![]() ![]() “By equating him with – and by equating him with his sister, to whom he’s not a celebrity, just a brother – he becomes a person who is in pain and who is shamed by society. He’s a celebrity whose only role is to entertain. And so, therefore, it doesn’t really matter when he dies, which is why immediately after he dies people start running foul headlines about his dirty, sordid life, because he’s not a man – he’s not a person who’s died in pain. “That’s just appalling, and it reduces him to not being a human being, to just being an entertainer. “There was this sense of, ‘Well, I wasn’t that happy with his promiscuity’ – whatever that means – or, ‘I didn’t really like the gay thing, but I forgave him because he entertained me,'” Dan explains. Looking back on that time, he thinks people used Freddie’s celebrity to dehumanise him in the weeks and months after his death – which is why they set out to dispel that fame and remind audiences that behind the performer was a man who was suffering, just like so many others who were facing AIDS-related illnesses. ![]() (Paul Natkin/WireImage)ĭan Hall is a producer on Freddie Mercury: The Final Act – and he was also a young gay man who was in the process of coming to terms with his own sexuality when the singer died in 1991. And then you hear Margaret Thatcher saying children are being taught they have an inalienable right to be gay as if that is a bad thing, and you realise it’s very much a product of its time.” Freddie Mercury of Queen on 9/19/80 in Chicago, Il. “There were headlines like, ‘I’d shoot my son if he had AIDS,’ and ones where they’d catch you unawares and you’d read it and think: ‘How did this manage to make it into print?’ I just can’t get my head around it. “But I find it unconscionable – one wonders how somebody writes into print some of the things that were said about Freddie after he died, and what the conversation is with oneself – what that journalist is saying to themselves as they write this stuff. “I’m essentially a human rights filmmaker, so I’m quite used to observing human rights abuses and I’ve documented many over the years,” James tells PinkNews. He was shocked to discover just how vicious the tabloids were in their assessment of the Queen frontman in the days and weeks after his death. James Rogan, director of Freddie Mercury: The Final Act, was just a child when Mercury died. Director of new Freddie Mercury documentary was horrified by salacious, cruel headlines about the singer Through interviews with Freddie’s bandmates, his sister, his friends, and with others who lived through the AIDS epidemic, Freddie Mercury: The Final Act gives a view of what it was like to live through a moment in time when being gay or bisexual turned you into a social pariah. The film tracks the final months of the singer’s life and culminates with the Freddie Mercury Tribute Concert, which was held on 20 April 1992 in Wembley Stadium. That fraught time is explored in the new BBC 2 documentary Freddie Mercury: The Final Act. ![]()
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