." The band is waiting for Mercury, who's played by Rami Malek, to show up at a recording session. Brian May, played by Gwilym Lee, is teaching the drummer and the bass player the stomp, stomp, clap for "We Will Rock You." Then Mercury walks in.

(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "BOHEMIAN RHAPSODY")

GWILYM LEE: (As Brian May) Stomp to this beat. Come on.

(SOUNDBITE OF STOMPING)

LEE: (As Brian May) Now I want you to clap on the third beat.

(SOUNDBITE OF STOMPING, CLAPPING)

RAMI MALEK: (As Freddie Mercury) What's going on? You know if you're on time.

LEE: (As Brian May) I want to give the audience a song that they can perform.

MALEK: (As Freddie Mercury) So what can they do?

(SOUNDBITE OF STOMPING, CLAPPING)

LEE: (As Brian May) Imagine thousands of people doing this in unison.

MALEK: (As Freddie Mercury) What's the lyric?

(As Freddie Mercury, singing) We will, we will rock you.

UNIDENTIFIED ACTORS: (As audience, singing) We will, we will rock you.

TERRY GROSS, BYLINE: Brian May, what a pleasure to have you here. Welcome to FRESH AIR.

BRIAN MAY: Thank you, Terry.

GROSS: So I have to tell you, in preparation for this interview, I was listening back to a lot of Queen recordings and thinking about how much fun some of them are and how dramatic some of them are and how they mix, you know, like hard rock and music theater and opera. And I thought we'd start this part of the interview with the most famous song that you wrote, which is "We Will Rock You." So let's hear a little bit of it, then we'll talk.

GROSS: Oh, OK.

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "WE WILL ROCK YOU")

QUEEN: (Singing) Buddy, you're a boy, make a big noise playing in the street, going to be a big man someday. You got mud on your face, you big disgrace, kicking your can all over the place, singing - we will, we will rock you. We will, we will rock you. Buddy, you're a young man, hard man shouting in the street, going to take on the world someday. You got blood on your face, you big disgrace, waving your banner all over the place. We will, we will rock you. Sing it out. We will, we will rock you. Buddy, you're an old man, poor man...

GROSS: That's Queen's "We Will Rock You," which was written by my guest, Brian May, who was the lead guitarist for the band. So what inspired that song? I mean, it's been played at so many sports stadiums over the decades. What were you thinking about when you wrote it? Were you thinking of it as a sports anthem?

MAY: No, not really. I was thinking of it more as a rock anthem, I suppose, and a means of uniting an audience or taking advantage - you know, enjoying the fact that an audience is united. And I didn't realize that it would transfer to sports games, so this is quite an amazing thing. It's wonderful for me to see what "We Will Rock You" has done. You know, "We Will Rock You" and "We Are The Champions," of course, have kind of transcended the normal framework of where music is listened to and appreciated. They've become part of public life, which I feel wonderful about. It's fantastic to me if I go to a, you know, a football game or a soccer game or basketball or whatever, any place all around the world, and there it is. And I think, like, most people don't even realize that I wrote it. Most people don't realize that it was written. It's sort of become...

GROSS: (Laughter) That's right.

MAY: ...One of those things that people think was always there. You know, it sort of goes back into prehistory. So in a way, that's the best compliment you could have for a song.

GROSS: Well, I think, you know, that's - if people don't even realize it was written, it's in part because it almost sounds like an old-school cheerleader cheer, you know...

MAY: Yeah. It's become a part of the fabric of life.

GROSS: ....Because of that stomp, stomp, clap thing and because it's a chant.

MAY: That's right. Well, the stomp, stomp, clap thing - yeah, people think it was always there, but actually, it wasn't. And I don't know how it got into my head. All I can tell you is we played a gig - sort of middle of our career in a place called Bingley Hall near Birmingham. Now, Birmingham is the sort of home of heavy metal, as you probably know. You know, Sabbath and a slate of people come from there. And it was a great night. People just - the audience were just responding hugely. And they were singing along with everything we did.

Now, in the beginning, we didn't relate to that. We were the kind of band who'd like to be listened to and taken seriously and all that stuff. You know, so people singing along wasn't part of our agenda. Having said that and then having experienced this wave of participation of the audience, particularly in that gig in Birmingham, we almost to a man, sort of reassessed our situation. I remember talking to Freddie about it and saying, look; you know, obviously, we can no longer fight this. This has to become something which is part of our show. And we have to embrace it, the fact that people want to participate. And really, everything becomes a two-way process now. And we sort of looked at each other and went, how interesting.

And he went away that night, and to the best of my knowledge, wrote "We Are The Champions" with that in mind. I went away and woke up the next morning with this (vocalizing) in my mind somehow. Because I was thinking to myself, what could you give an audience that they could do while they're standing there and they're all crushed together? They can stamp. And they can clap. And they can sing some kind of chant. So for some reason, it just came straight into my head, "We Will Rock You."

GROSS: So how did you record the stomp, stomp, clap so it would sound grand and reverberating, as opposed to three people, four people stomping their feet and clapping?

MAY: Well, I'm a physicist, you see.

(LAUGHTER)

MAY: So I had this idea if we did it enough times and we didn't use any reverb or anything that I could build a sound which would work. We were very lucky. We were working in an old disused church in North London. And it already had a nice sound, not an echoey sound, but a nice big, crisp sound to it. And there were some old boards lying around. I don't know what they were, but they just seemed ideal to stomp on. So we kind of piled them up and started stomping. And they sounded great anyway.

