I was too young to appreciate Freddie Mercury’s cultural impact when he died in 1991. It would only be much later that I learnt how he had been unashamedly flamboyant both in person and on stage with Queen, and how honest he was about his love of cock. All I knew at the time of his death was that a prolific figure from one of the greatest rock band’s ever had come out as having Aids, and died a day later.
Along with those infamous iceberg and tombstone adverts of the late 1980s, Freddie’s death from an illness that at that time was a certain death sentence did a very good job of burying my sexuality. I found the smallest, tiniest crack in the wooden panelling at the very back of the closet and squeezed myself into it.