I think most gay men of my generation remember where they were when they heard that Freddie Mercury had died. It was 30 years ago today and I had been Out, as we used to say, since 1980, more or less (I was 15: I told a girl who I knew could be relied on to tell everyone, saving me some legwork). It was a peculiar period of retreat in my life. I was working as a Clerk in the House of Commons, and for that moment was no longer Out. For some reason, I was sharing a flat in the only conspicuously non-gay bit of London I’ve ever lived in, Parson’s Green. A long-term relationship was not working out. I was not having the best time; and then I caught flu.
It had been announced that Freddie was HIV positive — a sombre moment. The next day, I was curled up with a blanket watching the television. The news came on; Freddie was dead. Bohemian Rhapsody started to play. I’ve never been quite certain whether I cried so much because I had a fever of 102 degrees, or whether the floods would have come anyway. It meant a lot.
In 1991, HIV/AIDS had been part of our lives for 10 years. There had been plenty of deaths. Many of those deaths had happened in groups of people less likely to make themselves known to us — it was cutting a terrible swathe through Africa, for instance. Haemophiliacs and intravenous drug users who contracted HIV remained, for the most part, as statistics. The public face of the disease in the West — the individual and conspicuous cases — were gay men, and in particular those gay men who were already in the public eye.
Denholm Elliott, Ian Charleson, Tony Richardson. Kenny Everett, Derek Jarman, Sylvester, John Curry, Bruce Chatwin — the list of British deaths alone is long and sobering. It was Freddie’s, though, that made the biggest impact. He seemed so embedded in British life, from the unprecedented impact of Bohemian Rhapsody in 1975 to the unforgettable turn at the first Live Aid in 1985.
He had achieved this status, too, despite being very unusual: unmistakably gay, Parsi, with a musical persona marrying debauched lechery, sustained tragic grandeur (Barcelona!) and extreme silliness. Everyone loved him. To us as gay men, he might have indicated that you didn’t need to fit in. You could be whatever you were, and that would make perfect sense. Perhaps that was an illusion. After all, Freddie never exactly came out.
Thirty years on, I start to wonder just how much HIV/AIDS shaped the lives of people like me. I was relatively lucky; by the time I was becoming sexually active, we knew about safe sex. Lucky, too, to live in a country where the advice from quite early on was to use condoms, rather than to adjust your morality or to attempt monogamy. Gay men born five or 10 years before me saw most of their friends die; I lost perhaps a dozen, no more.
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SubscribeI enjoyed this essay. Freddie was a symbol of outrageousness, imagination, pathos, defiance, cohesion, recklessness, theatre and huge talent to so many people – straight and gay. It is interesting to read how his life affected the gay community in particular.
Somebody is outraged even by the question
“You might die soon. Not many generations of people live through their twenties and thirties with this somewhere near the front of their minds.”
They certainly did!
…quite right. The idea that “in olden days, everybody died at twenty-two” is of course a mistake arising from averaging out the age of death when more children died before their fifth birthday, than lived past it…
…however at pretty much any point from the outbreak of the Great War until the end of National Service they lived with the possibility of participating in an existential war (so that’s much of the C20th)…
…many more people in the C19th (young men, especially) were in dangerous occupations, which included going to sea, and exploring, settling or conquering much of the world…and thus likely to die young by violence, accident or disease…
…and then we get back to the C18th, with the French Revolutionary/ Napoleonic Wars (for almost thirty years)…the American War of Independence…the Seven Years War…the War of the Spanish Succession…
…our C17th Wars with the French, the Dutch and each other…
…our C16th Wars with the Spanish, the French, the Scots and the Irish (and again, each other)…
…our C15th “War of the Roses”, immediately preceded by the Hundred Years War with the French…and so on.
In reality, my generation (I’m 64) are practically the first ever where young men (and some women)…didn’t live with the likelihood of sudden death…
All quite true, but war isn’t, of course, the only – or even the main – cause of death. Before antibiotics, even a small scratch could kill you. Diseases we now shrug off were frequently fatal. Syphilis was the AIDS of its time, and there were no drugs to treat it apart from mercury, which was itself a killer. Tuberculosis was rampant.