But being a physicist, I thought, well, supposing there were a thousand people doing this, what would be happening? And I thought, well, you would be hearing them stomping. You would also be hearing a little bit of an effect which is due to the distance that they are from you. So I put lots of individual repeats on them, not an echo but a single repeat and at varying distances. And the distances were all prime numbers. Now, much later on, people designed a machine to do this. And I think it was cool Prime Time or something.

But that's what we did. As we recorded each track, we put a delay of a certain length on it. And none of the delays were sort of harmonically related. So what you get is there's no echo on it whatsoever, but the claps sound as though they spread around the stereo, but they're also kind of spread as regards distance from you. So you just feel like you're in the middle of a large number of people stomping on boards and clapping and also singing.

GROSS: That's amazing. Now, here's another really interesting thing to me about "We Will Rock You." It's the most famous song that you've written. It's a largely a cappella song. You come in for your guitar solo at the very end. So until like the very, very end, like, you're not even playing on it. And it's just kind of amazing that you, as the guitarist, would write a song that you're barely featured on.

MAY: Well, I'm featured stomping and clapping, you see.

GROSS: Well, yes. And you're very good at that.

(LAUGHTER)

MAY: Yeah. Well, you see, songs aren't about guitars to me. Songs are about truthfully, a song is about a singer, in my opinion. And if the singer gets the idea across, then you're almost home and dry. You know, you can make the most beautiful piece of production - and I love production. You know, production is a big, big part of my life. But I'm always aware that if you don't have the right singer, and he doesn't have the right feeling, you're wasting your time. So a song is a song to me. And it doesn't matter what song. It could be a piano or an accordion on it, you know. If it's the right song and the right singer, and you feel passion, that's what it's about.

The guitars - yeah, I didn't want us to be standard. I didn't want it to be like, oh, here's a guitar solo, and then we sing another verse. I wanted it to be something stark and different. So it was very deliberate that I left the guitar solo to the end just because that was a final statement and a different statement - taking it off in a completely different direction. It changes key into that piece too, you know. So it's a whole different kind of trip. It was not a standard pop song.

GROSS: OK. So let's just hear the end of "We Will Rock You." And we'll hear that guitar solo at the end. Let's do it.

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "WE WILL ROCK YOU")

QUEEN: (Singing) We will - we will rock you. Everybody, we will - we will rock you. We will - we will rock you. All right.

GROSS: So that's the end of "We Will Rock You," written by my guest guitarist and singer-songwriter Brian May, who was one of the founding members of Queen. So...

MAY: Actually can I comment on the end of that?

GROSS: Yeah, please.

MAY: Interesting that you played the end of the song - you can hear the guitar waiting in the wings. That was - you can hear this feedback note. It's always present although it's not taking center stage all through the last choruses and then finally bursts upon the scene. And you notice Freddy goes all right, which means he's kind of handing over to the guitar. And we're in a different universe once the guitar starts. And that was the intention. And it's very sort of informal.

And you may notice - there's a lot of things to notice. You may notice that the last piece - the very last little riffs are repeated. And they're not just repeated by me playing them again. They're repeated by cutting the tape and splicing it on again and again. So - and that's deliberate too it's a way of getting a sort of - a thing that makes you sit up towards the end. And then it stops. There is nothing after it, which I really enjoy. There's no big ending. It just stops and leaves you in midair thinking, well, what happened there.

BIANCULLI: Brian May speaking to Terry Gross in 2010 - more after a break. This is FRESH AIR.

(SOUNDBITE OF QUEEN SONG, "KILLER QUEEN")

BIANCULLI: This is FRESH AIR. Let's get back to Terry's 2010 interview with Queen guitarist and astrophysicist Brian May. The group, in which he was a founding member, is the subject of the new movie "Bohemian Rhapsody," starring Rami Malek as lead singer Freddie Mercury.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED BROADCAST)

GROSS: So you know, Queen is such an unusual mix of hard rock, music theater and also an opera into that. And when you consider your average hard rock fan of the '70s and '80s, I would say most of them would be totally not caring about music theater or opera. And it's amazing - it's surprising that you that you were all able to mix that together in a way that really just went over so big with hard rock fans.

MAY: Hmm.

GROSS: I mean, do you agree that that's an unusual mix?

MAY: It is an unusual mix. Again, it wasn't really deliberate. It wasn't planned. We were just sort of letting out all the stuff that's inside us. I think as kids we were exposed to all kinds of stuff. You know, my parents were into classical music. And I heard a lot of that around me as I was growing up. And radio when we were kids was incredibly different from what it was - from what it is today. I think our favorite program was Uncle Mac's "Children's Favourites."

Now, a lot of English people will tell you about this. The kids would write in and request their music. But it wasn't rock music. It wasn't pop music because it sort of didn't exist in those days. So people would write in and ask for something like the "Thunder And Lightning Polka," "The Laughing Policemen" or some kind of New Orleans jazz thing - you know, all sorts of stuff was mixing when we were kids. And we just lapped it all up. Mantovani - now, you probably don't know who Mantovani is.

GROSS: Oh, yes, I do (laughter).

MAY: Oh, you do? OK. He had the singing strings you know. And it would be a vast sort of panoply of violins and cellos and violas, et cetera. And that was all influential on us. I know for a fact this all comes out in our music. So on the one hand, we're spurred on by hearing the beginnings of rock music. Buddy Holly - bless his heart. You know, thank God for Buddy Holly. The Crickets, that's just what moved my body into wanting to do this. And - but on the other hand, there's all this stuff which we've been absorbing as kids, and it all sort of creeps back into our music.

