I was gonna reblog a post and add this on but no, let’s just make a new one instead.
It is absolutely important to remember Freddie’s Parsi heritage and his cultural background, but I have a big problem with the fandom constantly saying that Farrokh Bulsara was Freddie’s “real name”.
That is absolutely the name he was given at birth, yes. That is the name his parents gave him, and Bulsara is his family surname.
But Freddie legally changed his own name. He didn’t go by Freddie Mercury on stage while still keeping his birth name as his legal name, he made the conscious and deliberate decision to make Freddie Mercury his “real” name (and had in fact been going by “Freddie” since he was a child at boarding school in India).
There is definitely a conversation to be had about whether Freddie felt forced to assimilate to Western culture and whether he felt disconnected from his own roots because of that (and I’ve seen one interview with Roger recently where he implies that that was the case). And absolutely, the fandom and the world at large needs to remember that Freddie was not born in England, he was not white, and his upbringing and history was very different from everyone else in Queen.
But framing this conversation around his “real name” being Farrokh Bulsara implies that Freddie Mercury was not a “real name” for him. And it erases the fact that Freddie Mercury is the name and identity that he deliberately chose to use for the vast majority of his adult life, for better or for worse, and regardless of whether that’s a decision that he would have made under different circumstances or would continue to stand by if he was still alive today.
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