"I Want To Break Free" - Freddie Mercury
On Defiance in Disguise
Mercury navigated a web of identity—both as a queer man and an immigrant of Parsi-Indian descent.
The wardrobe you can’t pull off, the room you won’t command, the sex you don’t dare to ooze — all of it transforms, at least in your head, when you put a record on the turntable. Rock and roll is theater. It’s here to help you fantasize an existence far cooler than your own.
With his four-octave vocal range and high-octane stage persona, Freddie Mercury embodied the theatricality of rock and roll. He was the sex-god butterfly we’d all hoped to morph into if only we listened hard enough or belted the lyrics with just the right dose of bravado. The bullies would disappear. The second-class status that came with queerness or ethnicity would fall away like a cocoon. A sex god butterfly can’t be bullied, only admired.
Yet, the persona was a mask for Mercury too. In real life, Freddie Mercury, or Farrokh Bulsara, wasn’t the red-hot character that he created to save himself.
Mercury navigated a web of identity—both as a queer man and an immigrant of Parsi-Indian descent. Beyond the glittering stage persona, strategic ambiguity enabled him to exist in a space where he could be both deeply personal and universally relatable.
Born in Zanzibar to Parsi-Indian parents, he spent much of his early life in British colonial environments before moving to England. Despite his deep cultural heritage, Mercury rarely, if ever, spoke in interviews about his Indian roots.
The music industry—particularly rock and roll—was overwhelmingly white, and an openly South Asian frontman of a major band would have faced significant barriers. He changed his name to Freddie Mercury, a move that not only gave him a more palatable stage identity but also shielded him from pervasive racism in the industry. Mercury’s music contains signifiers of his South Asian heritage. In “Bohemian Rhapsody,” Mercury sings the Arabic word “Bismillah,” which means “God” and is the first word in the Koran.
“I think changing his name was part of him assuming this different skin,” said guitarist Brian May. “I think it helped him to be this person that he wanted to be. The Bulsara person was still there, but for the public he was going to be this different character, this god."
The God of Mercury also got to play with gender expression—his flamboyant outfits, camp theatrics, and coded lyrics hinted at queerness while still deliberately ambiguous.
British newspaper The Sun branded Mercury a “bisexual rock star,” and when music magazine NME asked him in 1974, “So how about being bent?” Mercury replied: “You’re a crafty cow. Let's put it this way: There were times when I was young and green. It's a thing schoolboys go through. I've had my share of schoolboy pranks. I’m not going to elaborate further.” On another occasion, he answered a similar question by saying playfully: “I’m as gay as a daffodil, my dear!”
The rock music of the mid 1970s celebrated rebellion, but the industry itself remained deeply heteronormative. A mere handful of artists were out as bisexual —- Dusty Springfield, Lou Reed, David Bowie and Elton John. The consequences were severe for Springfield, whose career stalled. When faced with industry pressure, the men’s performances all swung the pendulum back toward heteronormativity.
Wrapping his own admissions in humor allowed Mercury to sidestep direct acknowledgment while maintaining an air of playful defiance.
In the meantime, Mercury had serious (and unserious) relationships with people of all genders. Most famously, he dated Mary Austin in the 1970s. The two lived together for several years and even got engaged before Mercury told Austin he was bisexual. (Her response was that she thought he was gay.) The two maintained a close friendship after splitting up, with Austin appearing at his side in public. He called her the love of his life (and left her the bulk of his estate after his death).
While on the road in Queen's early days, May shared hotel rooms with Mercury and witnessed his bandmate bringing home just about anyone. May told the Sunday Times in 2017, "It was fairly obvious when the visitors to Freddie’s dressing room started to change from hot chicks to hot men." The men included Jim Hutton, who was with Mercury until his death in 1991.
Queen’s music was like a treasure hunt of clues about Mercury’s queerness for fans who recognized the references. On Queen’s 1978 hit "Don't Stop Me Now,” Mercury sings that he wants “to make a supersonic woman of you” and “a supersonic man out of you.” Then in the video, he wears a T-shirt from Mineshaft, a popular New York BDSM gay bar of the time. Mercury had a whole collection of queer-coded shirts.
Even the band’s name, Queen, can be seen as a winking allusion to its frontman’s identity. It was Mercury who chose the name. PinkNews Editor Ryan Butcher told BBC that Mercury was “almost a covert agent for the LGBT community, dropping these little seeds of queer culture into the heterosexual mindset.”
It could be argued that Mercury was effectively hiding in plain sight. In the ‘80s, Mercury was known for his tight white tank tops and thick moustache—his take on a look from San Francisco’s queer Castro District. And he didn’t let his massive fame stop him from visiting popular London gay venues such as Heaven and the Royal Vauxhall Tavern. Actress Cleo Rocos wrote in her 2013 memoir that she, Mercury and comedian Kenny Everett even managed to sneak Princess Diana into the latter venue by disguising her in drag.
Perhaps one of the most daring ways in which Mercury expressed his queerness was in Queen’s 1984 video for the single “I Want to Break Free,” in which he and his Queen bandmates dressed in drag to parody characters from the British soap opera Coronation Street. The decision to wear drag got the video banned from MTV.
“I remember being on the promo tour in the Midwest of America and people’s faces turning ashen,” May told NPR in 2017. “They would say, ‘We can’t possibly play this. You know, it looks homosexual.’”
May blamed homophobia in the U.S. for slowing the band’s commercial success in the country.
“There’s a whole sequence of hits that were massive all around the world but not in the United States. We didn’t get a hit until Freddie [passed away,]” he explained. “I remember Freddie saying, ‘We won’t get the States back until I f***ing die.'”
When he died in1991 due to AIDS-related complications, Mercury’s queerness and ethnic heritage were downplayed by mainstream media. Instead, tributes emphasized his charisma and musical genius. In contrast, South Asian fans and the queer community mourned him as an icon, recognizing his struggles and triumphs as part of their broader histories—which too often get erased.
Freddie Mercury’s life was a paradox—boldly extravagant yet intensely private, openly queer in performance yet evasive in interviews, proud yet guarded about his heritage. By straddling these worlds, he preserved his career during an era hostile to visibility—but, he also created a mask any of us could wear to see ourselves more clearly, more authentically.
In the end, Mercury’s greatest triumph wasn’t in making the world sing along to his defiance. It’s that some of us were in on it.
Love this song. It instantly empowers. Freddy's, "You're my Best Friend" was the song I walked down the aisle to with my husband.
God, I love Freddie Mercury. Thanks for this read this morning!