Freddie Hated Communism

thomasquinn 32989 wrote:

Freddie was neither a conservative nor a progressive, not a radical or a reactionary, he was politically uninterested.

You can't possibly know he wasn't a conservative.

His name wasn't Frederickanald Sheringtonville-Mercury

Negative Creep wrote:

thomasquinn 32989 wrote:

Freddie was neither a conservative nor a progressive, not a radical or a reactionary, he was politically uninterested.

You can't possibly know he wasn't a conservative.

Yeah, I agree. To me, he seemed to lean more conservative, which isn’t a bad thing. And I understand that he didn’t vote or wasn’t interested in politics but he was well informed about things happening around him. Just my opinion and observations.

Negative Creep wrote:

thomasquinn 32989 wrote:

Freddie was neither a conservative nor a progressive, not a radical or a reactionary, he was politically uninterested.

You can't possibly know he wasn't a conservative.

I can know for a fact that he didn't know much about politics and didn't care - which you would see is the point I made, if you'd bother to read the punchline and not just the lead-up.

I can also know for a fact that, in an age when homosexuality was still treated as a shameful abomination that many felt ought to be a criminal offense, publicly affecting conservative sympathies was a common approach taken by many more-or-less-secretely homosexual celebrities to help in plausible deniability (the Conservative party was *very much* anti-gay).

There is nothing in Freddie Mercury's public statements, behaviour, reliable documentation about his (private) life that in any way suggests he ever held seriously considered political views of any kind, and there is good reason to consider statements he made in the vein of "I'm a conservative" in exactly the same light as such remarks as "I'm just a musical prostitute" and calling his own songs "disposable pop" - as purely ornamental statements that did not in any way reflect his real views, but sounded good at the time.