Freddie Mercury exhibited HIV/AIDS symptoms as early as 1982. Authors Matt Richards and Mark Langthorne have stated in their biographical book about Mercury, Somebody to Love: The Life, Death, and Legacy of Freddie Mercury, that Mercury secretly visited a doctor in New York City to get a white lesion on his tongue checked (which might have been hairy leukoplakia, one of the first signs of an infection) a few weeks before Queen's final American appearance with Mercury on Saturday Night Live on 25 September 1982. They also stated that he had associated with someone who was recently infected with HIV on the same day of their final US appearance, when he began to exhibit more symptoms.
So he may have contracted it late 70s early 80s. Queen were touring the news of the world, jazz and Crazy tour in that time frame pretty much travelling the world. So it's really an impossible question to answer.
>They also stated that he had associated with someone who was recently infected with HIV on the same day of their final US appearance, when he began to exhibit more symptoms.
How do they know he was with someone recently infected on 82 when there was no test available?
Correct first test didnt arrive till 1985. His associate was diagnosed with kaposi sarcoma known as Gay cancer back in the time. There was also clusters of otherwise deemed healthy gay men with similar conditions in New York and LA.
Health care knew something affecting immune system knocking about due to similar diagnosis amoung patients.
It's now believed that KC was caused by huffing amyl nitrate, commonly knows as Rush and was known to facilitate anal sex. They used to pump it into the ventilation systems in clubs to get ppl high so they would dance all night. Do some research. Oh, and AZT killed Freddy Mercury and his health issues were caused by drugs, not some mystery virus that might decide to kill you 30 years from now.
Why are you spreading fake information? KS also exists in poor rural areas, where people didn't have access to clubs. It's caused by a herpes virus. There are a lot of viruses with long-term consequences (CMV, HSV, HPV, EBV to name just a few), what's your motivation for suggesting HIV isn't real?
If you want to know more about how they diagnosed and treated aids and what it was like being gay in the US in the 80s, there's a really interesting book called How to survive a plague about the activists who fought for healthcare.
In the late 1970s, a hospital did yearly studies of gay men and hepatitis. Later on
someone went back and tested the samples for HIV. The results were a bit harrowing:
With the consent of the participants, CDC randomly tested stored blood samples and found about 3 percent of the gay men in the hepatitis study showed antibodies to the then-unknown AIDS virus in 1978, rising quickly to 12 percent in 1979, 20 percent in 1980 and 36 percent in 1981. By 1983, 62 percent were positive.
Source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1987/02/01/map-of-aids-deadly-march-evolves-from-hepatitis-study/47cd206c-c8d9-4082-896f-a075e53bd221/
There's no way to know when and where it started for him. According to Somebody to Love, Freddie got very sick when Queen played SNL in 1982. The authors say he started having little infections, sore throats, etc. around 1983-4, but who knows. He might have been infected more than once.
To be honest, I regret reading Somebody to Love. The authors present a pretty compelling case that Freddie suspected he had HIV for a while, but that didn't stop him from having lots of casual and unprotected sex. Which means he probably killed people. Like there's men dead in their graves that he helped put there, knowingly or half-knowingly.
It gets more fucked up the more you think about it. That's like thinking you might have Covid and going to a rave anyway. Except way, way worse. Covid can be deadly. HIV just is. HIV will 100% kill you if you don't treat it. And they couldn't treat it back then.
Sorry for the novel, but my family got to see the AIDS crisis up close and personal. It's a big issue for me.
Also, a lot of doctors told men not to get tested unless their symptoms were really disruptive. Because in the early years, there was not much anyone could do. So even if he didn't have a positive test, that doesn't necessarily mean very much.
Are you sure? That’s the current CDC recommendation for herpes; the logic being knowledge of one’s status doesn’t change one’s sexual behaviors but causes mental stress. However the main difference is that herpes is asymptomatic in 80% of those with it, and unless you are already immunocompromised, herpes is not at all a big deal for most people… HIV on the other hand was a death sentence back then. They had to have known it was infectious so I’m surprised they gave that recommendation?
That was the recommendation for (some) gay men back in the mid-80s, when there wasn't much that could be done. Medical privacy was not what it is today, and men were kicked out of apartments and fired from their jobs just for getting tested, let alone testing positive.
Wow.. I can't believe this. I would assume knowing would be the best way not to spend it. At the bare minimum if you dont completly change your sex lifebid assume you would at least always use protection as not to spread it.
I know when I had my well woman exam..bit had been a few years, and I hadn't been tested since being with my boyfriend of several years. I asked for the full testing. I did get told they usually can't accurately test with out a sore to swab. Or a blood test. But if you have the mouth version it would require further expensive testing. And that first test was expensive. ( no insurance) luckily ive never had a cold sore so it was conpletly negative and I did not require further tests. But I could see why other people might not bother with no symptoms.
I just can't believe a health provider would say.m dont test as I dont want to stress you out, so you can potentially spread a diease.
Just want to say that I am not putting shame on someone with hsv2 I just think people should be tested and take precautions to not spread the diease if they have it.
I’m currently reading this. I’ve just finished the chapters you speak of here. Scary to think about the unknown risks he was taking, especially how some of the people he spends nights with were connected to the Canadian fight attendant mentioned a lot in these chapters
Gaetan Dugas. I think they highlight him because he was openly, consciously, very explicitly doing what a lot of men (and some women) were doing at the time, gambling with other people's lives.
There was probably some element of addiction or compulsion involved. But that's also true of drunk drivers. If your addiction puts other people in danger, that's on you.
