Read Freddie Mercury’s Heartbreaking Announcement of His Diagnosis With HIV/AIDS, Released on This Date in 1991, Just a Day Before the Queen Frontman Died
Until Mercury released the statement, tabloid newspapers hounded the ailing singer, while only a smaller inner circle knew about the extent of his illness
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As midnight reached West London and Friday night passed into the first minutes of Saturday, November 23, 1991, rock band Queen’s press officer released a statement on behalf of frontman Freddie Mercury.
“Following the enormous conjecture in the press over the last two weeks,” Mercury announced, “I wish to confirm that I have been tested HIV-positive and have AIDS.”
Even as he lay isolated in Garden Lodge, his Kensington home, he could see paparazzi’s cigarette smoke over his garden wall. “I felt it correct to keep this information private to date in order to protect the privacy of those around me,” he continued. “However, the time has now come for my friends and fans around the world to know the truth, and I hope that everyone will join with me, my doctors and all those worldwide in the fight against this terrible disease.”
Mercury closed his letter with a final plea for privacy, a commodity that had proved elusive in recent years: “My privacy has always been very special to me, and I am famous for my lack of interviews. Please understand this policy will continue.”
Failing health had kept him out of the limelight since his last concert with Queen in 1986, and Mercury and Queen’s press team publicly denied that he had HIV/AIDS even after his 1987 diagnosis. That didn’t stop British tabloids from hounding him about his sexuality and health: In 1990, for instance, the Sun ran a special story called “The Sad Face of Freddie Mercury” with a picture of him leaving a doctor’s office “looking haggard and gaunt.”
After recording new music with his bandmates in Montreux, Switzerland, Mercury had returned home to London for the last time. He languished in bed as doctors and visitors like Elton John, his bandmates, former fiancée and longtime friend Mary Austin, and his partner Jim Hutton kept him company during his shaky last days.
On the day his groundbreaking statement was released, Mercury’s condition was severe. “By now Freddie had lost his sight, could barely move his muscles, had given up all solids and was surviving on the bare minimum of liquids,” biographers Matt Richards and Mark Langthorne wrote in Somebody to Love: The Life, Death and Legacy of Freddie Mercury. “He was drifting in and out of consciousness.”
It was clear that death was near. By releasing a statement, Mercury and his inner circle hoped to end the aggressive media speculation that had plagued the singer as much as his illness—to provide relief in his last moments and encourage openness about the still-stigmatized disease.
He only lasted a day longer. Mercury was pronounced dead at 6:48 p.m. on November 24. The official cause of death was bronchial pneumonia resulting from AIDS.
Writing in Rolling Stone, journalist Jeffrey Ressner noted that Mercury—the man born as Farrokh Bulsara to a Parsi Indian immigrant family in Zanzibar—was the “first major rock star to die of AIDS.”
“We have lost the greatest and most beloved member of our family,” the band later wrote in a statement. “We feel overwhelming grief that he has gone, sadness that he should be cut down at the height of his creativity, but above all great pride in the courageous way he lived and died.”
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