Mercury’s sexuality isn’t now ignored in the same way, but there’s still no definitive way to describe him. Kalyan says that Mercury was “smart enough to know that he basically had to masquerade as a white man to succeed”, and says his South Asian heritage is still not fully understood today “because South Asians are still deliberately ignored within the Western music industry”. “There’s no room for brown people in the Western music industry, and Freddie kind of knew that,” says Leo Kalyan, a queer British Pakistani and Indian singer-songwriter who hails Mercury as “the greatest performer of all time”. This character also helped him to dodge some of the racial prejudices of the era. The Bulsara person was still there, but for the public he was going to be this different character, this god." “I think it helped him to be this person that he wanted to be. “I think changing his name was part of him assuming this different skin,” Queen bandmate Brian May said in a 2000 documentary. The adopted surname Mercury came later, after his family emigrated to the UK in 1964, and he began to pursue a music career in west London. He attended British-style boarding schools in India, where he began using the name Freddie. In 1946, he was born Farrokh Bulsara to Indian Parsi parents on the island of Zanzibar, then a British protectorate and now part of Tanzania.
Mercury’s sexuality isn’t the only aspect of his identity that’s complicated. She rarely gives interviews, but told the Daily Mail in 2013 that Mercury said before he died: “If things had been different, you would have been my wife and this would have been yours anyway.” Austin still lives at Garden Lodge, a Georgian mansion in Kensington where Mercury spent his final years. Though Mercury was living with Jim Hutton, his male partner of six years, at the time of his death, he bequeathed the lion’s share of his estate to Mary Austin, a woman he dated for a similar length of time in the ‘70s and remained close to.
The release offers a timely opportunity to explore Mercury’s complex identity and status as a queer icon, especially since last year’s enormously successful biopic, Bohemian Rhapsody, was accused of playing down, or ‘straightwashing’, the singer’s relationships with men. Love Kills is included on Never Boring, a new box set gathering much of the material Mercury recorded away from Queen, including his only solo album, 1985’s Mr Bad Guy, and 1988’s Barcelona, an ambitious LP collaboration with opera singer Montserrat Caballé. “Everything was about subtext with Freddie Mercury,” says Martin Aston, author of Breaking Down The Walls Of Heartache: How Music Came Out. The song’s lyrics don’t allude to the disease which would claim the singer’s life seven years later, but it’s possible that its title could be a thinly-veiled reference. In 1984, two years after the Gay Men’s Health Crisis organisation was formed in New York to combat Aids, Freddie Mercury scored his first solo hit with Love Kills.
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