Queens’ Tragic Rhapsody

I n the early 1980s, aids began to take its steady toll in America ”“ ini­tially centered in New York, where roughly half the infections were f irst recorded. There were some who referred to the deadly ill­ness as the “gay plague,” but it soon be­came apparent that AIDS wasn’t dis­criminating: It was caused by a virus ”“ HIV ”“ that debilitated the immune system, and it was transmitted by in­fected bodily f luids, including semen and blood. It was most widely spread by drug users who shared hypodermic nee­dles and by people who had unprotect­ed sex, particularly those with multiple partners. Freddie Mercury fell into this latter category. “I’m just an old slag who gets up every morning, scratches his head and wonders what he wants to fuck,” he once said.

In the late 1970s and through much of the 1980s, Queen came to consider Mu­nich their home away from home, later to their regret. The city had an active and di­verse sex culture, and the place seemed to prove both a heaven and a hell for Mercury. May later said that the singer could hardly bear being in the studio sometimes ”“ “He’d want to do his bit and get out” ”“ preferring to spend evenings in Munich’s discos and clubs. One evening he met actress Barba­ra Valentin, who had appeared in some of Rainer Fassbinder’s films. Mercury entered into a passionate romance with Valentin, while carrying on intense, sometimes tem­pestuous affairs with various male lovers (including a rumored one with ballet star Rudolf Nureyev). He also used drugs and drank heavily in this period, and a few times experienced blackouts, unable to recall what he had done the night before. Valentin told Lesley-Ann Jones about finding Mercury on an apartment balcony naked, singing “We Are the Champions” to some construction workers below, then shouting, “Whoever has the biggest dick, come on up!”

There are varying accounts about how Mercury coped with the risk of contract­ing AIDS. Some thought it was why he was never anxious for Queen to tour America after 1982. But BBC DJ Paul Gambaccini re­counted running into Mercury one night in 1984, at a London club called Heaven. Gam­baccini asked Mercury if AIDS had changed his attitude about free-ranging sex. Mercu­ry replied, “Darling, my attitude is ”˜fuck it.’ I’m doing everything with everybody.” Gambaccini said, “I had that literal sink­ing feeling. I’d seen enough in New York to know that Freddie was going to die.’ ” Mercury once said to journalist Rick Sky, “By nature, I’m very restless and highly strung . . . a person of real extremes, and often that’s destructive to myself and oth­ers.” At some point, Mercury clearly recon­sidered. In late 1985, he had an AIDS test ”“ the results were negative. He abandoned the Munich club scene, as well as his affair with Valentin, and settled into a mansion in Kensington; former girlfriend Mary Aus­tin, who was now his secretary, had found it for him in 1980. “I lived for sex,” he would later say. “I was extremely promiscuous, but AIDS changed my life.”

I n 1987, mercury sub­mitted to another AIDS test, but then seemed to shrink from learn­ing the results. After trying to reach Mer­cury on several oc­casions with no reply, his doctor’s office then contacted Austin and shared the urgency of the matter with her: Mer­cury was now diagnosed as HIV-posi­tive. “I felt my heart fall,” Austin said later. Mercury, though, didn’t yet tell Queen. “We knew something was going on,” May later said, “but it was not talked about.” By this time Paul Prenter, Mercury’s for­mer personal manager, had already told a U.K. newspaper about the earlier blood test, and the press was starting to put the band under pressure to address the matter. But Mercury insisted that the ru­mors were false. Some friends conjec­tured that he had instead developed a liver problem from too much drinking, though in 1987 Valentin had noticed scars on his face and hands: possible signs of Kaposi’s sarcoma.

When the band’s 13th album, The Mir­acle, was finished in early 1989, the singer wanted to start another LP right away. He hoped to record as much work as he could, and he now realized he would have to tell his bandmates why. “He decided to just in­vite us all over to the house for a meeting,” said Taylor. Mercury told his bandmates, “You probably realize what my problem is. Well, that’s it and I don’t want it to make a difference. I don’t want it to be known. I don’t want to talk about it. I just want to get on and work until I fucking well drop. I’d like you to support me in this.” May later said that he, Taylor and Deacon were devas­tated: “We all went off and got quietly sick somewhere, and that was the only conver­sation directly we had about it.”

The knowledge naturally affected the tenor of the new album, Innuendo. “That produced a coming-together,” said Tay­lor, “a closing of the ranks.” May said that, as writers, Queen knew they were facing their ultimate subject, but the band’s cus­toms made it hard to communicate about it. “We didn’t speak to each other about lyr­ics,” May told Mojo in 2004. “We were just too embarrassed to talk about the words.” Even so, Innuendo addresses impending death as memorably and gracefully as any work could hope to, and does so without a moment of self-pity. “It was very con­scious toward the end,” May said. “Some­times Freddie wasn’t able to vocalize [what he wanted to say], and we in a sense ”“ this is going to sound very strange, but I think Roger and I kind of vocalized for him, in writing some of the lyrics. Because he was almost beyond the point where he could put it into words. So songs like ”˜The Show Must Go On,’ in my case, or ”˜Days of Our Lives,’ in Roger’s case, were things that we gave to Freddie as a way of him working through stuff with us. And that wasn’t spo­ken. It was us trying to find the end before we got there.” Added Taylor, “And we were determined to stick close to the end.”