![famous gay men with really high voice famous gay men with really high voice](https://static.stacker.com/s3fs-public/styles/slide_desktop/s3/00001305_5_0.png)
The movie reduces queer identity to a series of promiscuous sexual encounters, which it consistently frames as sordid, shameful, illicit, and corrupting. Yet Bohemian Rhapsody screenwriter Anthony McCarten, a two-time Oscar nominee, seems to have given zero thought to these issues. If film critics have sounded especially exasperated with this film, it’s because any screenwriter with even a passing interest in queer identity and an understanding of the history of queer cinematic erasure should have been able to avoid perpetuating that erasure.
![famous gay men with really high voice famous gay men with really high voice](https://compote.slate.com/images/20d15573-114e-4e98-b482-547c04ba23f4.jpeg)
Bohemian Rhapsody’s toxic depiction of queerness is subtle but pervasive - and completely avoidable And it’s worth discussing why, both because Hollywood should really be better at this by now and because so many of the problems the film has in depicting Mercury’s story are endemic not just to the film itself, but to the way society continues to view queer identity. It takes a hell of a lot of work to make a queerphobic film about one of the greatest queer icons in history, but even though Bohemian Rhapsody was sort-of directed by Bryan Singer, who himself is openly gay, the movie somehow retreads queerphobic stereotypes instead of giving us a fascinating, complex look at a real gay man. After all, it was his choice to live at the crossroads of mainstream culture and queer culture, to subvert the cultural exploitation of queerness by transcending it and embracing his personal and sexual power, that made him who he was.
![famous gay men with really high voice famous gay men with really high voice](https://www.rollingstone.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/rs-lgbtq-heros-1d765408-cdc5-44c5-995c-167f77e5bc6c.jpg)
It strips Mercury of a part of his identity that was as vital to his success as his four-octave vocal range. Bohemian Rhapsody is a movie that consciously tries to position a gay man at its center while strategically disengaging with the “gay” part as much as it can, flitting briefly over his emotional and sexual experiences and fixating on his platonic relationship with an ex-girlfriend instead. The result is far more hurtful than your average unconsciously homophobic film. (In reality, Mercury received his diagnosis in 1987.) What it really wants to be is a Queen concert, and what it really wants Freddie Mercury to be is a rock god instead of a real, queer human man. The film is no more conscious of Freddie Mercury’s reality than his Queen bandmates are in that scene, because it isn’t trying to be a biopic about Mercury’s life. The film almost portrays Mercury as a fully aware part of that exchange it almost makes a connection between the forced isolation of Mercury’s life and the marginalization of queer people at large.īut ultimately, it fails to do either. This moment is one of several in Bohemian Rhapsody that almost gives you a glimpse of the profound paradoxes of gay life before and during the AIDS crisis, when queer culture, subversive and life-embracing, built itself triumphantly at the edges of a society that refused to legitimize queer identity even as it gleefully exploited queer entertainers like Freddie Mercury. Freddie Mercury’s reality, in 1985, was one in which “ People just vanished, and everyone was in some kind of panic.” For Mercury, there was only one “it”: AIDS.īut the other members of Queen had no idea what he was talking about.
“It” has been stalking his community, stealing away people he loves, constantly reminding him of his mortality. “It” has been looming over Mercury’s life for years. Though Bohemian Rhapsody spends most of its runtime paying lip service to the idea that Queen is a sort of dysfunctional misfit family, in that moment, the distance between Mercury and his bandmates is undisguisable. It arrives at the end of the film - July 1985, in the film’s historically inaccurate timeline - when Mercury (Rami Malek) decides to tell the other members of Queen the truth about himself shortly before the biggest concert of their lives. The most telling moment in Bohemian Rhapsody, the Golden Globe-winning Queen biopic that occasionally stops singing to zoom in on its ostensible subject, Freddie Mercury, is almost certainly an accidental one.