GROSS: Now, when you teamed up with Freddie Mercury, who was, of course, the lead singer of - the late lead singer of Queen, did he nevertheless push you in directions or, you know, nudge you in directions that you didn't expect to head in - musically, theatrically, costumes?

MAY: Well, definitely costumes, yeah, I think. You know, Freddie was - I remember when Freddie first saw us play before he was in our band, as it were. we were called Smile. And he came along, and he said it's great. It's wonderful. It's incredible. Your music's great. But, you know, you don't dress right, you know. And you don't have enough lights. And you don't - you're not dramatic. You should be doing a show. You know, so Freddie was very influential in moving us across into being something much more theatrical, much more designed to connect with an audience. And it was a great thing. Yeah, Freddie brought a lot of things to us, which I'm sure otherwise we never would have considered.

GROSS: So let me ask you about the name of the band Queen. How did you feel about giving it that name? Freddie Mercury...

MAY: You've gone back a long way now, Terry.

GROSS: But let me just ask you the question. Freddie Mercury was either gay or bisexual. I'm not sure how he would have described himself. But he didn't really talk about that.

MAY: He would have said, I'm gay as a daffodil, darling (laughter).

GROSS: Would he have said that?

MAY: He did say that.

GROSS: Would he have said that in public?

MAY: He did say that in public. Freddie was not one to mince his words.

GROSS: (Laughter) So - but the name of the band - like, there's so many homophobic hard rock fans - there were in the '70s and '80s.

MAY: How did they feel about Freddie? Well, you know, it's strange. I think it was a sort of an undiscussed thing for such a long time, you know. And really, you know, the truth of the matter is nobody should care. Why should anybody care what sort of sexual persuasion people have? You know, he never hid the fact that he was turned on by men instead of by women. But strangely enough, I don't think it was always the case because I used to - you know, in the early days, we used to share a room. So I know who Freddie slept with in the early days, and they weren't men (laughter). So - but I think it sort of gradually changed. And I have no idea how these things work. But it wasn't really anybody's business but his, you know. And we never talked about it as if it was anything important. Why should it be important? We just made music together.

As for the fans, I don't know. You know, it was never really discussed. But I remember doing a promo tour for this song that we did which was called "I Want To Break Free." Now we made a video for that which was a pastiche of an English soap called "Coronation Street." And we dressed up as the characters in that soap. And there were female characters, so we were dressing up as girls, as women. And we had a fantastic laugh doing it. It was hilarious to do it. And all around the world, people laughed. And they got the joke, and they sort of understood it. I remember being on the promo tour in the Midwest of America and people's faces turning ashen. And they would say, no, we can't play this. We can't possibly play this. You know, it looks homosexual. And I went, so?

(LAUGHTER)

MAY: But it was a huge deal. And I know that it really damaged our sort of whole relationship with certainly radio in this country and probably the public as well.

GROSS: Oh, really?

MAY: And that's probably one of the reasons why this sort of hole developed between us and the states, which was really a tragedy because so many of our hits would have been - would have fitted very well into the life of the States. But we didn't really get back in there until "The Show Must Go On" and "These Are The Days Of Our Lives." And even those weren't the hits that they were around the rest of the world. These were some number one records around every civilized country.

BIANCULLI: Brian May speaking to Terry Gross in 2010. Queen, the rock group featuring him as lead guitarist, is the subject of the new movie "Bohemian Rhapsody," starring Rami Malek as Freddie Mercury. After a break, we'll continue their conversation. And film critic Justin Chang will review the new Coen brothers' film, a Western anthology collection called "The Ballad Of Buster Scruggs." I'm David Bianculli, and this is FRESH AIR.

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "CRAZY LITTLE THING CALLED LOVE")

QUEEN: (Singing) This thing called love, I just can't handle it. This thing called love, I must get round to it. I ain't ready - this crazy little thing called love. This thing called love, it cries like a baby in a cradle all night. It swings. It jives. It shakes all over like a jelly fish. I kind of like it - crazy little thing called love.

There goes my baby. She knows how to rock 'n' roll. She drives me crazy. She gives me hot and cold fever, then she leaves me in a cool, cool sweat. I got to get cool, relax, get hip and get back on my tracks. Take a back seat, hitchhike and take a long ride on my motorbike until I'm ready - crazy little thing called love.

BIANCULLI: This is FRESH AIR. I'm David Bianculli in for Terry Gross, back with more of Terry's 2010 interview with Brian May. He's a founding member and lead guitarist of the band Queen, whose lead singer was the very theatrical Freddie Mercury who died in 1991. The band Queen is the subject of a new movie called "Bohemian Rhapsody," starring Rami Malek as Freddie Mercury. The title of the film also is the name of one of Queen's most famous songs.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED BROADCAST)

GROSS: I think we should play here "Bohemian Rhapsody," which is perhaps, like, the most theatrical (laughter) piece...

MAY: A little "Bohemian Rhapsody."

GROSS: Yeah - of Queen.

MAY: It is very theatrical, isn't it? Yes (laughter). Yeah, this is Freddie's great baby. And yes we all contributed to the way it developed in the studio. But really it was so much constructed in his head before he ever stepped in there.

GROSS: How did he demo the song for you before the band started performing it?

MAY: He sat down at the piano and went de-de-de-de-de-de-de, de-de-de-de-de. And he said, and here's a bit where everything stops, and there's an acapella bit, and then we come back in again. He had it all mapped out. And that's the way it was done. The backing track was piano, bass and drums. And I was sitting in the studio, and it sounded great and intriguing and crisp and lively and challenging.

