Note: This is a series about my mental health journey and how specific experiences led to my diagnosis of clinical depression and anxiety. For the full context, please read Part 1, the letter to my bullies, Part 2, the letter to my school friends and Part 3 if you haven’t already.
Hey there, Freddie.
I don’t know if you can see me from wherever you are. Wherever it is, I hope you get to read this. You have made a difference in so many people’s lives. So bloody many. You have books, films, documentaries, monuments, and organisations created for you. For your undying legacy.
And yet in the case of most of the people whose lives you touched, very few know the real you. Hell, I am not sure if anyone truly knew or knows the real you. But whatever little the world and I know of you, we truly admire. I don’t think you will ever stop being loved.
So I am going to talk about what it is that makes you special to me. Why is it that I consider you my primary role model.
I knew you existed for the longest time, but it was in 2009 when my school’s musical, based on your work with Queen, utterly butchered one of your greatest works. I was drawn to the music you made with Queen. Simultaneously, I was drawn to you. I couldn’t put my finger on it at that time, but the truth is that you are the biggest queer icon who has influenced me.
It was all of you. The unabashed overbite (that you said you didn’t want to get fixed in the fear that it would mess with your singing), the outrageous costumes that made you a symbol for androgyny and everything camp, and the frank yet rare interviews you had with press throughout your life.
Your music is one of the things that saved my life at the time. It made me realise that I could let go of the life I was leading at the same time and adopt one that I actually wanted to live. Your persona made me realise that the possibility of being loved, no matter how ‘weird’ or ‘odd’ the world thought you were, existed. And to add to that, you taught me that anybody who didn’t love you could simply fuck off.
Over the last year or so, people have been talking about how you are portrayed in Bohemian Rhapsody, the biopic about you and your journey with Queen. Now, Rami Malek, the person who played you, has won the Oscar for it. Can you imagine it? An actor winning what is considered the highest honour in cinema, all for portraying you. I mean, people haven’t even won it for portraying Elvis, Ike and Tina, or Johnny Cash. It was all for you.
Truth be told, I wasn’t terribly impressed by the biopic. They got a lot of things wrong about your life and your history with Queen. I was sceptical of it last year itself, when I said that the biopic wouldn’t measure up to the other ways in which people have shared your story. Your closest friends, your family (your mother was utterly adorable, by the way) your bandmates, your managers, your collaborators, and your fans have all done you great justice (for the most part) by presenting you in the same way that you presented yourself.
But I welcomed it then and I welcome it now. I see it as a gateway for people who know nothing about you to fall in love with you (and maybe hate you a bit, because the film showed quite a few alleged instances where you were an asshole) and then discovered the better side of you; the real you.
The funniest thing about my admiration for you, to me at least, is the fact your life ended way before mine even began. You lived vicariously and happily and created a legacy for yourself even before my parents decided that they should procreate. And yet, I feel like as though as I know you a great deal. Not just because of your surviving associates, but because of what I saw of you in interviews, behind the scenes when recording and messing around during video shoots.
I saw your drive in making the people you cared about most happy in whatever way you possibly could. I saw your passion to create art, not just music, when you decided to perform with the Royal Ballet and especially with Montserrat Caballé, who I feel brought out something deep within you, waiting to come out. A true creative surge. I saw your deliberate yet careful confidence about how you shared stories from your life. One thing I do wonder about, however, is how proud you were to be Indian. You did change your birth name to Frederick Mercury and rarely mentioned in interviews that you were Indian.
By citizenship, you weren’t Indian. I think that you seemed exotically ambiguous enough to your fans in the ’70s and ’80s that it didn’t really occur to them that you could possibly be Indian. But you and me, Freddie, at the heart of it, we are both Indian and hella confused about our heritage at the same time. You studied in a rigid Catholic school in India during your formative years and were surrounded by Indian people. I studied in an Indian school outside India and was surrounded by Indians and people of other ethnicities. Over time, our stories reversed. You spent most of your adult life in a nation where Indians were quite a minority and I came back to the mothership. And the most relatable of it all? Both our parents had dwindling faith at certain points about what we would make of ourselves.
I think if I was alive back then, I would have tried to become friends with you. I don’t know if I would have succeeded, though. You, on the other hand, would have killed it even if you were alive now and built your legacy during this time. You would have been celebrated for being a person of colour influencing millions and being queer too while you were at it. Superwoman beat you to the punch for this century. Not for life, though. At the core of it, you are, in fact, the first queer personality of South Asian descent in the fucking world.
You saved me. You saved from myself, my low self-esteem, my inability to find things about myself worth being proud of, and the (sometimes) lack of people who understood me. But you understood me, without being there in person, through the way you were. You made me realise that I am queer and that I can be the best version of myself because of it and despite it. You even made me a better actor, even though you weren’t one yourself (not professionally, anyway).
If you hadn’t left this world because of a horrid virus that shouldn’t exist, I feel like you would have been campaigning for the rights of people who are HIV+and LGBTQ+. You’d be standing next to people like Magic Johnson for photographs and Lady Gaga while she clutched at her countless awards. You’d still be dressing outrageously and beautifully and abolishing the rampant ageism in the entertainment world. You would have your trademark moustache, except I am not sure what colour it would be. You would not just be pushing boundaries, you would be blowing them to smithereens before people even realised what the fuck was happening.
Most importantly, I know you’d still be making music. Music ran in your veins like blood. You created some of your best works just before you died. And you’d be happy to know that your wish has been fulfilled: you have never been boring. To me or to any of the people who love you. That word doesn’t exist for you, Mr. Farrokh Bulsara. The words that do exist for you are genius, visionary, and trendsetter. And you’d better believe it.
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