Was freddie mercury gay movie#
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.
The result is far more hurtful than your average unconsciously homophobic film. (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 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. 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.īut ultimately, it fails to do either. 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. 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.īut the other members of Queen had no idea what he was talking about. “It” has been stalking his community, stealing away people he loves, constantly reminding him of his mortality. “It” has been looming over Mercury’s life for years. 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 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. 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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