Music has been a part of my life for as long as I can remember. From my earliest memories of riding in the back of my father's beloved early '70s Pontiac Lemans with BigD 103 (America's First FM!) blaring, to my brother's pre-teen obsession with Billy Joel and my mother's insistence on ambient Celtic music during Christmas, music has been thankfully flooding my eardrums.
This post, however, is about Queen. Queen taught my eight-year old self about queerness, and throughout the years about musical drama, about fuck-yeah-you-can-have-terrible-teeth-and-be-sexy, about seriously shredding it, about you-can-never-wear-too-many-sequins, and about knowing yourself and not giving a shit what others think.
Okay, so maybe I'm giving Freddie a whole helluva lot of credit here, but I will say this: I don't trust people who don't like Queen. All the same, I'm not joking when I say Queen taught me about what it means to be queer.
My dad gave my brother Classic Queen (1992) on cassette (hey we're old!) that he played on a loop for, well, years. Who could blame him?! I remember looking at the band in the flyleaf and wondering why the hell anyone (Freddie) would wear an electric blue silk shirt with cats all over it, but that was beside the point. (Mind you, this is only my recollection of his outfit, I may be mistaken.) It wasn't just because I listened to the album non-stop without any control over it (our bedrooms shared a wall. If you'd like me to recite all of "We Didn't Start The Fire" I can do that, too) that it is so ingrained in my memory. It's because Queen truly changed my appreciation of music.
Sure, I had listened to The Beatles since, well, birth, and had passing familiarity with The Who and The Kinks and even Frankie Valley. I liked music. I loved Queen. Between the two of us, my brother and I destroyed the cassette of Classic Queen. I mean destroyed. We listened to it so often that the tape stretched and distorted. We paused, fast-forwarded, rewound and otherwise mangled the damn thing from over-use. I wonder if it's still around here somewhere, long ago replaced by a now very scratched CD...
I was moved by the music. It made me want to dance like a maniac (and at eight, you are 100% allowed to dance like a maniac), it made me cry and laugh and hurt and can't wait to fall in love. And therein lies my discovery - my understanding - of queerness.
My brother had told me that Freddie Mercury was gay. He then had to explain what gay was. While certainly not upset by the information, I was thoroughly confused. I thought, as many children who are raised by heterosexual parents, that love is one of those very restricted things. Restricted in the sense that certain criteria had to be met before love was achieved; as if it were some sort of algorithm. Hey, I was eight. I loved my family, I loved my pets, I loved Jem and the Holograms (perhaps a little too much, but once you're a Jem girl, you're never the same! Actually, I preferred her arch enemies, the Misfits, but whatever), and I loved QUEEN. It didn't much understand love outside of these narrow contexts.
I was in the car with my mom and had pushed play on - what else - Classic Queen that was in the tape deck. Having recently been informed about this gay stuff, when "Just One Year of Love" came on, I asked my mother what is was like to be gay and how that love compared to "regular" love. (What? Moms know everything.) I think I surprised her with the question, I mean, a trip to the town pool with your eight year old doesn't usually include conversations about sexuality as far as I can gather.
My mom just looked at me, an expression of mild surprise (okay, her eyebrows were attempting to become one with her hairline) across her face. She just said, "Love isn't something that is the same for everyone. Two men or two women can love each other just like a man and woman." (Side note: the physics of love were not discussed. I remained naive to those for quite a few more years, and by then, it was a different story.)
I chewed on that for about three and a half seconds before saying, "Oh, okay." And that was it. Is there really anything else to say? No, except that Queen kicks ass.
Shortly after this, Wayne's World came out, and thanks to Mike Meyers, everyone was singing "Bohemian Rhapsody." I felt like the biggest bad-ass in the fourth grade when I already knew the song and everyone else was running amok abusing the word "bismillah" in their most offensive Freddie-inspired falsettos.
And we all know the arena-Queen, the "We Will Rock You/We Are The Champions" medley that is a sporting event staple. (Odd to think that of the few songs Americans actually enjoy during their sports, they were almost all written by Brits, who tend to prefer singing Gerry and the Pacemakers and such during their arena sports. That was almost entirely a non-sequitur, but I felt it was important to make the point.) This isn't the Queen that I know and love, however.
My Queen is singing "Don't Stop Me Now" and "Good Old Fashioned Lover Boy" at the top of my lungs in Tanya's car on the way to pick up her friend in Vermont. The two of us dancing as best we could while still buckled into her Dodge Neon., murdering Freddie's stellar singing with our own adrenaline-fueled ridiculousness, totally high on the music and life and maybe the fumes form the car.
My Queen is realizing that the best part of the entire Highlander film is "Who Wants To Live Forever" (honestly, a Spanish ghost with a Scottish accent? WTF?) and Queen's other contributions to the series.
My Queen is being told in no uncertain terms that "Fat Bottomed Girls" are as sexy, if not more so, than any skinny supermodel. It's thinking that I should be an international assassin or spy, not because of James Bond, but because of "Killer Queen."
It's listening to "Breakthru" until I laughed myself to tears after a friend's death.
It's singing "Khashoggi's Ship" or "A Kind of Magic" into a hairbrush in the bathroom in my underwear at least a few times a year for my entire Queen-filled life ("Who said that my party was all over?"). It's knowing arena-rock at its best, and feeling like Queen was playing just for me in some of my worst moments. It's understanding that Freddie Mercury will forever be the only man I think acceptable in a mustache.
Sure, there are other bands I love as much for various reasons, but there's nothing like turning up the self-aware, silly, excitable, operatic, sweeping, shredding, soaring music of Queen. It can change my entire day from absolute shit to totally survivable and maybe even enjoyable. It can elicit laughter and tears, stinging nostalgia and deep fear. And even as I write this, I seem to be falling in love with Queen all over again.
P.S. Happy birthday, Brian May.
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