LAP wrote: In the 'Scandal" clip he looks very thin and his hair has also thinned out.
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His hair had already thinned out a few years before that, he just did his best to hide it. And look at Live Aid, it's a huge combed mess. Try freeze-framing the Breakthru video, there are two or three very brief frames where you can see how bald he was by then and it's much worse than you'll ever see it when he combed it neatly.
NickGreen · Member since
I understand he had a double crown so it might appear like a bald patch but it isn't, though just ageing can make it more apparent.
mooghead · Member since
Why would you resurrect this shit?
Oscar J · Member since
That's some hilarious thread digging right there, especially just to mention a receding hairline.
Invisible Woman · Member since
That he knew with certainty that was HIV positive would he go on a Magic tour and exhaust himself? I don't think so.
He definitely knew he was HIV positive prior to the start of the Magic Tour in June 1986.
Per Mary Austin at the 23 minute mark of the 2011 BBC interview (see above link).
"The last tour he knew and it was really hard work for him. Working through the emotional pain; Knowing it was going to be his last tour" ...
Invisible Woman · Member since
And because she so said it must be 100% true?
Mary actually don't say "he told me" or "he did a test and found out that he had HIV or AIDS".
And Jim?How he didn't notice anything?How could Freddie continue to live with him and act like nothing had happened,lie to him for months and hide such a serious thing and Jim do not suspect anything?
What kind of person was Freddie?
I don't believe in that.I don't idealize anyone, but this is just incomprehensible to me.
Sebastian · Member since
Not to mention memories do get blurry after a few decades. I think there's an interview somewhere where Brian gets wrong the date of his father's passing. His. Own. Beloved. Father. If it can happen to a clever Renaissance man with a PhD in astrophysics who eats and exercises properly and stays away from pernicious substances, it can also happen to anybody else, including Mary... to whom the exact timeline of the Magic Tour is probably not a big priority.
YAWN · Member since
Mary has two different versions of his coming out story, so I'd take her statements on when he became ill with a pinch of salt. She either just got the dates wrong, or she wants Freddie to sound like he deliberately withheld information about his HIV status to a partner. Hopefully it's just memory issues.
In a 2011 interview with the BBC, Freddie's longtime girlfriend Mary Austin revealed that he did know during the last tour that he had AIDS.
"The last tour, he knew, and it was really hard work for him, working through the emotional pain knowing that it was going to be his last tour. Watching him walk off stage, I feel pain now. Just that look of him walking off. I looked at him, he looked at me, and it's that knowing that this has to be the last one."
... It seems to me that Mary's specific and vivid memory of the end of the Magic Tour is extremely unlikely to be a false memory ...
kokax · Member since
there was an interesting discussion in this thread : http://www.queenzone.com/forums/1288222/freddie-mercurys-hiv-diagnosis-some-insight-1985-to-1987.aspx?page=1
KennyGXtrem · Member since
Here’s the thing, I think freddie would’ve gone on tour wether he new he was HIV positive or not because he told himself he wasn’t gonna care about the disease and he was just gonna keep living to the fullest
spiralstatic · Member since
It's morbid to think on these things & we can never know the answers, but I think it's only natural too that we should wonder.
All I've read from his friends is that once Freddie got into the gay scene, he loved it and took to it like a duck to water - entirely, doing everything with everyone, as wildly as could be.
My impression is therefore that it's most likely Freddie contracted HIV in the first period of time he was being wildly promiscuous and having a lot of unprotected sex with many different partners, quite likely in New York. I don't know exactly when that was, but I'm guessing the late '70's or if he was incredibly lucky, early '80's? Either way, sadly for him and for us and for everyone of that era, too early a date that he or anyone could possibly have known or escaped their future. Of course it could have been years later, but if he's having an awful lot of unprotected sex with different people in an area where HIV was spreading, logic seems to dictate to me that it's more likely he'd contract HIV sooner rather than later.
Sadly (or happily - if it was going to happen anyway, maybe oblivion is better?) at the time not a single person could have known of course that there was the slightest chance this could happen. I suppose the only positive is that they were spared the knowledge of the future and could enjoy freedom for those few years before AIDS was known about without fear?
As for diagnosis, all we can say is that I don't think Freddie was 100% certain (or at least 100% believed it) until 1987.
I suppose for me there's something about the notion that Freddie's sexual abandon continued till '85 that makes me personally wonder whether a part of him didn't fear from the time of the first whispers of AIDS were around *I might have this* & he might've thought if he had contracted HIV, he had most likely contracted it already, so why not just carry on having fun? Maybe a mixture of that and *It couldn't possibly happen to me*? My impression is that Freddie was an optimistic and positive person, so I can only hope that he suspected he was HIV positive as late as possible, for his sake and that once he knew he had AIDS, he believed there was still hope for as long as possible.
I think he must have had some idea his chances of being HIV positive were high early on when AIDS was known about, but by that point and at that time there was nothing he or anyone could do, so the best I can hope was that he was able to put any such worries out of his mind until they became unavoidable. Obviously there are other issues here involving did Freddie suspect he could be ill and continue to have unprotected sex.... and you know it's hard to even talk about that, because thinking "I might have this" is worlds apart from knowing you do, and at the time why would people want to know before anything could be done to help and when tests were so unreliable anyway. I mean, surely Freddie did infect many people unknowingly and I would hope he infected no-one knowingly. If we hope he discontinued having casual sex once truly suspecting he might be HIV positive, it ties in with him suspecting it in late '85-'86 (but surely Freddie wouldn't potentially infect Jim if he truly believed himself highly likely to be HIV positive?) In any case, what can you do - I suppose at the time everyone was taking risks of being infected &/or infecting someone else.
I know Jim Beach has spoken that Freddie didn't want to know for sure. And why would you want it proven to you at that time?
The thread [b]kokax[/b] linked is interesting as Freddie abruptly leaving Munich and returning to Garden Lodge and changing his lifestyle entirely in 1985 certainly speaks of a change in some way in his mind, if not necessarily in his knowledge of anything in relation to himself. Though he may not have known he was HIV positive until later, I would suspect he had that feeling inside himself where you know or at least fear something is deeply wrong, whether thats due to any tests or just knowing yourself at least in 1986, but fairly likely by the time he left Munich.
I think Freddie toured as long as he physically could and then continued to write and record music as long as he could. If he did suspect he was ill before The Magic tour, but felt he could still tour, I feel like it would only push him to tour all the more, knowing it could be his last. But that doesn't mean that he did know, or if he feared it at all, how small or definite that fear or knowledge was.
None of us can know the exact dates for anything else, but there must have been time when he suspected he was ill before anyone else knew and before knowing for certain himself. I personally can only hope his nature was such that he could genuinely tell himself there was no problem until forced to confront it.
spiralstatic · Member since
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Sweetandtenderhooligan · Member since
The spots on his arms during Live Aid look like sex bruises- they are perfect finger prints. So enough with this