And then as the days went on and the weeks went on, we started overdubbing all the different vocal parts. And as you probably know, you know, there's many of us on there. We would do each part a number of times until it was right and then go to another part and multi-track everything. In those days, you're working on 24-track tapes, so you run out of tracks quite quickly. So when you've put down, say, half a dozen tracks, you have to bounce them. You have to combine them into one track and then move on, which is a dicey process because you're losing information at that point. You're also losing generations.

And we did it so often on "Bohemian Rhapsody." The legend says - and it's true (laughter) - that the tape wore out. We suddenly realized we were losing top on the vocals. They were getting a bit dull. We held the tape up to the light, and you could see through it. So we - there was hardly any oxide left on it. So at that point, we swiftly had to make good copy and carry on. So it was a very different way of recording to the way you would do it now because there was no going back.

GROSS: Now, you mentioned that this started as, you know, piano and then piano, bass and drums. But you do have a guitar solo, a very well-known one.

MAY: Oh, yeah. Well, that's added after. Yes.

GROSS: Yeah. And it kind of bridges two sections of the song. And...

MAY: Yes.

GROSS: So I thought we'd hear an excerpt of the song and hear your guitar solo bridging (laughter) those two sections. So here's Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody" with my guest, Brian May, on guitar and also doing some of the voices.

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "BOHEMIAN RHAPSODY")

QUEEN: (Singing) Mama, ooh, I don't want to die. I sometimes wish I'd never been born at all. I see a little silhouetto of a man. Scaramouche, Scaramouche, will you do the Fandango? Thunderbolt and lightning, very, very frightening me. Galileo, Galileo, Galileo, Galileo, Galileo figaro, magnifico. I'm just a poor boy, nobody loves me. He's just a poor boy from a poor family. Spare him his life from this monstrosity. Easy come, easy go, will you let me go? Bismillah, no, we will not let you go. Let him go. Bismillah, we will not let you go. Let him go. Bismillah, we will not let you go, will not let you go, will not let you go, never let me go, oh. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. Oh, mama mia, mama mia, mama mia, let me go. Beelzebub has a devil put aside for me, for me, for me.

QUEEN: So that's Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody" with - featuring my guest, Brian May, on guitar. And how many voices did you do on that?

MAY: I'd have to go back and check, but a lot.

GROSS: A lot.

MAY: I suppose, you know, a few dozen. Yeah, a lot of voices on there because we're singing - normally, there's three of us. Me and Freddie and Roger would sing, John wouldn't. And we would sing one line until we felt it was right. It had the right spontaneity, had the right passion, and it was in tune and it was in time. Then we'd move on and double track it and double track it again.

So you got three times three voices at that point for one part, so you got nine voices for each part. Then in some cases, there were, I suppose, between six and nine parts on the record. So you multiply that together and you get, you know, well, you know, about 80 tracks, something like that, I suppose. But there - by the time you've got 80 tracks, they've all been bounced down. And the information is contained on much fewer tracks.

GROSS: Could you explain to me what the mama mia/Galileo/Scaramouche part is about?

MAY: No...

GROSS: OK.

MAY: ...Of course not (laughter) because I didn't write it.

GROSS: Could Freddie Mercury have explained it to you?

MAY: You should've asked Freddie. Oh, well, you don't have to ask him - wouldn't you? Yeah.

GROSS: Did...

MAY: I would never ask him.

GROSS: Why wouldn't you have asked him, what am I singing about? Why am I singing this?

MAY: You know, it's a funny thing. I think about it quite a lot. We never discussed what our songs meant. It was a sort of unwritten law that there was something in the songs which was very personal. And if somebody brought it in, you wouldn't get into it. You would just assume that they knew what they were doing. And it's odd, isn't it?

I mean, later on, it changed. I remember starting to write "The Show Must Go On," and Freddie came and sat down beside me. And I said, I want you to participate. I want us to do this together. And we absolutely discussed every single word and what it meant and what we were trying to do. But in the early days, it never ever happened. We just assumed that the writer of the song knew what he was doing.

GROSS: So let me just play you one thing that I'm sure you're familiar with. Here it comes.

(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "WAYNE'S WORLD")

MIKE MYERS: (As Wayne) I think we'll go with a little "Bohemian Rhapsody," gentleman.

DANA CARVEY: (As Garth) Good call.

MAY: The delightful "Wayne's World," yes, yes.

GROSS: Yes, Mike Myers...

(LAUGHTER)

GROSS: ...For the movie "Wayne's World."

MAY: I have to thank Mike Myers for introducing us to a whole new generation at that time. It was amazing what it did.

GROSS: What did it do for Queen?

MAY: Oh, it completely translated us to the new generation. And Freddie was already not well by that time, but I took it 'round to him. Mike Myers phoned me up and sent me the copy and said, you know, you make sure Freddie hears it - you know, could you? And I said, yeah. So I took it 'round to him, and Freddie loved it. He laughed and thought it was great. And he went - actually, what he said was slightly unprintable, but you can bleep it if you'd like (laughter).

He said - you know, we had a strange thing about America because America's where we grew up, you know? And it really made us as a group, all that touring. We used to tour every year about nine months, and most of it was in the States in those early days. So it really formed us as a band. And we absolutely had a love affair with America. There came a point when it all kind of went wrong in America, and we were like the biggest group in the world every place except the states. And I don't need to go into it, you know, the reason or whatever. It doesn't really matter.

But it was very difficult for us to sort of get back. And there's a whole kind of gap in Queen history if you view it from America. And Freddie was very aware of that. And we never really came back and toured the way we should've done. You know, every place else in the world, we played football stadiums. But it never happened in the States. And Freddie, when I played him this thing, said - (laughter) well, he said, you know, it might do for us what nothing else would do, and he was dead right.

