My two cents on Freddie coming out in Bohemian Rhapsody.
Ok, I’m seeing so much on Tumblr about the ‘Bisexual erasure’ in Bohemian Rhapsody. If you haven’t seen it, sorry for the spoiler but if you know Freddie Mercury this won’t come as any kind of shocking spoiler anyway.
His conversation with Mary Austin about his sexuality in this movie is apparently the actual conversation that went down between them. Freddie tells her he thinks he’s Bisexual and she goes on to straight up say ‘Freddie you’re gay’. This has caused a hell of a lot of anger in the Bisexual community and to an extent, I get it. The thing is though it shouldn’t. I mean it sucks, you’ve all at some point had someone try to tell you your preference and deny what you’re telling them about yourself.
But guys, this movie was made to represent Freddie’s life, his experience joining Smile and making Queen the iconic band we have, it’s not about being politically correct, not even entirely factually correct. Freddie was private about his sexuality, he didn’t like to label himself so the movie left it at that. They brought up his feelings, she gave her opinion. He went on to love her for the rest of his life as his closest friend and referred to her as the ‘Love of my life’ whilst having a lot of sexual relationships with men and have a long time life partner in Jim Hutton. He sung songs about women, he had crazy parties involving men and women and he was content in himself. He knew who he was and those closest to him knew who he was.
Instead of being pissed that the movie kept that dialogue true to the original conversation, look at the way Freddie lived and the way that he loved and expressed himself. It’s a movie about his life, it was representing him. Go and represent yourself and what you should really do with people who don’t get you and your sexuality, is live your life regardless. People get way too hung up on stuff. As a happily married Demisexual, I understand what it’s like for people to not understand or try and tell you your sexuality isn’t real.
For what it’s worth, you can love someone of a certain gender and still go on to discover that your feelings that way are lost. There’s a lot of pressure towards people to be straight, it’s not uncommon for it to take years and a few lovers and a lot of soul searching to realize that’s not how you see yourself. Maybe it hit a little close to home but whether Freddie was gay or bisexual doesn’t take away from your sexual preferences, he was the way he was and he didn’t feel the need to be validated for feeling that way by anyone else. We should all be a little more like Freddie.