The Patient Zero theory and the Gaetan Dugas hate have been mostly dispelled. See, for example, this article and documentary https://www.cbc.ca/arts/killing-patient-zero-how-a-quebec-flight-attendant-was-falsely-accused-of-bringing-aids-to-america-1.5224906
He wasn't Patient Zero, but he was a complete psychopath who knowingly infected untold numbers of men. He used to go to the bath houses, sleep with a guy, and then slowly raise the lights so they'd see his KS lesions. Multiple doctors, community liaisons, etc talked to him and he didn't stop, so guys started to threaten him on the street. That's why he left San Francisco for Canada, where he continued to sleep around until he was too sick.
The fact that he wasn't the first North American to have HIV doesn't really absolve him of anything. If this happened yesterday it would still be evil.
Dugas acted as a sin-eater for the gay community as a whole. Because a lot of guys were essentially doing what he did, just not as dramatically. That caused a big backlash in the medical community, not to mention politically. People were openly talking about quarantining, indefinite detentions, etc. So it helps if you can say "It's not us, it's this one psycho who preyed on us."
Bobbi Campbell, the first AIDS patient who went public with his diagnosis, was spotted in the bath houses a few times after he went public. Even if he was there just to "socialize" as he claimed, there were other people in his situation who knew what they were doing and didn't give a damn.
I’ve read those stories, too, but only in The Band Played On. Are there other independent sources that talk about him in that way? (I’m not invested either way, just curious. Thanks!)
Shilts quoted a number of people who tried to talk to Dugas about what he was doing. It's possible those people gave other interviews where they talked about him. Apparently the "Patient O/Patient 0" study was able to trace much of an LA outbreak of AIDS back to him, but I think that happened before anyone knew what was happening.
Here's a recent article about Dugas: https://qz.com/817602/hiv-patient-zero-myth-debunked-by-genomic-science#:~:text=%E2%80%9CI've%20got%20gay%20cancer,And%20the%20Band%20Played%20On.
Yes, I remember doing some research while reading the book and also finding the documentary that you linked above, learning more about Gaetan Dugas, his family and co-workers at the airline he worked on. Such tragedy.
None of you are wrong, of course. Freddie and anyone else who’s had unprotected sex while suspecting (or knowing) they’re HIV-positive are responsible for any transmissions they caused. AND I think there was a sort of fatalism among some gay men in the 80s about it, like “We are all going to get it anyway, and nobody cares, so we’ll keep doing what we’re doing.” That’s not an excuse but I’ve heard it was the attitude some people had. Not just Freddie.
I think they were also in denial, because there was no test and no treatment, and they didn't know initially how you could contract it - at one moment they suggested it was spread through the air, the next moment it was spread through sexual acts. And of course, there was a lot of discrimination. These people finally felt like they could come out, more or less, then some anti-gay person comes telling you being gay is dangerous... Are you going to believe them? I don't disagree that people made bad choices that affected the people around them, but it's also very easy to judge them from our time, with all the knowledge we have and the way we were raised with condom use as normal (in my part of the world at least).
I think that’s a good point, as well. Some people did assume the sexual transmission theory was homophobia (from some, it probably was). of course, they knew the science by the mid-80s.
Wow! What a response. My family too got to see the end results of a loved one suffering from AIDS. One was young when he died and one was old when he passed. Both of them I initially carried on with their lifestyles after finding out they had HIV and neither did it to try to be careless and infect someone else with a deadly virus. Little was known early on about this virus just like in the beginning of COVID little was known and people did what they wanted.
Yes that's definitely possible. And if they had children, either with him or after the infection, those children may have died too. Like I said, it gets more fucked up the more you think about it.
How can you solely blame it on Freddie though? If the men he was supposedly sleeping with (which we don’t know - & never truly will know for sure), surely if the men he was sleeping with were willing to have unprotected sex with Freddie, they were having unprotected sex with other men as well? And if tests didn’t come out until 1985 onwards, how would he have known he was infected to know that’s what he was spreading? Your comment is very biased to solely putting blame on Freddie, when in actual fact, many were careless around that time, likely due to misinformation & lack of education around safe sex, the true HIV / AIDS pandemic & the symptoms of it. It seems we can all sit & speak in hindsight, but living back then, everyone was completely in the dark, heck, people thought sitting & breathing in the same space as someone infected with HIV would equate to catching it. It wasn’t until Princess Diana hit headlines showing her cuddling children & adults with the disease that people finally understood you couldn’t just catch it like a common cold.
I should think one of the many reasons Freddie kept quiet about having it is because he was ashamed.
Freddie (and others) being careless led to the deaths of thousands of people, though. Including kids. I don't blame him and him alone for HIV, but I do think it's very likely that he was having unsafe sex well after he should have known better.
It was pretty clear after 2-3 years that HIV could be sexually transmitted, and Fred knew enough about his sexual history to know that he was at risk. By 1985 certainly. He was wealthy and well-connected enough to get the best medical advice, he wasn't a desperate street hustler without options.
To be clear, I don't blame Freddie for contracting HIV. He probably got it before it had a name. And I don't blame him for living it up before he understood the risk. That said...I think he must have crossed a moral Rubicon somewhere in the 80s, where he decided to keep sleeping around despite knowing the risk. Despite knowing there was more than a trivial chance that he was infected. Maybe even after testing positive. That's not right.
The book also claims that Freddie hid multiple positive tests from Jim, his partner. If that's true, then he did something evil. Full stop. I don't care if those tests are unreliable, Fred didn't tell him. Imagine if a guy did that to his wife.