You know, it's amazing that even the fact that Freddie died didn't make that much of a difference. But the fact that "Wayne's World" put it in their film did make a difference. And I suppose the quote that I'm steering clear of is that Freddie, at one point, said to me, you know, I suppose I'll have to [expletive] die before we ever get big in America again.

GROSS: Oh.

MAY: And it's a strange quote, but it sort of came true in a very strange way. But "Wayne's World" was the vehicle through which young people discovered Queen - you know, a whole new set of young people. And it was great for us, you know and I guess still is.

GROSS: Have you heard the Muppets version (laughter) of "Bohemian Rhapsody"?

MAY: Yes, of course, of course, yeah. Well, it...

GROSS: It's really fun. Can I play that for our listeners?

MAY: Yeah, you can. Well, we had a - we'd had to have heard it because it's us on the record. You know, they asked us if they could do it. And they said, look; we can sing this, and we can perform it. But we can't really play it. So can we use your actual track? So...

GROSS: Oh, I see. I see.

MAY: Generally we say - generally we don't let anybody do that. But in this case, because it's the venerable Muppets, we said, yes, we'll do that with you. So yes, we produced it with them.

GROSS: It's so much fun. So here's part of it.

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "BOHEMIAN RHAPSODY")

THE MUPPETS: (Singing) I see a little silhouetto of a clam. Scaramouche, Scaramouche, will you do the fandango? Thunderbolt and lightning - very, very frightening me. Mimimimi (ph), Galileo, mimimimi, Galileo, mimimimi - Galileo figaro. I'm just a poor boy. Nobody loves me. He's just a poor boy from a poor family. Spare him his life from this monstrosity. Easy come, easy go. Will you let me go? Manamana (ph), doo, doo, doo, doo, doo, doo. Let me throw - manamana. They we will not let you throw. Let me blow. Manamana - they will not let you blow. Let me joke - do not like your jokes. Let me joke - do not like your jokes. Let me joke (laughter) - no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Furnigui (ph), furnigui - mamma mia, let me go. Does anyone know if there is a part for me, for me, for me?

BIANCULLI: We'll hear more of our interview with Brian May, who played lead guitar with the band Queen, after a break. The new film about the band, "Bohemian Rhapsody," is now in theaters. This is FRESH AIR.

(SOUNDBITE OF QUEEN SONG, "ANOTHER ONE BITES THE DUST")

BIANCULLI: This is FRESH AIR. Let's get back to Terry's 2010 interview with Queen guitarist Brian May. The group, in which he was a founding member, is the subject of the new movie "Bohemian Rhapsody" starring Rami Malek as lead singer Freddie Mercury.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED BROADCAST)

GROSS: Let me get to some more recent developments in your life. Just a few years ago, you got your Ph.D. in a subject that you had been pursuing before Queen, and that's astrophysics. You have an astrophysics...

MAY: That's right.

GROSS: ...Book that you co-wrote recently, and...

MAY: It's called "Bang!"...

GROSS: Yeah.

MAY: ..."A Complete History Of The Universe."

GROSS: So...

MAY: An unassuming little title, I feel.

GROSS: It's interesting for me to think about you going back to the university after you'd become such a star. Of course when you're getting your Ph.D., it's not like you're sitting in a large lecture class with people, but...

MAY: Oh, yes, well, basically it is, you know? Yeah, I didn't do that many lectures, but basically you're abandoning your status outside. And you're going back, and you're being a student. It was tough, I have to say.

GROSS: Yeah. What was hard about that?

MAY: Well, it's tough because you're having to be very much subservient to the system again, you know? And you forget how hard that is after you've left school and university, you know, to go back into that system where you're constantly judged and you're assessed as you go along. And you do a piece of work which you're proud of, and then somebody goes, well, yeah, but can you go back and do it again and do this and this and this? It's frustrating and difficult.

And it was tough, I'd say, but I didn't want to be treated any different from any other student. I wanted this Ph.D. to be real, and it was. You know, they didn't make it easy on me, and I never wanted that. So it was tough. And I did it for a year. And I really had to ditch the rest of my life to do it, but it was worth it. I'm happy that I got the Ph.D.

GROSS: You wrote your thesis on a survey of radical velocities in the zodiacal dust cloud. I don't really know...

MAY: Yeah, radial, radial...

GROSS: ...What any of that means.

(LAUGHTER)

MAY: It's a survey of radial velocities in the zodiacal dust cloud, yeah.

GROSS: Oh, radial. I wrote it as radical velocities. I still don't know what it means.

MAY: It could be radical (laughter).

GROSS: We - can you give a very layperson's description of what you were studying in that, of what you were...

MAY: Yes, I can.

GROSS: Yeah.

MAY: I'm just - it's a study of dust - as simple as that. It's dust - in this case, in the solar system. So we're actually surrounded by it. The Earth moves through a cloud of dust constantly, and a lot of it comes down to Earth. And my experiment was to try and find out the motions of that dust, trying to figure out where it's going, what it's doing, where it came from and what it means in terms of the creation of the solar system.

Now, to be honest, it was quite a - it became something which people moved on from. It became a bit of a backwater in the 30 years in which I was absent from the subject because people were into, really, cosmology, the largest-scale study of the universe. And our little local solar system was not so interesting for many people. But luckily for me, about the time that I returned to it, we were discovering exoplanets. That's planets in other solar systems in orbit around other suns. So it was discovered at that time that they, too, had dust clouds. So if we're going to study dust, why don't we study the dust on our own doorstep, in our own solar system?

