Bohemian Rhapsody’s Queer Representation Is Downright Dangerous
Bohemian Rhapsody opens with Queen’s 1976 hit “Somebody to Love,” unsubtly blazoning Freddie Mercury’s quest for companionship as its central dilemma, alongside the meteoric rise of the band that made him an icon. “Can anybody find me somebody to love?” Freddie (played by Rami Malek) pleads as the camera pans over his shoulder in a flash-forward to the Live Aid performance that crystalized Queen’s place among the world’s greatest rockers.
The frontman biopic, in theaters November 2, far from ignores the singer’s alleged bisexuality, as feared it might when the first trailer was released this spring. (While Mercury was known to have relationships with both men and women, he strongly resisted commenting publicly on his private life.) But director Bryan Singer’s characterization of Mercury’s sexuality has little, if anything, to do with sex. In fact, there is not a single sex scene in the film’s drawn-out runtime — a startling omission given Mercury’s storied sexual appetite, and even despite the movie’s PG-13 rating. (Plus, this is supposed to be about rock ’n’ roll, remember?)
Rather, Rhapsody seizes on its protagonist’s sexuality as the root of a dual and destructive nature; a pivot around which to construct its narrative of competing, and ultimately irreconcilable, desires. Singer casts Mercury’s psychosexual imagination as a tug-of-war between convention and perversion, love and lust, security and dissolution. Such representation isn’t just cliche and dangerously reductive in its vilification of homosexual desire and implicit invalidation of bisexual identity. It also renders a flesh-and-blood pioneer of genderqueer glam rock with a richly erotic psyche as a hollow and false totem of the perils of fame.
Any film about a queer celebrity, set even in the recent past, has an obligation to contextualize how a star's queerness was expressed and received during less tolerant times. But it’s not Bohemian Rhapsody’s historical context that demonizes Mercury’s same-sex attraction — it’s the camera itself.
Mercury’s conservative Parsi-Indian background and the rock scene’s heteronormative fan appeal were doubly stacked against him. But Bohemian Rhapsody is only mildly concerned with potential fallout from mom and dad (played by Meneka Das and Ace Bhatti) — stereotypes of South Asian immigrant parents if I’ve ever seen them. They wring their hands when their son abandons his birth name, Farrokh Bulsara, to fully adopt his stage moniker. Mr. Bulsara is briefly shown reading tabloid headlines about his son’s backroom dalliances with men, and keeping the paper from Freddie’s mother. A resolutory scene that finds them quietly accepting Jim Hutton (Aaron McCusker), who would go on to be Mercury’s lifelong partner, as a “friend” Freddie brings home for tea is so pat as to feel absurd.
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📸: Alex Bailey