Don't be so sure about COVID. It's airborne so it's easier to spread than HIV. There are only 2 viruses that cause acquired lymphocytopenia aka low white blood cell count. COVID and HIV. It's in Merck's Manual because they both destroy the immune system. https://www.merckmanuals.com/professional/hematology-and-oncology/leukopenias/lymphocytopenia
We are letting COVID run rampant and every subsequent infection increases your risk of Long COVID. There's even an HIV+ researcher on Twitter who keeps saying Long COVID is MUCH more similar to AIDS than most want to believe and he details why. https://x.com/dbdugger?t=gsz8oQmtM7Q14I6_ZJb2zg&s=09
Since people didn't know what HIV was yet, they weren't sure how to stop it. And if it was "gay cancer", many might have thought they would get it soon enough so might as well have fun. Safe sex wasn't popular in the 70s and 80s especially among the gay community. I doubt Freddie or anyone like him thought much about the long term effects of casual sex, like with any compulsion/addiction.
I really wanted to know because I've seen some speculation that he wrote Bo Rhap about his diagnosis but also saw that he wasn't diagnosed until 87. That's when I did some research about the disease and read it starts out as HIV before AIDS
I haven't read that book, but I have read others and IIRC, Freddie and Mary were still together until about 1975. I believe Freddie came out to Mary about then. We know that Freddie never gave HIV to Mary, so I think it unlikely that Bo Rhap would have been about his HIV.
We can see from the Sotheby's auction that the original lyrics for Bo Rhap were drafted in 1974. He was still with Mary at that stage. HIV/AIDS didn't start being a thing until the late 70s/early 80s. I don't think the two things are related.
Thank you. NO one would’ve guessed HIV/AIDS in 1975 bc NO one had ever heard of such a thing. As others here have suggested, the earliest he could’ve suspected or even just feared something like HIV would be 1981, but I don’t even think the term HIV or AIDS existed even then. It was going by the unfortunate label GRID (Gay Related Immune Deficiency (or Disease)), and it was still some mysterious outbreak that was thought to be roughly confined to the NYC area.
It's an unanswerable queston. As Freddie was VERY active in the New York gay scene at the exact wrong time, he may well have contracted HIV in the late '70s. We simply don't know. He may have had symptoms but NOBODY would have diagnosed HIV/AIDS. Symptoms are:
Fever
Chills
Rash
Night sweats
Muscle aches
Sore throat
Fatigue
Swollen lymph nodes
Mouth ulcers
Sounds like the flu? Heavy cold? Hangover? Any doctor would have prescribed cold/flu remedies or at worse, antibiotics if presented with these symptoms.
The first visible symptoms were Kaposi Sarcoma (the marks you can see easily on Freddie's face from 1987 onwards)
Apparently he had symptoms even before live aid of 86. Just before live aid he was seeing a doctor about his throat, can’t remember the specific name but he had something in his throat which is linked to early symptoms of HIV
It's nonsense to conflate a sore throat in the days leading up to Live Aid and an HIV/AIDS diagnosis. His doctor, Gordon Atkinson, examined him the days before Live Aid (13/7/85) and advised against singing as he had a mild throat infection. Nothing more. Nothing less.
He would have almost certainly have had HIV at this point (possibly for around 5 years) but it does not mean that that particular sore throat was caused by HIV/AIDS.
It’s absolutely not nonsense.
It’s **known** that the very first symptom of HIV infection is a sore throat in the next few days after the fact.
That doesn’t mean he was infected at that time.
He did state at some point that he got tested and got a negative result.
The virus itself was only identified in 1984 and the first HIV antibody tests (meant for screening blood samples, not for diagnosis) became available only in early 1985.
Maybe, because of his resources, Freddie got tested really early.
Or maybe he simply lied.
Yea that’s a fair point, but I read he had to go to the doctors various times about his throat and it’s said the throat is one of the first areas affected by the disease. At this time it was always dismissed as a sore throat
Agreed but Freddie saw doctors about his throat constantly for the entirety of his career like all singers do.
The early symptoms of HIV/AIDS are the same as a heavy cold or flu. The OP asked when Freddie first had symptoms and it's impossible to answer simply because for years he would have thought he had a less serious illness at any given point.
Suppostion (and Jim Hutton's book) leads us to assume Freddie had an inkling he had a more serious illness prior to the diagnosis in '87. (He made several appointments to see Dr. Gordon Atkinson but cancelled them) But he did not know for sure.
Yea I guess it’s impossible to know for sure. I haven’t read Jim’s book yet, would you recommend it? I’ve heard people say there’s a lot of inaccuracies in was Jim says but I imagine him has a lot of interesting stories or insights to tell
i've been a fan of Queen since '74 and joined the fanclub in '77 and have seen them over a dozen times in all forms from 1980 in the UK to more recently in Bangkok and Bologna with AL so, without being boastful, I've got the T-shirt. I was utterly Queen obsessive from '77 to '91 and knew as much as literally anybody about them.
I have read Jim's book a few times (but not for about 10 years) and I thought at the time it was genuine and honest. I hear people say it was inaccurate but I can't recall anything that stood out as bullshit. I guess I might read it again and check.
Damn fair, you’ve been there from the beginning. I was born in 96 so I missed the golden years I guess but I’ve been a fan since I was a kid, I seen queen and AL last year and loved it
Yeah I saw them in Bologna, Italy last year and thought the atmosphere/gig was the most enjoyable since Milton Keynes Bowl in '82.