So my subject became quite trendy again, quite important for people. The way I studied them was through Doppler shifts, and a Doppler shift is a shift of frequency that you experience due to motion. The best way - the best analogy you can give is a police siren. If you're listening to a police car coming towards you, it goes (imitating siren). But as it goes past you, it goes (imitating siren). It goes down.

GROSS: Yeah, that's true, isn't it?

MAY: And that's a Doppler shift. Yeah, that's because the waves are stretching out as this police car passes you, and it changes from coming towards you to going away from you. Now, the same kind of thing happens with light. So I was looking at Doppler shifts in light due to the motions of the dust.

GROSS: So...

MAY: And from that, you can infer how they're moving.

GROSS: So - yeah, so what were the larger implications of what you were looking at?

MAY: A-ha, that's a good question. The larger implications are, where did it come from, and was it part of the creation of the universe, or is it being created now?

GROSS: The dust.

MAY: The dust, yeah. And in fact, all of the above is true. You know, a certain amount of dust is created in every event in the universe and particularly in supernovae. A lot of dust is put out. And we human beings and all animals and all plants and everything on the Earth are made of the dust that has come out of supernovae. Now, that's not something that I discovered, but that's a fact. So when Joni Mitchell said, we are stardust; we are golden, she was right. We are stardust. And I find that quite an amazing thing to think about. The material of our body did come from the insides of stars. It was made in the insides of stars.

GROSS: Well, Brian May, it's been such a pleasure to have you. Thank you so much for talking with us.

MAY: Thank you. It was a pleasure, Terry.

GROSS: I really appreciate it.

BIANCULLI: Brian May speaking to Terry Gross in 2010. Queen, the rock group featuring May as lead guitarist, is the subject of the new movie "Bohemian Rhapsody," starring Rami Malek as Freddie Mercury.

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "SOMEBODY TO LOVE")

QUEEN: (Singing) Can anybody find me somebody to love? Each morning I get up, I die a little, can barely stand on my feet. Take a look at yourself. Take a look in the mirror and cry - and I cry. Lord, what are you doing to me? I have spent all my years in believing in you. But I just can't get no relief, Lord. Somebody, somebody, somebody, somebody - can anybody find me somebody to love? Yeah. I work hard. He works hard. Every day of my life, I work till I ache my bones. At the end - at the end of the day, I take home my hard-earned pay all on my own. And I get down on my knees, and I start to pray till the tears run down from my eyes. Somebody, somebody, somebody - can anybody find me somebody to love? He works hard every day - every day. I try, I try, I try...

BIANCULLI: Coming up, film critic Justin Chang reviews the new Coen brothers' film, an anthology Western called "The Ballad of Buster Scruggs." This is FRESH AIR.

(SOUNDBITE OF DAVE MCKENNA'S "SWINGING ON A STAR")

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Queen Guitarist Brian May On Writing Anthems And Studying Astrophysics

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Brian May spoke to Fresh Air in 2010 about writing "We Will Rock You," recording the many vocals in "Bohemian Rhapsody" and getting a Ph.D. The biopic Bohemian Rhapsody details Queen's meteoric rise. DAVID BIANCULLI, HOST: This is FRESH AIR. I'm David Bianculli in for Terry Gross.

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Mercury never stated the meaning of Bohemian Rhapsody or if it had any relation to his 'coming out' as a bisexual man, however many lyricists, such as Freddie's good friend Tim Rice, interpreted the hit song as his confession.

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'“Mama, I just killed a man” meaning: He’s killed the old Freddie he was. “Put a gun against his head, pulled my trigger, now he’s dead” meaning: the old straight Freddie is dead. He’s destroyed the man he was trying to be, and now this is him, trying to live with the new Freddie'.

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Story of Song

According to the band members of "Queen", this classic single is one of Mercury's great mysteries; only he knew truly how it would come together. There's a possibility that Freddie could have been working on this song many years earlier. Chris Smith, the keyboard player in Mercury's first band "Smile", claimed that Freddie would play several piano compositions at rehearsals, including one called "The Cowboy Song," which started with the line, "mama, just killed a man." Kenny Everett, a London DJ, once asked Freddie Mercury about the song, Freddie said: "It's one of those songs which has such a fantasy feel about it. I think people should just listen to it, think about it, and then make up their own minds as to what it says to them." Freddie continued, claiming that the lyrics were nothing more than "random rhyming nonsense."

Could "random Rhyming nonsense" claim the number 1 spot on the charts in 6 different countries including the UK? Some critics even consider it one of the greatest records ever made!

In 1986, Freddie was asked in an interview with Lesley-Ann Jones, author of the biography Mercury, if 'Bohemian Rhapsody' was about him coming out as gay, he didn't give a straight answer, and he was always very vague about the song's meaning, admitting only that it was about "relationships." Mercury's family religion was "Zoroastrianism", which doesn't accept homosexuality. It is possible that Freddie made efforts to conceal his homosexuality because he didn't want to offend his family. Jones says she spent time with his lover, Jim Hutton, after Freddie's death, and he told her that the song was, in fact, Mercury's confession that he was gay. Mercury's good friend Tim Rice agreed, and offered some lyrical analysis to support the theory: "Mama, I just killed a man" meaning: He's killed the old Freddie he was. "Put a gun against his head, pulled my trigger, now he's dead" meaning: the old straight Freddie is dead. He's destroyed the man he was trying to be, and now this is him, trying to live with the new Freddie.
"I see a little silhouetto of a man" - That's him, still being haunted by what he's done and what he is.

