Cabaret would go on to have a profound effect on Freddie, firstly as a young man when he was discovering, and finding himself attracted to, the themes of homosexuality. And, watching the film repeatedly throughout his later life, other themes contained within it would become increasingly relevant and apparent: the futility of false dreams, decadence, loneliness, mortality and the centrality of truth. This is a classical Hollywood musical drawing from the traditions of theatre and literature, arenas that were attractive to Freddie, ones that he already felt a part of. The film’s style alternates between naturalism and non-naturalism, drawing on a wide range of musical influences, each one, again, appealing to Freddie’s broad spectrum of interests and his innate cultural curiosity. Given the decadence of the film, its broad cultural canvas, the themes of sexual orientation and the fact that Cabaret not only allows us to share the lives of the main characters but also places us in the audience, it is easy to see now how much it influenced Freddie on many different levels while at the same time providing him with confidence that he should embrace who he was at that moment in time and be comfortable with the decisions he was making about himself, his present and his future.
Just over a year later, and to Freddie’s utter delight, The Rocky Horror Show landed in London and in it we can see its cross-dressing elements (just one more example in a long tradition of boys playing girls, from Shakespeare’s original plays to men playing women in British pantomime to the later androgyny of British glam rockers, which would soon enough list Freddie Mercury among their members). In the musical, Freddie related to Rocky’s underlying condemnation of sexual puritanicalism and hypocrisy, something that makes the show still relevant to this day.
At the time of its release The Rocky Horror Show was a revelation. Gay men and women were experiencing a tiny degree of genuine sexual freedom for the first time. Finally, they could meet in public, could date (relatively) openly, and could see themselves represented positively in movies and books for the first time and represented as attractive, sexual, sexy people. Cabaret was one of the first films, along with The Rocky Horror Show, to portray gay men and women as handsome, alluring and visually stunning. With all of this sudden visibility, they were no longer required to conceal their sexual identity and live their lives in the closet, although many still did, or had to, as Freddie would for the rest of his life. But that aside, Freddie, like so many creatives, would be swept up by the newfound atmosphere of potential change and, dare anyone think so far ahead, perhaps even acceptance. Their reaction to this freedom was to, naturally, go crazy.
Over the coming decades The Rocky Horror Show would take on a new and different meaning, poignant and sad, but that still lay ahead. In 1973 who could possibly have known what was to come, what the price of sexual freedom would cost?
While all this was happening in the world of cinema and theatre, pop music, too, embraced androgyny through the appearance of glam rock. The first tentacles of glam rock touched culture in 1971 with T. Rex and their single ‘Bang A Gong (Get It On)’ but, in truth, it had been forming in the performances and personality of Mick Jagger through the second half of the 1960s in his video performances, dressed up as a nurse or Oscar Wilde, and in his song-writing (‘Honky Tonk Women’ has been commented on as being about a drag queen). Combining this with his unusual look, that he even carried into his acting in films such as Nicolas Roeg’s Performance (1970), it’s easy to see why Steven Simels wrote of Jagger: ‘Hipless and emaciated, possessing lips of such astonishing lasciviousness, that when you put him on stage he resembles nothing so much as some weird mixture of both human sex organs’.5
Suddenly, at the beginning of the 1970s, thanks to cultural icons such as Mick Jagger, androgyny was not only accepted but was starting to become encouraged. Seventy-five years previously, in the late-1890s, the very term ‘androgene’ had meant a type of male homosexual who perhaps also referred to himself as a ‘female impersonator’. Now it was back in fashion. As Marjorie Garber writes: ‘The 1960s and 1970s, like the 1890s of Oscar Wilde and Aubrey Beardsley, demonstrated once again that androgyny – at least the “bad” androgyny, the bad-boy or bad-girl androgyny – could be sexy. It was exciting in part because it was a violation of one’s parents’ certainties about gender and gender roles and in part because reading – the interpretation of signs – is always exciting. It was exciting, in other words, because it was uncertain. It connoted risk.’6
This androgyny, combined with the philosophy of artist Andy Warhol that anyone could be a star if they looked like one, ushered in the new fashion of glam rock and this, in turn, would draw Freddie in. All the roads, across the shifting social and cultural decades, have led us here
Glam rock, in its very first classic incarnation in the UK, arose from a number of distinct musical trends: in particular the love for retro 1950s three-chord rock’n’roll, a general androgyny unleashed by the culture wars of that same time period, and the media and technology from the time itself and of the future. Colour television was introduced. Pop in the 1960s was black and white, but burst into colour in British homes in the 1970s when you could hire a colour TV set for the new colour broadcasts. Suddenly pop was colourful, glittering and glamorous. Shining as a genre from 1972 to 1975, the typical UK glam rock song, therefore, was loud, stomping, simple and flamboyant, with big guitar riffs and repeated chants. The typical glam song of the time also featured heavy tribal beats (sometime two drummers would play on one track) and a lead vocal that blurred at least some gender distinctions. This fitted precisely with the ideas that Freddie had been forming throughout his adolescent years; all those lyrics and musical concepts he had scribbled down in his bedroom that his mother had been warned about discarding from under his pillow.
Then, in 1972, in the midst of the rise of glam rock, David Bowie created his persona Ziggy Stardust and instantly become the talk of the rock world. And no one seemed to mind, or see, the overtly homosexual overtones. Bowie was a defining cultural personality of the early 1970s, not merely because of his shifting sexuality, but because his emphasis on image, theatricality and pastiche, as well as the narcissism of his stage persona, seemed characteristic of the era. He set his own style with flamboyant colours and clothes, and it must have suddenly seemed to Freddie that anything was possible. Philip Auslander expands upon gender constructs and identity formations in his summation on the performative world of glam. He states: ‘The demand for the freedom to explore and construct one’s identity, in terms of gender, sexuality, or any other terms, is glam rock’s most important legacy.’7
For Freddie, glam rock was a vehicle through which he could allude to his homosexuality without having to commit affirmatively or pronounce declaratively his preference towards men. He used Queen and then creative works as a window of opportunity to liberate himself publicly through sexual innuendo and allusion.
Freddie stated: ‘I remember back in an interview where I said, “I play on the bisexual thing.” Of course I play on it. It’s simply a matter of wherever my mood takes me. If people ask me if I’m gay, I tell them it’s up to them to find out.’8
Singer Marc Almond recalls well the era in the 1970s after Bowie and Marc Bolan of T. Rex embraced glam rock and hid behind androgyny to conceal or allude to sexual preferences: ‘After Bowie and Bolan it was OK to flirt with androgyny. It didn’t strike me then that Freddie