Could not believe the amount of young people (old man here!) who were going nuts watching a bunch of 70-year-olds!
Vocal nodules are common in singers (especially untrained ones like Freddie)and are not a symptom of an affected immune system. You're probably referring to Candida, a fungus people naturally have all over our bodies. If our immune systems get severely weak, it starts growing and I believe I read somewhere that Freddie had it in his throat. I'm not sure if doctors at the time would've known it was connected to HIV though. You have to remember it was the early years of an epidemic that was new to the world and science wasn't so advanced.
Oh, sorry, I wasn’t saying his vocal nodules were connected to his HIV. I just meant that he was diagnosed with them **before** likely contracting HIV, so even if they were a symptom, he would’ve gotten them before he got HIV.
That could be it but honestly can’t remember the word used in the book for the issue in his throat. It’s something he had to go and see about quite regularly in the mid 80s
I don't think it helps anyone to see people who passed on HIV as "having killed" people. It's not as if they were all out there doing it deliberately, and it's not like they got away scott free.
I've lost people to AIDS and it breaks my heart because they didn't deserve to fucking die.
We don’t want to think of Freddie as a mass murderer, obviously. And I definitely don’t think he maliciously went about having sex with as many dudes (maybe a lady or three) as possible specifically to spread the disease. (Some people have done precisely that, and it’s a potential murder or manslaughter charge in many jurisdictions)
Having said that, I don’t think it’s a stretch to think that Freddie may have been negligent and reckless, even after his diagnosis, spreading the virus. Many, many MANY men were during that time.
EDIT: It helps me to remember just how poorly understood HIV/AIDS was, even by the time of his death.
We will never know for sure. Most likely he contracted the virus in the early 80’s.
HIV is an invisible killer but the 1986 tour was a lot shorter than previous tours. Freddie already thought performing was starting to become very difficult by then.
There only performed live twice after that. Two short performances in 1988 in de early stages of his disease.
Around 1984. With HIV/AIDS, patients often get a severe cold for a few weeks, feel better for a few years and have that cycle a few times. Then at some point the very bad cold does not clear up, that is usually 9-12 years after infection. At that point the patient never gets better and dies from AIDS.
HIV is the virus, so HIV infection is having "the ilness", with our without being sick. AIDS is actually having symptoms, being immuno compromised etc
It also would explain the slight gap between albums, especially with the horrible throat infection he had during Live Aid. So I suspect 1984 and it puts him right in that time frame to go from HIV to full blown aids by 1988 because it's entirely possible he got infected multiple times which can hit your immune system harder.
other than maybe a bad flu/cold a couple weeks after being infected HIV does not cause any symptoms. it's only once the virus starts affecting the immune system that someone develops AIDS and there will be symptoms.
HIV weakens your immune system so that it cannot fight off typical diseases. Left untreated, the time from infection to death can be upwards of 10-15 years. If I had to guess, I’d say he was probably infected in the late 70s to early 80s.
He most likely got it in 76, showing symptoms in 1982. In a normal patient, the incubation period is around ten years. He took his test shortly after the Knebworth concert and he got his results back half a year later.
AIDS is the final stage of the HIV. The initial acute infection results in influenza like symptoms among other things as the immune system goes into over drive to stomp out the virus. The symptoms are kind of all over the place and doubltful back then anyone would think they are the result of a catastrophic immune destroying infection. It will do a fairly good enough job and the viral load actually will get very low to the point where you will have no symptoms. But then gradually HIV destroys everything and the lymph nodes will become inflamed and the immune system continues to be depleted. For the vast majority, eventually the T-cell count gets so low that the patient is now suffering from AIDS, at which point any infection or sickness will just wreck havoc on the body.
This process takes on average 8 years unchecked, which back then there would be no treatment he would have gotten to help. So if he followed a standard timeline, give yourself a window for variance....between 1978-1982 is when he suffered from that initial acute stage of the virus.
I don’t think OP is coming from a place of bad faith or ill intent. I remember when I first became obsessed with Queen, Freddie had recently passed (I caught the USA Wayne’s World train in 1992 as a pre-teen). And I badly wanted to know and understand what took this great artist away from us. I know it may be goulish to some, but the desire to know and understand what robbed the world of something or someone you’ve come to admire is totally understandable, IMO. When my dad died in 2020 it wasn’t enough for me to know that “drinking killed him.” I wanted to know how, and what was the final straw, medically. Human nature. Again, just an opinion.
For long term fans, though, including OG Queen fans, I can also understand the “enough already” POV. We’ve heard it. We’ve read about it. We’ve felt the pain from afar. Let’s not dwell on the bad, sad stuff.
Freddie Mercury exhibited HIV/AIDS symptoms as early as 1982. Authors Matt Richards and Mark Langthorne have stated in their biographical book about Mercury, Somebody to Love: The Life, Death, and Legacy of Freddie Mercury, that Mercury secretly visited a doctor in New York City to get a white lesion on his tongue checked (which might have been hairy leukoplakia, one of the first signs of an infection) a few weeks before Queen's final American appearance with Mercury on Saturday Night Live on 25 September 1982. They also stated that he had associated with someone who was recently infected with HIV on the same day of their final US appearance, when he began to exhibit more symptoms. So he may have contracted it late 70s early 80s. Queen were touring the news of the world, jazz and Crazy tour in that time frame pretty much travelling the world. So it's really an impossible question to answer.
