Things we learned about Freddie Mercury after he died

Freddie Mercury didn't just have a legendary singing voice, he also had a legendary strut and a legendary stage presence. He was so charismatic, he could make the legions of people who paid to see him sing do all the singing for him.

With that kind of reputation, you'd be forgiven for assuming that Freddie Mercury loved the spotlight. And though he did clearly adore some aspects of his fame, off stage he was an intensely private person — so private that there were elements of his life that even his own bandmates didn't understand. People like that usually remain mysteries until long after they've died, when the people who knew them finally feel compelled to bring some of those secrets to light.

That doesn't mean this is an exhaustive list of Freddie Mercury's secrets. A lot of those secrets almost certainly died with him or will die with the people who promised not to reveal them. But these are some of the secrets that came out after Freddie Mercury's tragically early death.

In the 1980s, HIV was a death sentence. So it really wasn't that uncommon for people to just not want to know if they had the virus. Now, there are certainly some major ethical problems with engaging in risky activity and then neglecting to get tested, but it's at least understandable why someone wouldn't want to face the possibility that they'd contracted a universally fatal disease.

According to journalist Tim Teeman, Mercury was one of those — he might have suspected, at some point, but he wasn't diagnosed until 1987, after Kaposi's sarcoma (a type of cancer) appeared on his shoulder. Longtime partner Jim Hutton said up until that point there'd been no real indication that Mercury was ill, even though Kaposi's sarcoma is an advanced symptom of AIDS.

Even after that, he was never open about his illness. He didn't even tell his family — after his sister spotted Kaposi's sarcoma on his foot and asked about it, he simply said, "You have to understand that what I have is terminal. I'm going to die." And that was all he would reveal.

Because Mercury was one of the first celebrity AIDS victims, people are often surprised to hear that he was once engaged to a woman and that she remained very close to him even after he started having relationships exclusively with men. (This aspect of the Bohemian Rhapsody movie was pretty accurate.) Even though they never married, Mercury often referred to Mary Austin as his wife, and in a 1985 interview he once said, "All my lovers asked me why they couldn't replace Mary, but it's simply impossible. I couldn't fall in love with a man the same way I did with Mary."

Mercury was involved with Jim Hutton for the seven years prior to his death, but he left the former hairdresser with a pittance compared to what he reportedly left to Mary Austin — she received the bulk of his estate, including his money, his mansion, and his recording royalties. And Austin wasn't exactly kind to Hutton after Mercury's death, either, because she kicked him out of the house shortly after the singer's passing. Don't feel too bad for the guy, though, he did all right. He took the £500,000 Mercury left him and used it to build a home in his native Ireland. He remained in Ireland until his death in 2010.

It's hard to believe that the guy who wrote the words "So you think you can stone me and spit in my eye" might have been anything but contentious in real life, but Mercury's onstage reputation did not follow him into his personal life or even into his relationship with his bandmates. In fact Mercury was really the more level-headed of the bunch, especially when it came to disagreements between the other members of Queen, which were evidently quite common.

Mercury once said the band "argued about everything — even the air that we breathe." Yet somehow the band persisted through it all, and according to the Hollywood Reporter, Mercury's bandmates said the front man was the guy who usually ended up keeping the peace. "It was normally Roger and I who were at opposite ends," Brian May recalled in 2007. "Everyone thinks that Freddie was difficult. Actually Freddie was great. He was a great diplomat."

Much has been made of Freddie Mercury's incredible "four octave" singing voice, which allowed him to reach the depths of "Somebody to Love" and the heights of "Under Pressure." His vocal range was so impressive that in 2016 it even inspired a team of European scientists. According to Scroll.in, Mercury always believed it was his teeth that gave his voice that special quality, which is why he never tried to have them corrected despite the fact that he was painfully self-conscious about them. But the 2016 study concluded that it wasn't his teeth but his vestibular folds.

If you have no idea what those are, neither does anyone else. In fact Mercury himself had probably never heard the phrase "vestibular folds," but he used them in a way most people don't.

The vestibular folds are a pair of membranes located just above the vocal cords, which are sometimes called "false vocal cords" because they're not typically used for making sound. Mercury could use his to create "subharmonic vibration," which is how he produced that growl he's famous for. As for his four octave singing voice, the team wasn't able to confirm or deny the phenomena, so that remains an unanswered question.

The HIV virus doesn't kill directly. It attacks the immune system, which makes it possible for secondary infections to move in. The diseases and infections that kill AIDS patients are often diseases and infections that don't bother healthy people — Kaposi's sarcoma, for example, which was Freddie Mercury's first symptom, is a cancer caused by the human herpes virus 8. Human herpes virus 8 won't cause symptoms in a person who has a healthy immune system.

That's what makes AIDS such an insidious virus — it's not a single disease, it's a lot of diseases, and the symptoms patients end up having are particular to the viruses, bacteria, fungal organisms, and other microbes that that individual patient is exposed to. 

Freddie Mercury had Kaposi's sarcomas, but as the disease progressed he developed other horrifying complications. In 2017 guitarist Brian May told the Sunday Times Magazine that one of Mercury's ugliest complications was in his foot. "Tragically, there was very little left of it," May said. "Once, he showed it to us at dinner. And he said, 'Oh, Brian, I'm sorry I've upset you by showing you that.'" Ultimately, though, it was pneumonia that killed the singer — a relatively common end for a very uncommon person.

Of all the pop stars you've heard of, both past and present, there probably aren't too many that you'd immediately peg as "that dude who wishes he could sing opera." But Freddie Mercury is definitely one of them (if not the only one of them). He called "Bohemian Rhapsody" a "mock opera," and though there's definitely some tongue-in-cheek stuff in it there's some pretty clear love for the form in there, too. And in case you still had doubts that the rock icon was also an opera fan, he even recorded a "classical crossover" album with operatic soprano Montserrat Caballe, which was released in 1988 under the title "Barcelona."

Mercury's mother said that, had he lived, he would have gone on to write rock opera. Granted, not traditional opera, exactly, though she also said that traditional opera was one of the forms he loved as a child. Of course moms always say stuff like that, so don't take her word for it — Mercury's long-time partner Jim Hutton once also said that he probably would have gone on to write opera or ballet scores. 

Mercury even ventured into that territory in life, once performing ballet at a London Coliseum charity gala. So you really can't pigeonhole the guy the way you can some other rock stars. He was definitely not a stereotype.

Freddie Mercury was friends with Michael Jackson, because of course he was, but as it turns out, Mercury was just too wild and crazy for Jackson's tastes. That's right, the guy who owned a chimpanzee, had dreams of building a giant robot replica of himself, and once tried to buy Marvel Comics so he could star in a Spider-Man movie thought Freddie Mercury was too wild and crazy to hang out with.

According to the Hollywood Reporter, Mercury and Jackson were planning to record several songs together, but they could never really find the time to do it. (It might have also had something to do with the fact that Jackson kept bringing his pet llama to recording sessions.) And then ultimately, the two stars had a falling-out "because the U.S. star objected to Mercury taking too much cocaine in his living room." And when someone is too wild for a guy like Michael Jackson … well, maybe we really don't know that much about Freddie Mercury after all.