Something you don’t get a sense of from Bohemian Rhapsody, the 2018 Freddie Mercury biopic for middle-age heterosexuals who didn’t figure out that its subject was queer until he died of AIDS-related bronchopneumonia, is how good he must have been at fucking. In fact, it would prefer you to not dwell on the fact that Mercury fucked at all, cutting away from scenes in leather bars, scenes where he is drawn away from a phone call with his fiance by a trucker he’s interested in sucking off, scenes where the rest of Queen stand in the periphery somewhat alarmed that there are more queer people in a room than straight people, and scenes where his eventual relationship with partner Jim Hutton are reduced to chaste handholding and one or two significant looks.
Some of this is bad directing, some of this is bad editing, some of this is the way in which biopics, in condensing lives into two hour narratives, need to smash things together, but the Freddie Mercury who fucks is almost entirely absent from the movie about his life, tucked away in a scene where, in promoting the 1982 album Hot Space, he snaps at a reporter and heads off to a mansion to do a ton of coke off-screen with the film’s gay villain and several of his nameless gay associates. Hot Space is my favorite Queen album, and it’s the one the surviving members of the band almost entirely disavow. They hated that it was a departure from the guitar epics they were known for, that its rhythm was more disco than anything else, that the dominant instrument is the synthesizer. While I’d concede that the back half of the record falls apart in trying to fulfill the artistic proclivities of the other members of Queen (rescued by “Under Pressure,” which wasn’t recorded for the album, though it certainly influenced the direction of Hot Space), the first four songs are a compelling argument for disco as a genre Queen should have embraced, rather than rejecting.
“Body Language,” the last song of that sequence, is so simple that, without Mercury’s voice, it’d feel like a guy figuring out a cool synth line only to drop it for something more important. It’s Mercury’s song, to the extent that Queen feels ancillary to what’s happening. Maybe that’s partly why the band derides Hot Space when the subject comes up (that and the fact that the record wasn’t a hit), but in placing Brian May, Roger Taylor and John Deacon in the background, the Freddie Mercury I am most taken by, with his Tom of Finland mustache and leather jacket, is in full force, demanding one to lie prostrate and worship him. Backed by his own moaning, it may be the only sexy Queen song in their catalog, the only one that embodies desire rather than poking fun at the concept. I want the Freddie Mercury that exists in this four minutes and 30 seconds, enough that I’m pretty sure I could endure the withering put-downs songs like “Back Chat” assure me such a tryst would portend. This is the Freddie Mercury who fucks.
Why he’s been left out of the narrative of Mercury’s life, I suspect, has to do with the universal appeal of Queen, which is to say their appeal to straight people, which is to say their run from Queen to The Game. Hot Space is the cutoff point, like Mercury’s persona went from eccentric to aggressively queer in a way that the audience who primarily buy Greatest Hits I and II are simply unequipped for. The only song from Hot Space that’s on any Queen compilation until “Las Palabras de Amor” sneaks onto 1999’s Greatest Hits III is “Under Pressure,” which, no shit, that’s the one with David Bowie.
You can’t pump your fist to “Body Language,” can’t sing along to it in a crowd unless you want to out yourself to the meatheads who are there to scream-sing “We Are the Champions.” I order Queen records every week at my job, and while I can order as many copies of Flash Gordon as I want, Hot Space has never been available. I’ve never seen a used copy of it, and I’ve been collecting records since I was 13.
E.T., the game that nearly sank the video game industry, was released in 1982, the same year as Hot Space. Infamously, hundreds of thousands of unsold copies of this game were buried in a New Mexico landfill and covered with cement. While Hot Space wound up in the cutout bin, its physical absence from my life feels like a conspiracy of the same magnitude, as if an embarrassed corporation dumped every copy they could in the middle of nowhere and reduced its existence to an urban legend. I ache for the loss of Hot Space, for the way “Body Language” will never exist on radio playlists but the song from A Night at the Opera about wanting to fuck a car does. Given how massive Queen is, Hot Space’s excision from their catalog isn’t exactly tragic, but it is unfortunate. It adds dimension to a band that’s been flattened out by constant airplay and an endless cycle of nostalgia tours. You can’t fill an arena with a song like “Body Language.” That’s okay—some songs are meant for the dark.
NEXT: A track-by-track review of Family Values Tour 1999, to mark its 20th anniversary.