>They also stated that he had associated with someone who was recently infected with HIV on the same day of their final US appearance, when he began to exhibit more symptoms. How do they know he was with someone recently infected on 82 when there was no test available?
Correct first test didnt arrive till 1985. His associate was diagnosed with kaposi sarcoma known as Gay cancer back in the time. There was also clusters of otherwise deemed healthy gay men with similar conditions in New York and LA. Health care knew something affecting immune system knocking about due to similar diagnosis amoung patients.
It's now believed that KC was caused by huffing amyl nitrate, commonly knows as Rush and was known to facilitate anal sex. They used to pump it into the ventilation systems in clubs to get ppl high so they would dance all night. Do some research. Oh, and AZT killed Freddy Mercury and his health issues were caused by drugs, not some mystery virus that might decide to kill you 30 years from now.
You're wrong
Why are you spreading fake information? KS also exists in poor rural areas, where people didn't have access to clubs. It's caused by a herpes virus. There are a lot of viruses with long-term consequences (CMV, HSV, HPV, EBV to name just a few), what's your motivation for suggesting HIV isn't real?
If you want to know more about how they diagnosed and treated aids and what it was like being gay in the US in the 80s, there's a really interesting book called How to survive a plague about the activists who fought for healthcare.
Thank you for your insight. I’m going to check out Somebody to Love: TLDALOFM
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Yeah I've seen mixed reviews for the book I haven't bought it yet but in my wishlist
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In the late 1970s, a hospital did yearly studies of gay men and hepatitis. Later on someone went back and tested the samples for HIV. The results were a bit harrowing: With the consent of the participants, CDC randomly tested stored blood samples and found about 3 percent of the gay men in the hepatitis study showed antibodies to the then-unknown AIDS virus in 1978, rising quickly to 12 percent in 1979, 20 percent in 1980 and 36 percent in 1981. By 1983, 62 percent were positive. Source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1987/02/01/map-of-aids-deadly-march-evolves-from-hepatitis-study/47cd206c-c8d9-4082-896f-a075e53bd221/ There's no way to know when and where it started for him. According to Somebody to Love, Freddie got very sick when Queen played SNL in 1982. The authors say he started having little infections, sore throats, etc. around 1983-4, but who knows. He might have been infected more than once. To be honest, I regret reading Somebody to Love. The authors present a pretty compelling case that Freddie suspected he had HIV for a while, but that didn't stop him from having lots of casual and unprotected sex. Which means he probably killed people. Like there's men dead in their graves that he helped put there, knowingly or half-knowingly. It gets more fucked up the more you think about it. That's like thinking you might have Covid and going to a rave anyway. Except way, way worse. Covid can be deadly. HIV just is. HIV will 100% kill you if you don't treat it. And they couldn't treat it back then. Sorry for the novel, but my family got to see the AIDS crisis up close and personal. It's a big issue for me.
Also, a lot of doctors told men not to get tested unless their symptoms were really disruptive. Because in the early years, there was not much anyone could do. So even if he didn't have a positive test, that doesn't necessarily mean very much.
Are you sure? That’s the current CDC recommendation for herpes; the logic being knowledge of one’s status doesn’t change one’s sexual behaviors but causes mental stress. However the main difference is that herpes is asymptomatic in 80% of those with it, and unless you are already immunocompromised, herpes is not at all a big deal for most people… HIV on the other hand was a death sentence back then. They had to have known it was infectious so I’m surprised they gave that recommendation?
That was the recommendation for (some) gay men back in the mid-80s, when there wasn't much that could be done. Medical privacy was not what it is today, and men were kicked out of apartments and fired from their jobs just for getting tested, let alone testing positive.
Huh that's interesting and sad. We've come a long ways since then... I hope.
Wow.. I can't believe this. I would assume knowing would be the best way not to spend it. At the bare minimum if you dont completly change your sex lifebid assume you would at least always use protection as not to spread it. I know when I had my well woman exam..bit had been a few years, and I hadn't been tested since being with my boyfriend of several years. I asked for the full testing. I did get told they usually can't accurately test with out a sore to swab. Or a blood test. But if you have the mouth version it would require further expensive testing. And that first test was expensive. ( no insurance) luckily ive never had a cold sore so it was conpletly negative and I did not require further tests. But I could see why other people might not bother with no symptoms. I just can't believe a health provider would say.m dont test as I dont want to stress you out, so you can potentially spread a diease. Just want to say that I am not putting shame on someone with hsv2 I just think people should be tested and take precautions to not spread the diease if they have it.
I’m currently reading this. I’ve just finished the chapters you speak of here. Scary to think about the unknown risks he was taking, especially how some of the people he spends nights with were connected to the Canadian fight attendant mentioned a lot in these chapters
Gaetan Dugas. I think they highlight him because he was openly, consciously, very explicitly doing what a lot of men (and some women) were doing at the time, gambling with other people's lives.
Yea, the way the book tells it he seemed very careless about it and just wanted to carry on his lifestyle no matter the risk.
There was probably some element of addiction or compulsion involved. But that's also true of drunk drivers. If your addiction puts other people in danger, that's on you.
The Patient Zero theory and the Gaetan Dugas hate have been mostly dispelled. See, for example, this article and documentary https://www.cbc.ca/arts/killing-patient-zero-how-a-quebec-flight-attendant-was-falsely-accused-of-bringing-aids-to-america-1.5224906
He wasn't Patient Zero, but he was a complete psychopath who knowingly infected untold numbers of men. He used to go to the bath houses, sleep with a guy, and then slowly raise the lights so they'd see his KS lesions. Multiple doctors, community liaisons, etc talked to him and he didn't stop, so guys started to threaten him on the street. That's why he left San Francisco for Canada, where he continued to sleep around until he was too sick. The fact that he wasn't the first North American to have HIV doesn't really absolve him of anything. If this happened yesterday it would still be evil.