In an interview with Brian May on the Queen Videos Greatest Hits DVD, Brian said: "What is Bohemian Rhapsody about, well I don't think we'll ever know and if I knew I probably wouldn't want to tell you anyway, because I certainly don't tell people what my songs are about. I find that it destroys them in a way because the great thing about a great song is that you relate it to your own personal experiences in your own life. I think that Freddie was certainly battling with problems in his personal life, which he might have decided to put into the song himself. He was certainly looking at re-creating himself. But I don't think at that point in time it was the best thing to do so he actually decided to do it later. I think it's best to leave it with a question mark in the air."

However, a simple interpretation of the song is about a boy pleading in front of an unsympathetic religious group after murdering a man. The word 'Bismillah' means (In the name of Allah) and it's the first word of every chapter of Al-Quran. A small voice in the group shows a little sympathy every now and then: "He's just a poor boy from a poor family; Spare him his life from this monstrosity."

Release date

Released on October 31, 1975

Songwriter/s

Freddie Mercury

Label

EMI - Elektra - Parlophone - Hollywood

Chart Rankings

US - 9

UK - 1

GERMANY - 7

This great record topped the chart in the UK. Kenny Everett, Freddie's friend, played it on his Capital Radio broadcast before the song was released (courtesy of a copy Mercury gave him). It also peaked at number 1 in the Australia, Belgium, Canada, Netherlands, and New Zealand. The song was certified 4 times platinum in the UK and the US with combined digital sales of over 6.2 million copies. After Freddie Mercury's death in 1991, "Bohemian Rhapsody" re-entered the charts in the UK reaching number 1 twice. In the US, after its appearance in the movie Wayne's World, it entered the charts again reaching number 2 and lasted in the charts for 17 weeks.

Artist's age on release date

The band Queen was had been active for 5 years when they released 'Bohemian Rhapsody'.

Cover Versions

No covers.

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Queen - Bohemian Rhapsody | Beyond The Lyrics | Story of Song

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According to the band members of "Queen", this classic single is one of Mercury's great mysteries; only he knew truly how it would come together. There's a possibility that Freddie could have been working on this song many years earlier.

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'Being a star allowed Mercury to push some boundaries, but he still lived at a time when honesty about his attraction to men could have limited his career'

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Queen's Freddie Mercury never wanted to have an in-depth discussion about his sexuality with the public. However, it was well known that this icon of rock had had relationships with both men and women. At one point he claimed to be bisexual, but he may have been a gay man who got involved with members of the opposite sex because he was trying to survive - and build a career - in a very homophobic world. Mercury died of an AIDS-related illness at the age of 45, taking his personal insights into his sexuality to the grave. Yet a look at the circumstances of his life, loves and career can still offer insight into who he truly was.

Mercury hid his sexuality from his family

For most of Mercury's life, the wider world didn't accept gays and bisexuals. Born in 1946, he grew up at a time when same-sex attraction was considered a mental illness, a tragedy, a joke, or some combination of the three. LGBT people were barely represented in the media, and the message society had to offer was that not being heterosexual was unacceptable.

With homophobia rampant, many gay men felt pressured to hide their sexuality, including from their families. Mercury's Parsee parents practiced Zoroastrianism, a religion that saw being gay as a type of demon worship. While Mercury remained close to his family throughout his life, he never discussed his sexuality with them. In fact, his parents were apparently told that a male lover living at Mercury's home in London was the gardener.
READ MORE: Meet Mary Austin, the Woman Who Stole Freddie Mercury's Heart
He openly dated both men and women

Photo: Dave Hogan/Hulton Archive/Getty Images

As a young man, Mercury dated women, and he entered into a serious relationship with Mary Austin in the 1970s. The two lived together for several years and even got engaged before Mercury told Austin he was bisexual (her response was that she thought he was gay). The two would maintain a close friendship after splitting up, with Austin continuing to appear at his side in public. He called her the love of his life and left her the bulk of his estate in his will.

Mercury was also seeing men, both while he was with Austin and after ending their sexual relationship. These included record executive Paul Prenter, David Minns, chef Joe Fanelli, DHL courier Tony Bastin, German restaurateur Winfried "Winnie" Kirchberger, and Jim Hutton, who was with him until Mercury's death in 1991. Yet Mercury didn't entirely give up on women: in the 1980s his female paramours included German actress Barbara Valentin.

Mercury also didn't limit himself to steady relationships. While on the road in Queen's early days, Brian May, who shared hotel rooms with Mercury, saw his bandmate with female companions. In 2017 May told the Sunday Times, "It was fairly obvious when the visitors to Freddie's dressing room started to change from hot chicks to hot men." Cities like New York and Munich had gay scenes where Mercury, who'd called his sex drive "enormous" and who'd sung about being "a sex machine ready to reload," found one-night stands and more.

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Being a rock star allowed Mercury to push gender boundaries

Photo: John Rodgers/Redferns

Mercury was the one who suggested naming the band Queen, which at the time was a derogatory term for a gay man. Onstage, he wore outfits that left gender and societal norms behind. Among his sartorial choices were leotards, angel-wing cloaks, tight shorts, and leather or PVC attire that evoked a biker image then popular in gay nightclubs.

Being a star allowed Mercury to push some boundaries, but he still lived at a time when honesty about his attraction to men could have limited his career, and the careers of his bandmates. For someone who wanted his music to be heard, and who was loath to drive fans away, being open about his sexuality was something to avoid.

