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The importance of Freddie Mercury After his death, gay society became more reckless

Fuck it (Michael Montfort/Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images)

Fuck it (Michael Montfort/Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images)


November 24, 2021   5 mins

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.

All the same, we lived in a world where a fundamental truth was influencing all our actions, and it was this: You might die soon. Not many generations of people live through their twenties and thirties with this somewhere near the front of their minds. It has an inevitable effect on what you do. In recent years, friends in their twenties and thirties have sometimes asked me whether I ever thought of having children. It never crossed my mind as a reasonable possibility. It wasn’t until the late Nineties that I even gave way to a long temptation, and got a dog — I mean, dogs can easily live 15 years. It might turn out not to be fair.

Looking back, there might have been other consequences to this looming terror. One of them might have been a general state of mind that can only be summed up as “Fuck it”. You might as well do what you had in mind. Shame more or less disappeared as a state of mind. I knew a lot of straight literary people who anguished and writhed and wasted time over the question of whether they should or should not write a novel, taking it for granted that they’d live another 60 years. Fuck it. I wrote one, then another, then another. People younger than me were dying of the virus, after all.

There were other consequences of that fuck-it mentality. Gay society took on a dangerous and reckless flavour, with the first all-night clubs like Trade — there was one point in the Nineties where we worked out that you could go to one dance club after another without a break between 10pm on a Friday to lunchtime on Monday. Some queens really did it. The mood of outrageous bad taste was universal. One of Derek Jarman’s last paintings was called Arse-Injected Death Syndrome. “Bad news,” a dear friend said to me once. “I’ve got the fucking Death Clap.” And burst out laughing.

Maybe, too, the sense that you might be dead in five years brought people together, to disagree and argue and yell, but with a sense that your different opinions were all in the same bundle. A lot of my generation find it pretty weird that speakers for what is now called the LGBTQI community seem obsessed with determining who can be admitted to their ranks, or excluded. It wouldn’t have seemed a very pressing question in the Eighties and Nineties, and we haven’t forgotten how important the support of lesbians was to gay men during the crisis. It went a long way towards unifying a community.

By the turn of the century, things were changing. The new century went on; we started to hear the words “living with HIV” as an accurate description, and not as a hopeful euphemism. The habit of hedonism remained; the urgency of protest receded. Gay Pride renamed itself as Mardi Gras; it turned into a parade of LGBT-supporting businesses, anybody gay and lesbian without an official wristband confined behind barriers.

We might, after all, live as long as anyone else, and people started to marry, to adopt children, to stay in boring jobs, to talk about pensions and property. I got married to my boyfriend; I paid off my mortgage; we got a small Schnauzer called Greta, who is still going to be here in 2035, as I hope to be. The friend of mine who told me he had “the fucking Death Clap” is, for all purposes, perfectly healthy.

Freddie goes on, not as a martyr, but as a marvellous, unique presence who did something never seen before and never really attempted since. Quite a lot of him has since been toned down; when the jukebox musical We Will Rock You opened, it was striking that it turned Freddie’s music into the backdrop to a straight romance between a couple of kids. Freddie was outrageous in a way that might not be permitted now; a six-minute pop song with casual incorporations of the Islamic imprecation “Bismillah”; the Tom of Finland image with moustache and crotch-clinging trousers; the Live Aid performance, including the borderline sexual harassment, live, of the onstage cameraman.

His outrageousness was extinguished by a disease, but the presence of that disease fed and spread something of the same outrageousness: that desire to say “Fuck it” from time to time. I think any gay person who lived through the ten years between the discovery of HIV/Aids and Freddie Mercury’s death — lived though it as a sexual being — will always have been shaped by it. Maybe always set slightly apart from what followed, too. If they lived.


Philip Hensher is the author of eleven novels and a Professor of Creative Writing at Bath Spa University

PhilipHensher

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Lesley van Reenen
Lesley van Reenen
2 years ago

I 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.

Last edited 2 years ago by Lesley van Reenen
Julie Blinde
Julie Blinde
2 years ago

Somebody is outraged even by the question

Roger Sponge
Roger Sponge
2 years ago

“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!

R S Foster
R S Foster
2 years ago
Reply to  Roger Sponge

…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…

Sue Sims
Sue Sims
2 years ago
Reply to  R S Foster

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.

William Murphy
William Murphy
2 years ago
Reply to  Sue Sims

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.

Gayle Rosenthal
Gayle Rosenthal
2 years ago
Reply to  Sue Sims

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.

Gayle Rosenthal
Gayle Rosenthal
2 years ago
Reply to  Roger Sponge

I asked my 35 and 37 year olds if AIDS impacted their young adult lives and the answer was a definitive YES !

Raymond Inauen
Raymond Inauen
2 years ago

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!

Tony Conrad
Tony Conrad
2 years ago
Reply to  Raymond Inauen

We are too nice to use it. Our wives would not approve.

Julie Blinde
Julie Blinde
2 years ago
Reply to  Tony Conrad

you don’t know the half of it

Gayle Rosenthal
Gayle Rosenthal
2 years ago
Reply to  Tony Conrad

Let’s Go Brandon ! That’s easier to say than F*** J** B**** !

Ian Stewart
Ian Stewart
2 years ago

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.

Lord Rochester
Lord Rochester
2 years ago

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.

David B
David B
2 years ago

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.

Jon Redman
Jon Redman
2 years ago

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?

Jon Redman
Jon Redman
2 years ago

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.

Andrew D
Andrew D
2 years ago
Reply to  Jon Redman

Dwarfs, please (as in Snow White). Dwarves were invented by Tolkien.
Little things…

Dustshoe Richinrut
Dustshoe Richinrut
2 years ago

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.

Last edited 2 years ago by Dustshoe Richinrut
Gayle Rosenthal
Gayle Rosenthal
2 years ago

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.

Karen Burgess
Karen Burgess
2 years ago

do you know who Kevin Spacey is?

Dan Croitoru
Dan Croitoru
2 years ago

Who or what is censoring you? Unherd or your desire for likes under your post?

Gayle Rosenthal
Gayle Rosenthal
2 years ago

Julie you have a very black/white attitude about this topic. Why the assault on your fellow readers ? Makes no sense.