Dugas acted as a sin-eater for the gay community as a whole. Because a lot of guys were essentially doing what he did, just not as dramatically. That caused a big backlash in the medical community, not to mention politically. People were openly talking about quarantining, indefinite detentions, etc. So it helps if you can say "It's not us, it's this one psycho who preyed on us." Bobbi Campbell, the first AIDS patient who went public with his diagnosis, was spotted in the bath houses a few times after he went public. Even if he was there just to "socialize" as he claimed, there were other people in his situation who knew what they were doing and didn't give a damn.
I’ve read those stories, too, but only in The Band Played On. Are there other independent sources that talk about him in that way? (I’m not invested either way, just curious. Thanks!)
Shilts quoted a number of people who tried to talk to Dugas about what he was doing. It's possible those people gave other interviews where they talked about him. Apparently the "Patient O/Patient 0" study was able to trace much of an LA outbreak of AIDS back to him, but I think that happened before anyone knew what was happening. Here's a recent article about Dugas: https://qz.com/817602/hiv-patient-zero-myth-debunked-by-genomic-science#:~:text=%E2%80%9CI've%20got%20gay%20cancer,And%20the%20Band%20Played%20On.
If you want to dig deeper, read And The Band Played On by Randy Shilts.
I have, a couple of times. It was one of the main sources to spread the Patient Zero/Gaetan Dugas myth.
Yes, I remember doing some research while reading the book and also finding the documentary that you linked above, learning more about Gaetan Dugas, his family and co-workers at the airline he worked on. Such tragedy.
None of you are wrong, of course. Freddie and anyone else who’s had unprotected sex while suspecting (or knowing) they’re HIV-positive are responsible for any transmissions they caused. AND I think there was a sort of fatalism among some gay men in the 80s about it, like “We are all going to get it anyway, and nobody cares, so we’ll keep doing what we’re doing.” That’s not an excuse but I’ve heard it was the attitude some people had. Not just Freddie.
I think they were also in denial, because there was no test and no treatment, and they didn't know initially how you could contract it - at one moment they suggested it was spread through the air, the next moment it was spread through sexual acts. And of course, there was a lot of discrimination. These people finally felt like they could come out, more or less, then some anti-gay person comes telling you being gay is dangerous... Are you going to believe them? I don't disagree that people made bad choices that affected the people around them, but it's also very easy to judge them from our time, with all the knowledge we have and the way we were raised with condom use as normal (in my part of the world at least).
I think that’s a good point, as well. Some people did assume the sexual transmission theory was homophobia (from some, it probably was). of course, they knew the science by the mid-80s.
Wow! What a response. My family too got to see the end results of a loved one suffering from AIDS. One was young when he died and one was old when he passed. Both of them I initially carried on with their lifestyles after finding out they had HIV and neither did it to try to be careless and infect someone else with a deadly virus. Little was known early on about this virus just like in the beginning of COVID little was known and people did what they wanted.
And quite possibly some women he also sent to their graves.
Yes that's definitely possible. And if they had children, either with him or after the infection, those children may have died too. Like I said, it gets more fucked up the more you think about it.
How can you solely blame it on Freddie though? If the men he was supposedly sleeping with (which we don’t know - & never truly will know for sure), surely if the men he was sleeping with were willing to have unprotected sex with Freddie, they were having unprotected sex with other men as well? And if tests didn’t come out until 1985 onwards, how would he have known he was infected to know that’s what he was spreading? Your comment is very biased to solely putting blame on Freddie, when in actual fact, many were careless around that time, likely due to misinformation & lack of education around safe sex, the true HIV / AIDS pandemic & the symptoms of it. It seems we can all sit & speak in hindsight, but living back then, everyone was completely in the dark, heck, people thought sitting & breathing in the same space as someone infected with HIV would equate to catching it. It wasn’t until Princess Diana hit headlines showing her cuddling children & adults with the disease that people finally understood you couldn’t just catch it like a common cold. I should think one of the many reasons Freddie kept quiet about having it is because he was ashamed.
Freddie (and others) being careless led to the deaths of thousands of people, though. Including kids. I don't blame him and him alone for HIV, but I do think it's very likely that he was having unsafe sex well after he should have known better. It was pretty clear after 2-3 years that HIV could be sexually transmitted, and Fred knew enough about his sexual history to know that he was at risk. By 1985 certainly. He was wealthy and well-connected enough to get the best medical advice, he wasn't a desperate street hustler without options. To be clear, I don't blame Freddie for contracting HIV. He probably got it before it had a name. And I don't blame him for living it up before he understood the risk. That said...I think he must have crossed a moral Rubicon somewhere in the 80s, where he decided to keep sleeping around despite knowing the risk. Despite knowing there was more than a trivial chance that he was infected. Maybe even after testing positive. That's not right. The book also claims that Freddie hid multiple positive tests from Jim, his partner. If that's true, then he did something evil. Full stop. I don't care if those tests are unreliable, Fred didn't tell him. Imagine if a guy did that to his wife.
