Freddie Mercury had a true love for one person in his life. Oh, he loved plenty of people. Freddie loved everyone, and there’s no shortage of people he had as lovers. But his one true love, even though he was gay, was a woman named Mary Austin. When they met, they were still young adults, and Mary herself was only 19. They were engaged for years, and Mary likely had the expectation of being Freddie’s bride at one point. She loved Freddie before the money and the success, and she loved him up to the very end when he was dying of AIDS. Freddie once said that “the only friend I’ve got is Mary, and I don’t want anybody else.” In later years, he said that many of his lovers couldn’t figure out why they couldn’t compete with Mary and why Freddie couldn’t love them as much. The simple fact was that Freddie Mercury was the type of human being to only give his heart away once in his lifetime, and he had already given his heart away.
After living together for some years, Freddie and Queen started to find success. Mary began to suspect he was cheating on her because he was out a lot. When she asked him about it, he confessed that he was having conflicting feelings about his sexuality and thought he might be “bisexual.” She told him she believed that he was gay. Shortly after that, Mary moved out of their apartment, breaking Freddie’s heart. But how can a woman go on in a relationship like this? There was nothing else for Mary to do but to leave and let Freddie live the life of his choosing because she loved him as much as he loved her. One of her most famous quotes, said in her own quiet voice, was, “His pain became my pain. His joy became my joy.” When Freddie died, he left the majority of his fortune to Mary, who he considered to be his common-law wife.
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Freddie wrote the beloved Queen ballad “Love of my Life” for Mary after she left him. Over the years, it became a sort of love song that Freddie would sing to his adoring fans, and they would sing right back to him. At nearly every Queen concert, they had this interchange. At a concert in Brazil in 2015, Queen lead guitarist Brian May put down his electric guitar and picked up an acoustic guitar. Then, he sat on a stool and started speaking to his audience. Brian says in Portuguese, “I want you to sing with me. We’re going to sing for Freddie.” And Brian May plus a stadium full of adoring fans sing a love song to the great Freddie Mercury.
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In the video below, you can see something you don’t get to see very often: Brian May’s vocal power. He’s always focused on the guitar, and though he sings, there is typically someone else serving as the primary singer, whether Freddie before his death or in recent years, Adam Lambert.
