Mary Austin: Understanding Freddie's most complex relationship
Now that the truth about the complexity of Freddie’s sexuality has been revealed, his long relationship with Mary Austin seems even more extraordinary than we suspected from what we believed we knew about it.
The received narrative – that they met and fell in love when Mary was a teenaged shop girl and Freddie was working on a market stall, they moved in together and remained joined at the hip as he progressed from poverty-stricken obscurity to wealth and rock stardom with Queen, they became engaged and planned to marry, only Freddie discovered his ‘true’ nature, she encouraged him to be himself, they ended their engagement but undertook to continue their devoted friendship – is contradicted by what Freddie wrote in the seventeen private notebooks that he gave to his only child the summer before he died.
I admit, I always found their set-up strange. Why did Mary stick around once it became obvious that she and Freddie had no future together? Why didn’t she cut her losses, wish him well, make her excuses and depart for pastures new?
There was a big world waiting to be explored. She was still young. He would have seen her all right for money. Why punish herself by remaining in his life, running his companies and acting as his confidante when she could go off and have her own life somewhere else?
What’s love got to do with it? Only everything. Freddie and Mary stayed together because they had no choice. When they fell for each other, they fell for life. Neither could imagine existing without the other. Life would get complicated, at times intolerably so.
But there was no question that they would hold each other up and never let each other down. Why was the world never told the truth about Freddie’s relationship with Mary? Because it was their business and theirs alone. They did not owe the world an explanation.
Mary’s worst nightmare, it was long assumed, was that Freddie would leave her for another woman once Queen’s fame and fortune kicked in. His legendary confession to her that he believed himself to be bisexual, and her famous response – that no, he was really gay – was only part of the story.
Queen’s feature film Bohemian Rhapsody reduces Freddie’s multi-layered love life to a single, seamless transition – from Mary to Jim Hutton – and neglects to showcase significant others who undertook pivotal roles in Freddie’s life. It promulgates the perception that Freddie was the ultimate tragic figure, a gay man in love with a woman, but their partnership was doomed because he could not shake off his insatiable longing for men. It was never that simple.
The rub? Queen had a growing reputation to protect and a musical legacy to preserve. The band and their management may have feared, quite reasonably, that their popularity could be compromised and even destroyed had the truth about Freddie’s life got out. Because, while tolerance for homosexuality was on the rise during the late 1970s, bisexuality was still viewed as problematic. Such revelations may well have compromised the band.
Freddie’s daughter is unequivocal. Sharing what she has learned from her father’s handwritten journals, she insists that he regarded himself as bisexual and needed both.
‘He had sex and lust with men, and love with Mary,’ she affirms. ‘He was physically drawn to men and needed to be dominated sexually, and he was emotionally drawn to women. He needed the unshakable love he shared with his woman more than anything else in his life.’
During the early years of his engagement to Mary, Freddie embarked on a passionate affair with music business executive David Minns that thrust him into a monumental dilemma. Because that was when he accepted his need for both. That is to say, a devoted partnership with a woman and regular sex with a man. But he loved and adored Mary. He worshipped the ground she trod.
How could he expect quiet, dignified, gentle Mary to tolerate that kind of arrangement? He was desperate to do the right thing by her, but at the same time was reluctant to relinquish his homosexual life. To complicate things further, his torment led to a brief affair with the wife of a close friend during her husband’s absence on business. A child was conceived. Freddie became a father in February 1977, and called it the greatest achievement of his life. Not even that came between Freddie and Mary. Why? Because nothing ever could.
Perhaps no one else would ever be able to understand that nothing could shake their unbreakable bond. But they could. So no one else’s opinion really mattered.
The world believed that the couple sadly ended their engagement. The truth is that they never did. They remained betrothed for the rest of Freddie’s life. He would still have married his Mary, in fact. He fully intended to. ‘He had postponed their wedding when it ought to have happened for lack of money,’ reveals B., his daughter, ‘and because of business complications. He at last got around to wanting to rearrange it during the 1980s, but by then the situation had changed. The disease (AIDS) had arrived.’
Not wanting to deprive his life partner of the opportunity to become a mother, Freddie encouraged Mary to think about finding someone else to father her children. But none of what ensued, including her two sons by a different partner, changed the way the two of them felt about each other.
‘Mary was always his wife and he her husband,’ says B. ‘He always behaved as though he were her husband’ – gay sex aside – ‘kept his promises and stuck to his commitments. They never parted.’
I have told before how Mary unleashed her lawyers on us before the book was released in September 2025. They tried everything to prevent publication. When their efforts against the UK publisher failed, they approached every foreign publisher who had agreed a translation deal with us, and attempted to extract a copy of the manuscript. Again, they failed.
Mary gave an interview to The Sunday Times in which she said she would be ‘astonished’ if it turned out that Freddie had fathered a child. She did not believe that he would ever have kept from her, his devoted partner, something so monumental and life-changing. We stood our ground. The book came out. Although Mary and her lawyers now had the opportunity to examine the text minutely and to throw, as it were, the book at us if any of its content were untrue, we never heard another word from them.
Funny, that.
Buy ‘Love, Freddie’, LAJ’s intimate revelation of Freddie Mercury’s secret love