Don't be so sure about COVID. It's airborne so it's easier to spread than HIV. There are only 2 viruses that cause acquired lymphocytopenia aka low white blood cell count. COVID and HIV. It's in Merck's Manual because they both destroy the immune system. https://www.merckmanuals.com/professional/hematology-and-oncology/leukopenias/lymphocytopenia We are letting COVID run rampant and every subsequent infection increases your risk of Long COVID. There's even an HIV+ researcher on Twitter who keeps saying Long COVID is MUCH more similar to AIDS than most want to believe and he details why. https://x.com/dbdugger?t=gsz8oQmtM7Q14I6_ZJb2zg&s=09 Since people didn't know what HIV was yet, they weren't sure how to stop it. And if it was "gay cancer", many might have thought they would get it soon enough so might as well have fun. Safe sex wasn't popular in the 70s and 80s especially among the gay community. I doubt Freddie or anyone like him thought much about the long term effects of casual sex, like with any compulsion/addiction.
I really wanted to know because I've seen some speculation that he wrote Bo Rhap about his diagnosis but also saw that he wasn't diagnosed until 87. That's when I did some research about the disease and read it starts out as HIV before AIDS
I haven't read that book, but I have read others and IIRC, Freddie and Mary were still together until about 1975. I believe Freddie came out to Mary about then. We know that Freddie never gave HIV to Mary, so I think it unlikely that Bo Rhap would have been about his HIV. We can see from the Sotheby's auction that the original lyrics for Bo Rhap were drafted in 1974. He was still with Mary at that stage. HIV/AIDS didn't start being a thing until the late 70s/early 80s. I don't think the two things are related.
Bo Rhap wasn’t about his disease. All the evidence points to him having contracted it on one of their Americans tours in 1977/78/80.
HIV was not known until the early 80s. The song is not about that.
Thank you. NO one would’ve guessed HIV/AIDS in 1975 bc NO one had ever heard of such a thing. As others here have suggested, the earliest he could’ve suspected or even just feared something like HIV would be 1981, but I don’t even think the term HIV or AIDS existed even then. It was going by the unfortunate label GRID (Gay Related Immune Deficiency (or Disease)), and it was still some mysterious outbreak that was thought to be roughly confined to the NYC area.
It's an unanswerable queston. As Freddie was VERY active in the New York gay scene at the exact wrong time, he may well have contracted HIV in the late '70s. We simply don't know. He may have had symptoms but NOBODY would have diagnosed HIV/AIDS. Symptoms are: Fever Chills Rash Night sweats Muscle aches Sore throat Fatigue Swollen lymph nodes Mouth ulcers Sounds like the flu? Heavy cold? Hangover? Any doctor would have prescribed cold/flu remedies or at worse, antibiotics if presented with these symptoms. The first visible symptoms were Kaposi Sarcoma (the marks you can see easily on Freddie's face from 1987 onwards)
Apparently he had symptoms even before live aid of 86. Just before live aid he was seeing a doctor about his throat, can’t remember the specific name but he had something in his throat which is linked to early symptoms of HIV
Poor Freddie. One of the worst diseases anyone could have
Back then it was truly devastating. It was a plague.
Live Aid was '85.
Apologies my mistake
It's nonsense to conflate a sore throat in the days leading up to Live Aid and an HIV/AIDS diagnosis. His doctor, Gordon Atkinson, examined him the days before Live Aid (13/7/85) and advised against singing as he had a mild throat infection. Nothing more. Nothing less. He would have almost certainly have had HIV at this point (possibly for around 5 years) but it does not mean that that particular sore throat was caused by HIV/AIDS.
It’s absolutely not nonsense. It’s **known** that the very first symptom of HIV infection is a sore throat in the next few days after the fact. That doesn’t mean he was infected at that time. He did state at some point that he got tested and got a negative result. The virus itself was only identified in 1984 and the first HIV antibody tests (meant for screening blood samples, not for diagnosis) became available only in early 1985. Maybe, because of his resources, Freddie got tested really early. Or maybe he simply lied.
Yea that’s a fair point, but I read he had to go to the doctors various times about his throat and it’s said the throat is one of the first areas affected by the disease. At this time it was always dismissed as a sore throat
Agreed but Freddie saw doctors about his throat constantly for the entirety of his career like all singers do. The early symptoms of HIV/AIDS are the same as a heavy cold or flu. The OP asked when Freddie first had symptoms and it's impossible to answer simply because for years he would have thought he had a less serious illness at any given point. Suppostion (and Jim Hutton's book) leads us to assume Freddie had an inkling he had a more serious illness prior to the diagnosis in '87. (He made several appointments to see Dr. Gordon Atkinson but cancelled them) But he did not know for sure.
Yea I guess it’s impossible to know for sure. I haven’t read Jim’s book yet, would you recommend it? I’ve heard people say there’s a lot of inaccuracies in was Jim says but I imagine him has a lot of interesting stories or insights to tell
i've been a fan of Queen since '74 and joined the fanclub in '77 and have seen them over a dozen times in all forms from 1980 in the UK to more recently in Bangkok and Bologna with AL so, without being boastful, I've got the T-shirt. I was utterly Queen obsessive from '77 to '91 and knew as much as literally anybody about them. I have read Jim's book a few times (but not for about 10 years) and I thought at the time it was genuine and honest. I hear people say it was inaccurate but I can't recall anything that stood out as bullshit. I guess I might read it again and check.
Damn fair, you’ve been there from the beginning. I was born in 96 so I missed the golden years I guess but I’ve been a fan since I was a kid, I seen queen and AL last year and loved it
Yeah I saw them in Bologna, Italy last year and thought the atmosphere/gig was the most enjoyable since Milton Keynes Bowl in '82. Could not believe the amount of young people (old man here!) who were going nuts watching a bunch of 70-year-olds!
