Freddie Mercury: Out on Stage, Brown in the Closet

By Janaki Challa 

Take everything you know and imagine about Freddie Mercury: the iconic British rock star, the philandering partier, the serial maker of testosteroned-anthems, and flip it around to something less familiar: Farrokh Bulsara, a demure, bucktoothed Indian boy in a Bombay boarding school, listening to Lata Mangeshkar, playing cricket.

Curiously enough, the one thing Freddie Mercury was never asked, nor spoke openly about, was his Indianness.   

Queen band member Roger Taylor said in the documentary “A Kind of Magic” that “[Freddie] did play it down a bit (being Indian). I think it was because he felt people wouldn’t equate being Indian with rock and roll.” Why was rock n’ roll loathe to claim an Indian and why have Indians been loathe to claim this rock icon? Was it because he was queer – in every sense of the word? Was it because Mercury himself downplayed his ethnicity?

Freddie did not spend his childhood the way one would imagine a British rock star from the boondocks would have spent his youth. His cultural upbringing was perhaps more similar to that of South Asian diasporic youth than suburban British kids. He did not walk the sodden London streets squatting in industrial buildings at 15, he did not eat bangers and mash for brunch (until later, anyway), he did not have a fully British accent when he was ten. Nor, for that matter, was his name “Freddie.”

Young Farrokh Bulsara in Bombay

Farrokh Bulsara was born in Zanzibar, Tanzania to Indian Parsi parents. Parsis are observers of the ancient religion of Zoroastianism. They are a miniscule Persian ethnic group who migrated to the subcontinent thousands of years ago during the spread of Islam in Persia. Farrokh Bulsara, like most Parsis, spoke Gujrati, and according to his mother, “loved dal and rice.” He grew up on the tiny streets of the East African coast. At ten he went to St. Peter’s, a boarding school in Bombay. One of his biggest musical influences was Lata Mangeshkar, and hence he probably grew up watching Bollywood films.  He probably had same issues on his mind we harp on and on about: identity, alienation, reconciling multiple worlds. But unlike us, he was not in ample company during his time.

Freddie experienced and embraced oddity early on. When he was sent off to Bombay at ten years old, where he became the outsider—a newcomer from the Zanzibarian coast who did not grow up in the same cultural mileu as his classmates. Peter Patrao, his old math teacher once said, “he was a fairly nondescript boy with buckteeth. The children would call him Buckie, which he hated, and that might be how he came up with the name Freddie.” At the age of seventeen, when he moved to England, his Indian English probably wasn’t the most vogue accent in town—it was frequently noted he was ridiculed for it. There wasn’t a socio-cultural category available to Freddie during his time—his foray into music happened only a short while after India’s independence from the British Raj, and racist Victorian sentiments on ethnicity and sexuality still persisted. That, and never before was there a flamboyant, Indian-East African- Parsi- gay- rock-opera star. 

Maybe the question is not only why he wanted “hide” his Indianness, but also why he wanted to pass off as a European—or if he cared about any of these identifying categories at all. Of course, it is not necessary to address one’s cultural background in their art—but Freddie never even disclosed biographical details of his past in his few recorded interviews.  Did he want to assimilate in the British world? Did he ever assimilate? Did he feel always alien no matter which culture he found himself in? Was he stuck between worlds—or liberated from all?

There is also the angle of the Indian world—and the Parsi community—who, similar to Freddie’s still Victorian social climate in Britain— were steeped in puritanical dogma and traditional beliefs. It was no surprise that even Indians did not approve of his lifestyle, of brazen flamboyance from a man of their community, and the profession itself.  His superlative art, his prodigious melodies, and haunting ballads are sometimes said to hide elements of his frustration with this.

There were no Indian rock stars in England, sure. But there were also no Indian rock stars in India. Or Tanzania.  Let alone gay, Indian, Parsi, third-culture-kid rock stars in either India, England, or Tanzania.

Freddie could not refer to any identity or trajectory other than his own. It is clear from interviews with his family and friends that he was not self-hating, not the type to try hard to be “white-washed.” His silence or dismissal about his cultural background—and one so formative and dramatically different than British life at that—can be interpreted as a political and social symptom of his time:

Freddie lived in the same Britain that has given the world its Victorian feelings about desire, sex and gender. Perhaps he rejected British Victorian taste at the same time he rejected his Indian Africaness. Even American liberal Lester Bangs was made uncomfortable by Mercury’s bare chest. What we call ‘queer’ now with feelings of empowerment, then, was still scary and threatening even on the music scene. Did he consider himself British? Or like Bowie who came after, an alien altogether?

Was identity, for Freddie, not British or Indian, African or English, but nothing at all related to country or creed? He let these identities have contradictions and multiple definitions, especially in songs like Bohemian Rhapsody, or Mustapha, where nothing even makes linguistic sense. Perhaps his embrace of neologism hinted at his disdain for categories. Perhaps his music manifested his apathy towards coherence, and labels.

But this is the Freddie we all know: Take, for example, September 1978—his prime. He was handsome, with an angular though slightly bovine jaw, and vaguely ethnic features. Even as someone unfortunate enough to have never witnessed his performative tenacity in real life, the visual archives of Freddie Mercury make certain things apparent: he was magical, soft-spoken, and—to complicate and contribute to his paradoxical bustle—clear that he was the toughest, coolest queen the world had ever seen, whose work, as effeminate and genderbending as it was, is still considered pretty manly today. V.S. Naipaul once said: “write every book as though it is your last.” Freddie, with vatic intuition, took a page out of that book, and sang every song with the same sentiment. It is universally agreed upon—I think—that it is seldom one finds artists who exalt both abandon and irony as debonairly as he.

Despite the fact that he seemed to dismiss categories, reject a slew of social norms, he was ironically, a creature of caricature, of extremity, and high-Victorian causticity: “There’s no half measures with me,” Freddie said in one of his last interviews, unintentionally referencing an apt musical notation. From the dramatic flippancy of his costumes, to his 8-octave baritone perusing vocal extremes with relative abandon, to the fact that he—without doubt, and to the agreement of nearly everyone who lived in his era—defined what it meant to “party like a rock star, “  Freddie was not one for subtlety when it came to his artistic tastes.

And it is also possible that Freddie was not “stuck” in multiple worlds—though he was rejected from most— but liberated. And maybe he had the right idea about  culture—that he was not Indian, Zoroastrian, British, or Zanzibarian—but quite simply, he was all that became of his passion: just rock ‘n’ roll.

*In honor and remembrance of Freddie Mercury, who will always be my Killer Queen, for his 66th birthday on September 5th, 2012.*