Hello lovely people and merry (almost) Christmas,
Welcome to the latest instalment of my historical profile series where we
look at the life and times of disabled and LGBTQ+ people, as well as some of
the momentous periods of history that they lived through, or were a part of.
Did you know that December 1st isn't just the start of advent, it's also is World AIDS Day?
and that’s what we are going to be talking about today, through the lens of someone very special.
This time, we’re going to be looking at the absolute legend
and all-time Queen that is Freddie Mercury.
Along the way, you can expect tales of triumph and resilience, of tragedy and revolution.
And no less than 24 of Queen and Freddie’s song titles… which will
be very cleverly hidden throughout the video and VERY difficult to spot,
I’m sure. Let me know in the comments if you catch them all!
List them! Go ahead…
So, whatever you do, Don’t Stop Me Now,
as we dive Headlong into the successes and sorrows of the wonderful Freddie Mercury.
- [embarrassed] I promise they’re not all going to be like that…
The man we all know as Freddie Mercury was actually born Farrokh Bulsara,
in September 1946. His parents were Parsi-Indian by descent,
but were living in Zanzibar when little Farrokh came into the world.
Because of the ‘joys’ of colonialism […], being born in Zanzibar made young Farrokh
a British citizen, which I suppose would turn out to be a good thing eventually.
As a child, he attended boarding school in India, where his friends gave him the
nickname Freddie. But he’d still be a Bulsara for another 20 years or so.
His love for music shone through from an early age. He started playing the
piano when he was seven, and formed his first band, called the Hectics,
aged just 12 years old. He was obsessed with Western pop and rock music – apparently it
was all he ever listened to. I think we can all see where this is going.
After school, he moved back to Zanzibar to be with his parents, but a year later,
in 1964, the whole family upped and moved to Middlesex in England.
Now what, you may be wondering,
could possibly induce someone to want to LEAVE Zanzibar and move to Middlesex?
- Well, major political revolution and the threat
of ethnically motivated violence would probably do it…
Yeah that would probably do it. Basically, the year before,
the British had granted Zanzibar its independence
and things did not go well among the culturally diverse island inhabitants.
Ah the british… the british messed up another independence didn’t they?
We are all surprised.
African revolutionaries overthrew the Sultan of Zanzibar and his mostly Arab government,
and the violence continued through the Arab and south Asian groups.
- Suddenly, wet Middlesex doesn’t seem like such a downgrade.
So the Bulsaras started a new life in England,
and Freddie was ready to embrace his Western cultural dreams.
He studied graphic design at college, and worked a wide range of jobs – from
baggage handler to market seller. But all the while his love of music shone through,
and he was in several heavy blues bands
(which I didn't know they were a thing)
before he met drummer Roger Taylor and guitarist Brian May in 1970.
At the time, they were in their own band called Smile,
but Freddie joined them as lead vocalist and chose a new name for the group.
That name was, you guessed it: Queen.
Freddie said he liked the regal sound of it, and was aware of the gay connotations,
but that was, quote “just one facet of it”.
deftly sidestepping difficult questions surrounding sexuality
there– it won’t be the last time we see that from him.
A year later, the trio were joined by bass guitarist John Deacon,
and the band Queen as we know them was complete. They stayed together
through the good times, and the bad times, for the next 20 years.
Freddie Bulsara chose himself a new, more Flash-y stage name while the band were working on their
first album. After he wrote the song My Fairy King, he was apparently inspired by his own
lyrics – “Mother Mercury, look what they’ve done to me”, and the rockstar Freddie Mercury was born.
- Anyone else hearing loud and clear what dear Freddie isn’t
explicitly saying? We’ll get to that in a bit.
After being signed by EMI Records and Elektra Records,
Queen were Under Pressure to succeed, and succeed they most certainly did!
Their debut, self-titled album released in 1973 was described
as one of the most exciting developments ever in rock music.
which really is quite a thing to say about something! that’s lot to live up to!
They were bold and brave in their musical style, and uniquely democratic,
with all the band members taking turns to write songs for their albums.
Probably the band’s most famous song, Bohemian Rhapsody, was written by Freddie himself.
It nearly didn’t make it to our ears though. Because it was so out-there in terms of style,
AND nearly six minutes long, the record producers had real reservations about releasing it.
But they took a chance, and the rock scene of the 70’s LOVED it,
helping it top the UK charts for nine weeks. You could say they were Radio Ga Ga for it.
Okay that one was a bit of a stretch.
Freddie Mercury wasn’t just wedded to Queen though. He had a wide interest in the arts,
collaborating with musical theatre producers and opera
singers to pursue his solo career alongside his work with the band.
Queen and Freddie were on a roll, achieving international success and topping the US charts
by 1979. If anyone was justified in saying We Are The Champions, it was Killer Queen themselves.
- that one was bad.
Some might even say they invented the entire genre of ‘stadium rock’,
playing to a record-breaking audience of 231,000
people in Sao Paolo, Brazil in 1981. They told us – We Will Rock You, and they did!
