Freddie Mercury

Bad Gays

Huw Lemmey & Ben Miller

History

4.6 • 842 Ratings

🗓️ 8 February 2022

⏱️ 81 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

For a time, one of the world's most famous rock stars – singer of stadium rock anthems that still signify foot-stomping machismo – existed as an avatar of the most exuberant, feared, liberation-era forms of homosexuality: going from a 1970s long hair in skin-tight leotards cut to the navel to a Castro clone with a handlebar moustache who wore fisting T-shirts in his music videos. If the legacy of Mercury and his music often seems to smooth his work, and that of his band, Queen, into a sort of middle-aged, KISS FM everyday normality, here we lean into the contradictions of the charismatic man and the nuances of queer life in the 1970s and 1980s. ----more---- SOURCES John Harris, “The Sins of St Freddie,” The Guardian, January 14, 2005, sec. Music, https://www.theguardian.com/music/2005/jan/14/2 Jim Hutton and Tim Wapshott, Mercury and Me (London: Bloomsbury, 1995); Lesley-Ann Jones, Bohemian Rhapsody: The Definitive Biography of Freddie Mercury (London: Touchstone Press, 2012) Matt Richards and Mark Langthorne, Somebody to Love: The Life, Death and Legacy of Freddie Mercury (London: Weldon Owen, 2016) “Remembering Queen’s Infamous 1981 Tour of South America,” Remezcla (blog), accessed February 8, 2022, https://remezcla.com/features/music/we-remember-queens-infamous-tour-of-latin-america/ Our intro music is Arpeggia Colorix by Yann Terrien, downloaded from WFMU's Free Music Archive and distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License. Our outro music is by DJ Michaeloswell Graphicsdesigner.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello, everybody, and welcome to Bad Gaze, a podcast about evil and complicated
0:20.6	queers in history. My name is
0:22.2	Ben Miller. I'm a writer, researcher, and member of the board of the Shulis Museum in Berlin.
0:27.4	And my name's Hugh Lemmy. I'm a writer and author. And last week we talked about Franco
0:32.9	Zeparelli, an opera director who summed up all of the negative aspects of that wonderful term opera queen.
0:39.3	Who's this week's episode about Hugh?
0:40.7	Well, I'm going to paint you a picture, okay?
0:42.4	Imagine the scene, Ben.
0:44.3	It's February the 13th, 2022.
0:47.2	You've taken time off from your busy opera-going schedule to travel to Inglewood, California,
0:52.3	and to attend the event of the season, the NFL Super Bowl.
0:56.3	You have your beer hat on, and you're wearing the jersey of your favourite team, the Cincinnati Bengals.
1:02.1	The stadium is packed, the atmosphere of excitement and expectation palpable.
1:06.9	And over the loudspeaker, a beat starts.
1:09.6	Dum, dumch, dum, ch, dum, ch, dum, ch.
1:14.2	And that is all the crowd needs.
1:16.4	Before you know it, the entire stadium is stamping their feet and clapping their hands in time to the beat.
1:21.3	Everyone, absolutely everyone, knows the lyrics.
1:24.4	And then the impossible happens, against the odds, the Bengals romp home to victory against
1:29.4	their opponents, the Los Angeles Rams. And you can't believe it. You're on your feet amongst a crowd
1:34.3	of Bengals fans. Tears are filling your eyes. This might be the greatest moment of your life.
1:39.5	And then, across the loudspeakers, the same voice begins again to call out, this time singing a soft
	...

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