Freddie Mercury

On Monday, Nov. 25, 1991, my mother woke me up with a knock on the door.

“What’s the name of that singer you love so much?” she asked, cigarette and coffee in hand. “Because he’s on the news.”

I was a 23-year-old slacker with an English degree who graduated the previous May. I had no job, no future prospects. The week before I’d moved out of the apartment I shared with a crazy ex-girlfriendand was staying at my mother and stepfather’s house until I could find my own place.

Surrounded by my possessions in trash bags and milk crates, I arose from an air mattress with the sound of Kurt Loder from MTV News announcing that Freddie Mercury, lead singer of the rock band Queen, died the night before from AIDS-related bronchio-pneumonia.

“That’s such a shame,” my mother said. “And hewas so handsome.”

She knew this was a big deal for me. Her garage was stacked with boxes of every record Queen ever made, every 45, tubes full of posters. Second only to the Beatles in Great Britain, Queen ruled the charts with the stadium anthems “We Will Rock You” and “We Are The Champions.” There’s also the operatic opus cum karaoke staple “Bohemian Rhapsody.”

By that November, now twentyyears ago, their stardom had faded, especially in the U.S. It was then I realized that my fandom-turned-obsession was also a kind of love affair, which was now coming to an end.

Since I was nine years old, Freddie Mercury—flamboyant frontman, rock icon—was at the center of my rather dull suburban life. Like millions of others, while he was alive, he earned my devotion and hero-worship. It wasonly when he died, and in the years that followed, that he became an actual human being. I finally saw him for who he was: a gay man.


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Everybody loves Queen nowadays. This past September, Google celebrated what would have been Freddie Mercury’s 65th birthday with an animated doodle on its homepage. Singing competitions feature Queen every season, with Freddie’s operatic voice as abenchmark for melismatic contestants. There’s a long-running Queen musical in London’s West End and around the world, a competition to be in an official tribute band, and a biopic with Sacha Baron Coen in the works. In 1991, however, Queen couldn’t get arrested in the U.S., and being a fan of Freddie Mercury was tantamount to saying you were either gay, unhip, or both.

Growing up, I didn’t want myrock stars to be like me. Life in South Jersey was boring, unsophisticated. The son of a truck driver and part-time secretary, I lived in a rancher and went to Catholic school. Nothing around me could be rockstar-like. Everyman rockers Bruce Springsteen and John Cougar made me cringe back then.

“People want art,” Freddie said in 1977. “They want showbiz. They want to see you rush off in yourlimousine.” He toasted his audiences with champagne in ballet tights. I wanted some of his showbiz presence to rub off on me, but what was that presence?

Rock ’n’ roll equals sex. To listen to Jim Morrison or Elvis Presley for years as obsessive teenagers must leave a different effect than listening to, say, singing along to the lead singer of a rock band called Queen who dressed like Leathermanfrom the Village People.

Once in high school I got into a fight with a boy named Frank when he said I was gay because I liked Queen. To admit that my rock idol was gay would be tantamount to saying that I, too, was gay, and that was social suicide as a teen in South Jersey. So we duked it out. Most of the time I would say Freddie Mercury was “bisexual,” as if he had somehow reformed himself. Iwasn’t especially naïve, and Freddie didn’t hide his sexuality, but he also didn’t proclaim it. He said it would be “boring” if he did.

If we were good Freudians, we would concede we’re all a bit bisexual. At some point, gazing at Freddie channel Elvis Presley in “Crazy Little Thing Called Love” and Donna Summer in “Another One Bites The Dust,” I questioned whether all this added up to me...