Mark Mason

Straight talking | 11 August 2016

Freddie Mercury, Elton John, Larry Grayson? Just flamboyant, surely?

Thirty years ago this week, Queen performed what would turn out to be their last gig, at Knebworth. Their penultimate concert, at Wembley, was shown on Channel 4. I recorded it, and became obsessed. Time after time I watched-Freddie Mercury prance on to the stage sporting a moustache you could have swept a factory floor with. I watched him simulate the act of self-love with his famous sawn-off mic stand. I watched him preen, pout and posture, shaking his backside at the crowd, reappearing at the end dressed as the Queen. The previous year I’d watched him at Live Aid wearing a skimpy white vest and a leather armband studded with metal. Not once did it occur to me that-Freddie Mercury was gay.

Those of you born since then-probably won’t believe that. Twentysomethings just don’t understand how anyone older than them can not have been aware of gay-culture. But we weren’t. Plenty has been written by gay people about what it was like growing up back then, having to hide their true nature. But the under-reported corollary was that the rest of us didn’t know what was being hidden.

I was born in 1971, just four years after homosexuality was decriminalised in England and Wales. I would be nine before it was legal in Scotland, 11 in Northern Ireland. Looking back at 15 year-old me, it’s incredible that I could have been so unobservant about the Freddie I adored. The band was called Queen, for God’s sake. But I promise you that’s how it was. Things had been the same in 1982, when Culture Club made their first appearance on Top of the Pops. At school the next day the smart kids delighted in telling the rest of us that the lead singer was actually a man, but I don’t think even they thought about Boy George being gay.

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