Perhaps Freddie’s finest hour came in 1985,
when Queen performed in front of 1.9 billion people worldwide for the televised Live Aid
charity concert. That amounted to nearly 40% of world’s population at the time!
Could we do even do that today?!
To a large degree, Queen owed their success to Freddie Mercury’s
flamboyant personality. His stage persona was sparklingly outgoing,
even outrageous. But it’s said that in his private life, he was a very different man.
He was shy and gentle when not performing, striving to become the Invisible Man.
Nevertheless, people do like to judge based on public appearances, with Freddie’s stardom and
exuberant performances leading many to speculate about what was going on behind closed doors.
Was he gay? Was he straight? Was he bisexual? One thing was for sure,
Freddie Mercury was going to keep them guessing.
All through the early 1970s, he gave every appearance of being into Fat Bottomed Girls,
dating Mary Austin for several years. [beat] oh god, that one was really shoehorned in! I’m not
saying that Mary Austin had a particularly fat bottom, it was the girls part I was referring to!
Some of these name titles are just really hard to fit in ok?
That relationship ended in 1976, although he still insisted, You’re My Best Friend,
and the pair stayed close for the rest of their lives.
Freddie’s push for privacy meant that his other relationships were never out in the open until
much later. Interestingly, the coded language that Freddie used to speak about his life
meant that some people felt once he came out that he had actively concealed his sexuality,
whilst others believed he was always openly gay- you just needed to know what to listen for.
Even though being gay had been decriminalised in the UK in 1967, that didn’t mean it was
easy for someone who found his pleasures among the same sex during the 70s and 80s.
By his own admission, he fully embraced the more carnal pleasures,
even if he was never quite explicit about who he was spending his time with. We now know that
Freddie also had several long-term partners while he was looking for Somebody To Love,
including German restaurateur Winfied Kirchberger and Irish hairdresser Jim Hutton.
Even though he kept his distance from Jim in public, among his inner circle,
he referred to him as his husband, and wore a gold wedding band while they were together.
- Turns out that he was just your average Good Old-Fashioned Lover Boy.
Sadly, his love life wasn’t the only card that Freddie kept close to his
chest. His intense privacy extended to matters of his health as well.
Even as his fame and fortune grew, Freddie’s friends and bandmates started to notice some
signs of illness around 1982, when the rockstar was just 32 years old.
A dark mark appeared on his face, and his hand, and he suffered from a lesion on his tongue.
Friends encouraged him not to Play the Game with his health and get them checked out, but
he was ultimately dismissive of the doctors’ diagnoses. He wasn’t
interested in talking to the professionals, or discussing the results. For him, simply,
The Show Must Go On. And… there wasn’t a lot of positive information coming from the doctors.
Other people saw these signs of illness though, and speculated wildly about what they could mean.
Because, by this time there was a new illness beginning to make
waves among gay communities in the US and the UK.
It was called AIDS, and as far as anyone could tell, it carried a death sentence.
It was actually back in the late 1970s that the pandemic started
spreading silently among gay men in the US.
It was silent because, well, gay people were silent.
In many places it still wasn’t safe to be openly out, and admitting you had a
disease that affected that community was tantamount to outing yourself.
It wasn’t long before the disease crossed the pond.
In the UK, the first cases were seen in 1981,
and in 1982 the first person here died of what we now know as an AIDS-related
infection. That was the same year that Freddie started showing his symptoms.
AIDS, which stands for ‘Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome’,
is the name given to the collection of related infections and illnesses,
but for the first few years, no one knew exactly what was causing them.
Eventually though, scientists identified the human immunodeficiency virus, or HIV, in 1984.
It’s a nasty, pernicious little virus that goes a step further than your common
cold or flu virus, actually changing the DNA inside the cells it infects.
For that reason, it’s notoriously difficult to treat without attacking the body’s own cells,
and basically impossible to cure.
- although we will be speaking more at the
end about what great strides have been made in medicine.
After contracting the virus, most often through exchanges of body fluids or sharing of needles,
people suffer a week or so of flu-like symptoms, but then things go quiet.
HIV can lie dormant for years, and be passed on to others,
before the infected person begins to feel the worst effects.
But all this alone doesn’t explain how it came to be such a big problem.
The issue was with the way this deadly pandemic was handled by governments, who, like so many
before them and since, didn’t give LGBTQ+ people the rights or attention they deserved.
Things were especially bad in the US. Not every state had legalised homosexuality,
and activists were still working hard to advocate for gay rights.
But the emergence of HIV basically caused a reactionary backlash. It
was a major step backwards for the activists’ cause.
AIDS was dismissed as a ‘Gay Plague’ by the White House, and looked on as a joke by governments.
- yes, the actual White House at the time! The official government line
And activists found their demands that the growing medical crisis be
acknowledged and addressed were all but ignored.
The idea was that being gay, meant being promiscuous, meant that you deserved what
was coming to you, even if that meant a slow and painful death as your body shut down on you.
They basically thought that Too Much Love Will Kill You. Or at least, too much gay sex will.
- oh absolutely bin them. Straight into the bin!