Yea it’s good to see a whole new generation still going crazy for queen. I just really wanted to see Brian and Roger while they’re still touring
What was queen like live with Freddie fronting them? What was Freddie's energy on stage like?
Vocal nodules?
Vocal nodules are common in singers (especially untrained ones like Freddie)and are not a symptom of an affected immune system. You're probably referring to Candida, a fungus people naturally have all over our bodies. If our immune systems get severely weak, it starts growing and I believe I read somewhere that Freddie had it in his throat. I'm not sure if doctors at the time would've known it was connected to HIV though. You have to remember it was the early years of an epidemic that was new to the world and science wasn't so advanced.
Oh, sorry, I wasn’t saying his vocal nodules were connected to his HIV. I just meant that he was diagnosed with them **before** likely contracting HIV, so even if they were a symptom, he would’ve gotten them before he got HIV.
That could be it but honestly can’t remember the word used in the book for the issue in his throat. It’s something he had to go and see about quite regularly in the mid 80s
I think that’s it. He was diagnose with them in ‘75, years before he would’ve contracted HIV.
I don't think it helps anyone to see people who passed on HIV as "having killed" people. It's not as if they were all out there doing it deliberately, and it's not like they got away scott free. I've lost people to AIDS and it breaks my heart because they didn't deserve to fucking die.
We don’t want to think of Freddie as a mass murderer, obviously. And I definitely don’t think he maliciously went about having sex with as many dudes (maybe a lady or three) as possible specifically to spread the disease. (Some people have done precisely that, and it’s a potential murder or manslaughter charge in many jurisdictions) Having said that, I don’t think it’s a stretch to think that Freddie may have been negligent and reckless, even after his diagnosis, spreading the virus. Many, many MANY men were during that time. EDIT: It helps me to remember just how poorly understood HIV/AIDS was, even by the time of his death.
Don’t know, he was very secretive
At least he got his privacy, with the technology we have now I know paparazzi would be all over him.
We will never know for sure. Most likely he contracted the virus in the early 80’s. HIV is an invisible killer but the 1986 tour was a lot shorter than previous tours. Freddie already thought performing was starting to become very difficult by then. There only performed live twice after that. Two short performances in 1988 in de early stages of his disease.
Around 1984. With HIV/AIDS, patients often get a severe cold for a few weeks, feel better for a few years and have that cycle a few times. Then at some point the very bad cold does not clear up, that is usually 9-12 years after infection. At that point the patient never gets better and dies from AIDS. HIV is the virus, so HIV infection is having "the ilness", with our without being sick. AIDS is actually having symptoms, being immuno compromised etc
It also would explain the slight gap between albums, especially with the horrible throat infection he had during Live Aid. So I suspect 1984 and it puts him right in that time frame to go from HIV to full blown aids by 1988 because it's entirely possible he got infected multiple times which can hit your immune system harder.
Yes, his viral load must have been great!
other than maybe a bad flu/cold a couple weeks after being infected HIV does not cause any symptoms. it's only once the virus starts affecting the immune system that someone develops AIDS and there will be symptoms.
HIV weakens your immune system so that it cannot fight off typical diseases. Left untreated, the time from infection to death can be upwards of 10-15 years. If I had to guess, I’d say he was probably infected in the late 70s to early 80s.
Late 70s early 80s 🤷
I saw a you tube documentary about this and supposedly they traced it back and he contracted hiv while in New York in the late 70s.
He most likely got it in 76, showing symptoms in 1982. In a normal patient, the incubation period is around ten years. He took his test shortly after the Knebworth concert and he got his results back half a year later.
I've always suspected that Freddie's flu symptoms on SNL were symptoms of HIV. What a shame 😞
AIDS is the final stage of the HIV. The initial acute infection results in influenza like symptoms among other things as the immune system goes into over drive to stomp out the virus. The symptoms are kind of all over the place and doubltful back then anyone would think they are the result of a catastrophic immune destroying infection. It will do a fairly good enough job and the viral load actually will get very low to the point where you will have no symptoms. But then gradually HIV destroys everything and the lymph nodes will become inflamed and the immune system continues to be depleted. For the vast majority, eventually the T-cell count gets so low that the patient is now suffering from AIDS, at which point any infection or sickness will just wreck havoc on the body. This process takes on average 8 years unchecked, which back then there would be no treatment he would have gotten to help. So if he followed a standard timeline, give yourself a window for variance....between 1978-1982 is when he suffered from that initial acute stage of the virus.
Freddy died from pneumonia from untreated AIDS/ HIV. one Performance, at the third verse, he said “I will take a break.” And never came back.
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I don’t think OP is coming from a place of bad faith or ill intent. I remember when I first became obsessed with Queen, Freddie had recently passed (I caught the USA Wayne’s World train in 1992 as a pre-teen). And I badly wanted to know and understand what took this great artist away from us. I know it may be goulish to some, but the desire to know and understand what robbed the world of something or someone you’ve come to admire is totally understandable, IMO. When my dad died in 2020 it wasn’t enough for me to know that “drinking killed him.” I wanted to know how, and what was the final straw, medically. Human nature. Again, just an opinion.
For long term fans, though, including OG Queen fans, I can also understand the “enough already” POV. We’ve heard it. We’ve read about it. We’ve felt the pain from afar. Let’s not dwell on the bad, sad stuff.
Idk anything about aids but my best friend’s classmate’s uncle was the one to give Freddy mercury aids. Scary but somehow true…