I was struck the other day by just how many of the great composers died at what we’d now consider young ages – considering the amount they wrote, it’s staggering. Here are some of the most famous (and prolific) composers who died in the first half of the 19th century:
Beethoven: 56
Schubert: 31
Mendelssohn: 38
Chopin: 39
Weber: 40
There were plenty of composers who lived far longer, certainly, but this does make the point.
Then again, childbirth and its after-effects not infrequently killed women, something again taken for granted.
In other words, Philip Hensher’s assumption that AIDS was a unique occurrence and before that, most people assumed that they would live to a ripe old age, is total bilge.
As Tom Lehrer remarked: “It is people like that who make you realise how little you have achieved. Do you know that when Mozart was my age he had been dead for two years?”
Wolfgang Amadeus, 1756 – 1791.
I wouldn’t call it total bilge but certainly the author uses Freddy’s fabulous talent to make a rather unrelated point. It’s easy to live and die quietly when you are not famous but being gay in Freddie Mercury’s time means you can live gay and write about it semi-famously, or die with an outsized portion of grieving. I don’t think Freddie made the out-going gay community any more out-rageous than it naturally is. And that only continued with the LGBTQABCXYZ movement.
I asked my 35 and 37 year olds if AIDS impacted their young adult lives and the answer was a definitive YES !
I guess you could say the same for the momentary situation, f**k it! So many things are being vilified and so much is being polarized! We need some creative relief! I want to break free!
We are too nice to use it. Our wives would not approve.
you don’t know the half of it
Let’s Go Brandon ! That’s easier to say than F*** J** B**** !
It would be nice if you acknowledged not just lesbians but his fellow band members in Queen, without whom Freddie would have been an also ran.
I recall the music press in the seventies berating Queen for their departure from hard rock to glamorous pop, and although it may have been Freddie leading the way, it was his band colleagues who chose to accompany him on that path as they were ridiculed by ALL the rock music community. They took some big risks, the video of them cross dressing for ‘I want to break free’ killing their success in the USA, and they were all very competent writers and musicians who could easily have left and joined ‘serious’ rock bands.
Good piece. But there’s a fair bit of bisexual erasure here, too. Mercury and Elliot, for sure. This always strikes me as odd when Mercury is written about: he moved around the Kinsey scale in his life and didn’t just steadfastly inhabit one end. I’m not sure where this need to make him a “gay man” comes from.
Just a quibble, but AIDS wasn’t described until a few isolated cases from San Francisco and New York were separately reported in MMWR (the CDC house journal) in 1982, and had several other names before settling in AIDS. HIV was not determined to be the causative agent until 1983 when Luc Montagnier established the link.
Is anyone else getting bored of being informed that you loved Freddie Mercury? I quite liked Don’t Stop Me Now and Who Wants To Live Forever. Both were quite pleasant pop tunes. When Elton John dies, no doubt it will turn out that “everyone” including myself loved him too, which will come as just as much of a surprise. I probably love Boy George, too.
Other than being a bit irresponsible in a showbiz way, none of them seems especially interesting. What am I missing?
Indeed. I understand that Freddie, whom we all loved, used to throw parties for which he hired dwarves. The dwarves were dressed in loin cloths, spray-painted gold, and required to stand motionless around the room, holding aloft bowls of cocaine for the guests’ use.
Dwarfs, please (as in Snow White). Dwarves were invented by Tolkien.
Little things…
It was his creative drive that must have kept Freddie going. He faced the tough final years with dignity. I think then he must have wanted to emphasise his creativity as being his essence. Freddie did not have to be provocative, nor flamboyant or outrageous to make good music. Those things could just as easily have been added as spice to his works — and they were. He knew how to entertain with aplomb. But in spite of all the glamour of being a rock star, Freddie Mercury must have loved making music. The presence of the disease caused Freddie, as I saw it, to focus his mind on creating more beautiful sounds.
SInce I raised 3 boys I prefered they not be in my boys schools or anywhere around them. It’s not “bad”, but I do feel that the oversexualized adult communities or all kinds are insensitive to parental rights and preferences. This article is just more propaganda for the movement.
do you know who Kevin Spacey is?
Who or what is censoring you? Unherd or your desire for likes under your post?
Julie you have a very black/white attitude about this topic. Why the assault on your fellow readers ? Makes no sense.