My favorite gay icon.
Since my college days, I've dreamed of dressing as Freddie Mercury in drag from the music video "I Want to Break Free". It's silly, campy, and the song is a total ear worm. Through the years, my love for Queen and Freddie has ebbed and flowed but a recent rewatch of the biopic on my plane ride to Atlanta last month has reignited this affliction.
While working out and listening to his isolated vocals in "Love of my Life", I began reflecting on what I know of his life and almost coming to tears. His obvious talent, a voice so operatic and dangerous in its beauty, is like overhearing heaven. His vocals don’t feel like something a human throat should produce but a finely toned instrument. It is incomprehensible to believe we had such a person among us, that he was not an angel or a god. He strutted through this earth in stilettos and skin-tight body suits. He was outrageous, chaos incarnate, a total presence in the stage. I am obsessed with his extravagance. He dared to exist so luminously despite the world trying to dull his light.
I used to think of “I Want to Break Free” as a breakup, empowerment song. After watching the biopic..it is not just a lament, but a declaration of stepping into the terrifying light of authenticity — even when it means losing everything familiar. I can't help but assume Freddie wrote this with his hidden sexuality in mind. The lyric pleading "I don't want to be alone..." took on a devastating weight when I considered it as a cry against the alienation Freddie may have feared — not just from love, but from a world that might judge him for living truthfully. It captures something so complicated, so human.
And there is also something very cruel and human about the disease that stripped him not just of life but dignity. It was spoken of in euphemisms and hushed shame. It left people abandoned, scorned, exiled. And for someone like Freddie, who once had the world in his palm — to lose his defenses, his strength, his privacy — it was a tragedy both public and unspeakably personal.
But being the diva he was - he did not go down quietly but with the sound of graceful defiance in his final songs and performances. And amid all the spotlights and sorrow — he had cats!! And after he died, he made sure they were taken care of.
I lament because there will be no another like him but I am thankful we were graced with his voice and presence in this life time.