It took a whole year from when the HIV virus was discovered before President
Reagan spoke about it publicly, by which time around 12,000 Americans had died.
Imagine if the Covid pandemic had been ignored in the same way? There would be mass outrage.
And there WAS mass outrage, among the few that were actually talking about
it. Gay people saw their friends dying around them,
while nobody could or would do anything to help. Freddie Mercury himself experienced it.
By this point, the gay community were ANGRY. They were thinking,
I’m Going Slightly Mad. Why won’t anyone listen? Why won’t anyone DO something?
But they at least had One Vision. In the absence of any government intervention,
they organised their own care for those affected,
forming the first AIDS charity ‘Gay Men’s Health Crisis’, and later ACT UP.
Their actions did help to speed up the governments’ responses,
but it was too little too late.
By 1991, HIV/AIDS had become a global pandemic with over 10 million people infected.
- By 1995, it was the single biggest killer of men aged 25 to 44 in America.
It was this growing AIDS crisis that Freddy Mercury found himself mired in, in the late 1980s,
even though, like so many others, he chose to keep quiet about his condition.
After having his blood tested for the virus in 1986,
he was eventually diagnosed with AIDS in 1987.
His friends and bandmates knew the truth, but in public they all still still publicly
denied that he had the disease, even as Freddie started to look increasingly gaunt and unwell.
Of course, there are many who think that things might have gone differently with the
AIDS crisis if the star had been more open about his sexuality, and his battle with the disease.
But hindsight is always golden, and there’s no knowing if even the voice of the great Freddie
Mercury would have been enough to shift the inertia of prejudice and stigma. It all could
have backfired, and that’s not something Freddie was willing to break his famed privacy for.
Also neither is it something we should expect one person to carry upon themselves.
So Freddie played The Great Pretender, and carried on writing and performing
as long as he could. The members of Queen were always by his side,
ready to work with him when he was able, and not pushing him when he wasn’t.
But in reality, they were all waiting for the Hammer to Fall.
He made his final appearance on stage in 1990, and filmed his last music video in May 1991.
After that, he told the rest of Queen that he couldn’t do it anymore,
and retired to his home in Kensington in West London.
In those last few months, he was bedbound, and lost his sight, but his friends were often by
his side, including his lifelong companion Mary Austin, and his partner Jim Hutton.
In the end, he started refusing the medications he was offered,
taking only painkillers, telling his friends Who Wants To Live Forever, after all.
It was only in November of 1991, after all of this that Freddie
finally went public about his health, announcing in a statement that he had,
in fact, tested positive for HIV and was suffering from AIDS.
And tragically, just one day later, Freddie Mercury passed away. He was just 45 years old.
Even if he’d been quiet about it during his life, Freddie Mercury was the first
big star to die of AIDS, and that made a big impact around the world.
For the blinkered governments, could this be a case of Another One Bites
The Dust? Oh no, People really started to sit up and take notice.
The next year, Queen held a concert at Wembley Stadium in Freddie’s honour, to pay tribute to
the man so many had loved, and to raise awareness about HIV and AIDS and the ongoing health crisis.
The Mercury Phoenix Trust was set up in his memory,
and every year they host the ‘Freddie for a Day’ event on Mercury’s birthday,
to celebrate his life and raise funds to support AIDS education and treatment around the world.
And that’s still a battle that’s ongoing.
HIV/AIDS is still one of the most destructive pandemics in history.
In the last 40 years, around 77 million people have been infected with the virus,
and about 35 million have died. There are still 100,000 people living with AIDS in the UK today.
The good news is, though, that not every HIV and AIDS story has to end like Freddie’s these days.
There have been huge advancements in the medications available to treat the disease,
which can now be so effective at suppressing the HIV virus that they
make it basically undetectable in someone’s blood.
And doctors are now realising that undetectable is basically the same as untransmittable,
so while there’s still no cure as such, someone infected with HIV can go on to live a normal,
full and healthy life without worrying about passing it on to others.
There are even pre-exposure and post-exposure
prophylactic medicines that are helping to curb the spread too.
- It’s a Kind of Magic that could have come about much sooner,
if people had sat up and taken notice when they should have done.
Who knows, it might have even been enough to keep Freddie Mercury and
his incredible music with us for longer.
However, not everyone around the world has access to these life changing medications, which is why
I’m using today’s video to fundraise for amfAR, the Foundation for AIDS Research, an international
nonprofit dedicated to supporting AIDS research, HIV prevention, treatment education and advocacy
of AIDS-related public policy. I’ll be donating all AdSense raised from this video on top of my
own personal donation and I hope you’ll join me by clicking the ‘donate’ button here on YouTube,
or following the link in the description- either way 100%
of your donation will go to the charity, it’s just whichever is easiest for you.
If you’re unable to donate, please talk about World AIDS Day, whether it’s by
sharing this video, a post you’ve seen on social media or even just talking to
a friend. There is still stigma to be broken and if we’ve learnt anything from the last
few years it’s that pandemics can pull us apart when we most need to come together.
Thank you so much for watching, I hope you enjoyed this video and I’ll see you in my next one.