Beautiful line, and so very true. Thank you for this!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KX2BQM0D01M&feature=youtu.be

Have some ear candy:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AnGaEk0rZdU

When I was 20 working as a bartender at a golf club I found an 8-track of the album “The Game”, took it home and was Sooo impressed by it I became a dedicated fan. On that album was the tour de force “Rock It – Prime Jive” which was easily one of the top five songs Queen had ever done. I couldn’t believe they didn’t release that as a single from the album rather than the god-awful “Another one bites the dust”.

I met a guy who, it turned out, was the road manager for Queen, and they were in San Francisco for a concert. He was quite taken with me. I ended up spending the night with him at the fairmont. We had a canopied bed in a room 1/2the size of my current home. We had an order-what-you-want-it’s-on-Freddy breakfast in bed with a servitor (the only word for it) to make sure we were quite happy.

That night, I rejoined my friend. We were in a limousine with Freddy and some leather Daddy with him, because that’s what he liked, and we went to visit several south of market Bars. I wanted to talk to Freddy, because I LOOOOOOOOOOVED Queen, but he was very taciturn, possibly because I was there with Road Manager, probably because Leather daddy wasn’t turning out quite as he had hoped.

Road manager and I decided that we would have more fun back at the fairmont.

Ah, youth.

I was a freshman, in the drama club, natch, and I remember performing in a student production and BR seemed to be always playing in the backstage and dressing areas. It sort of became a de-facto sound track to that school year. (Much like “Paradise By The Dashboard Light” became a soundtrack—another over-the-top set piece written by a gay composer.)

And I remember everyone not being entirely sure what to make of “Bohemian Rhapsody”. I grew up in one of the more progressive suburbs of New Jersey, but still —was that a chick or a dude singing? What’s with that voice? And then when Queen started to show up on some of those late night rock concert shows and you had the visual to go with the sound—it didn’t necessarily clear the air. They were sort of a guilty pleasure for many of us. I bought “A Day At The Races” and would play it on the family stereo. I recall my mother inquiring as to who was it I was listening to and answering “Queen” and watching her eyebrows arch.

By the time I moved on to college they had become a mainstay of rock radio, MTV had launched and and it became pretty obvious the Mercury was in his own way coming out—that leather outfit from “Crazy Little Thing Called Love”. And the good thing was that it didn’t seem to matter to many people at that point. Freddie definitely blazed some trails.

I don’t even know when and how their music made its way to my side of the Iron Curtain. I don’t even know if it was before or after the fall of the communist regime in Bulgaria (it started on 10 November 1989, but it took a little time for the whole economic and social structure to collapse, so I think of 1990 as the first post-communist year).

We were so naive here that we didn’t notice anything – or at least the general straight population didn’t notice anything. We thought of the clip of I Want to Break Free as “just silly fun” and the rest seems to us… just somehow eccentric.

I remember that it was written in some newspaper here that he was “bisexual” – there was already enough freedom of speech for that in 1991. I think that was my first encounter with the concept of bisexuality. It didn’t matter as I was mourning the singer I’d barely learned to like, at a time when music meant an awful lot to me. I was too grieved to experience a culture shock. It never occurred to me later to somehow try to find out if he was really bisexual, or full-on gay. It just wasn’t important for me in any way.

It’s amazing how different my perspective was.