Yet even in this climate, Mercury was able to use music to express himself-and he may have said more than a quick glance at his catalogue shows. For some-including renowned lyricist Tim Rice-"Bohemian Rhapsody," a worldwide hit written by Mercury, was a coming-out song. In this interpretation, lyrics like "Mama, just killed a man" could be a reference to Mercury doing away with his heterosexual self. Of course, Mercury himself never confirmed this take on the song.

Mercury didn't label his sexuality even after his AIDS diagnosis

The exact circumstances of how Mercury was infected with HIV are unknown, but the virus was spreading through New York City's gay community in the late 1970s and early '80s. This lines up with when Mercury was often visiting nightclubs and bars, and having one-night stands. (At the time, people weren't aware of how the virus was transmitted.)

As the 1980s progressed, it was obvious many gay men were getting sick and there was talk about a "gay cancer"; Mercury himself knew people with the disease. After displaying some signs of illness, his own HIV infection was confirmed by the late '80s. Even after developing AIDS, he denied reports about his illness and being gay. He was more upfront with his bandmates, but never told his family why he was ill.

One reason for Mercury's silence was worry about how his public image and legacy would change with this revelation, which at the time would have been enough to confirm him as gay. It wasn't until November 23, 1991, that he issued a statement that said in part: "Following enormous conjecture in the press, I wish to confirm that I have been tested HIV-positive and have AIDS. I felt it correct to keep this information private in order to protect the privacy of those around me." He died the next day. Mercury's statement didn't mention his sexuality-meaning he maintained his policy of not commenting on the matter to the very end.

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The Complicated Nature of Freddie Mercury's Sexuality

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Queen's Freddie Mercury never wanted to have an in-depth discussion about his sexuality with the public. However, it was well known that this icon of rock had had relationships with both men and women.

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"I hate talking to people I don't really know.. It's the media basically, built me up to be a real ogre and a tyrant.. because of the way I come across on stage"

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Freddie Mercury Interview with Lisa Robinson 1984

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Mercury was known to be very private and secluded in regards to speaking about his sexuality publicly. Even privately, he did not discuss his sexuality with his family, likely due his parent's practice of the Zoroastrianism, in which gayness was seen as a form of demon worship, but also his awareness of himself in the public eye, in which being openly gay would not have been received well by the media and may have put a negative spin on his successful career. However, Mercury openly dated both men and women, despite not technically labelling his sexuality or publicly aligning with the LGBTQ community.

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"He was a different person again... he was more at one with himself, more relaxed, more happy"

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Around the time of Bohemian Rhapsody's release, Mercury confessed his sexuality to Austin, whom he was engaged to at the time and had been together for six years. They continued to remain good friends until the end of his life.

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Freddie's private vs public self is touched on here, reflecting the British tabloid's extensive interest in 'uncovering' the star's private life and, as a whole, the growing nature of hyper-surveilled celebrity culture towards the end of the 20th century.

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Александр Нырков

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One week later: Brian May and Roger Taylor interview

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Bohemian Rhapsody went on to top the UK Singles Chart for nine consecutive weeks, and still remains the UK's best selling single of all time

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The "I Want to Break Free" music video, in which Freddie and his bandmates dressed up in drag and depict female characters from the soap Coronation Street, was not received well by MTV, and was seen as extremely controversial and scandalous at the time.

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Queen - I Want To Break Free (Official Video)

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'Bohemian Rhapsody' marks the height of Mercury's persona at both its most camp and outrageous, and its most raw and vulnerable. For me, the first line 'Is this the real life? Is this just fantasy? Caught in a landslide, No escape from reality' symbolised the mask Mercury puts on through his flamboyant public persona, but very private and sheltered personal life, in which he was struggling with his sexuality at the time.

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Queen – Bohemian Rhapsody (Official Video Remastered)

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In "Killer Queen", from the Sheer Heart Attack album (1974), Mercury's overtly glamourous and dandified image becomes more blatant, building on the outrageous and quintessentially British themes of his persona and the band itself.

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Queen - Killer Queen (Top Of The Pops, 1974)

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'The young Bulsara was still there, but for the public he was going to be this different character, this god' (Freddie Mercury, 2000)

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Freddie, when asked how he would describe himself as an artist. He then goes on to speak about how he feels reflecting on his image from the 1970s, saying: "I actually laugh at myself, but I know it was something that you have to do". To me, through this Mercury implies how he conformed to a certain image in an attempt to be successful when breaking into the music scene of the 70s, but then shed this persona by the 80s, perhaps mirroring his 'coming out' as bisexual and a discovery of his 'true' identity.

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Freddie Mercury Interview Musical Prostitute part 1

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No Escape from Reality: The Postcolonial Glam of Freddie Mercury

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No Escape from Reality: The Postcolonial Glam of Freddie Mercury

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One of Mercury's most recognisable and distinct qualities was his flamboyant stage persona, in which he used the campiness of glamour and fashion as a form of self-expression and personal branding, whilst simultaneously masking his ethnicity and background by choosing to fit in with white British culture. In this way, Mercury's construction of an overtly camp and glamorous public persona acted as a mask, disguising her true identity within the private sphere as a particularly shy and introverted person.

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Mercury, who was born 'Farrokh Bulsara' to Parsi-Indian parents, first embarked on his path to stardom by teaming up with guitarist Brian May, drummer Roger Taylor, and bassist John Deacon to form their first band 'Smile' in 1970. It was around this time that he legally changed his surname to 'Mercury', and began designing the band's new identity, which would now be called 'Queen' (which at the time was a derogatory term for gay men). This would mark the beginning of Mercury's ascension to fame and popularity as the lead singer and frontman of the band.