Questions about Mercury’s sexuality emerged at St. Peter’s. Another student Janet SmithThe girl school’s teacher, now named him, still remembers him. “an extremely thin, intense boy, who had this habit of calling one ‘darling,’ which I must say seemed a little fey.”
“It simply wasn’t something boys did in those days,” She said: Lesley-Ann Jones‘ Mercury: An intimate biography of Freddie Mercury. “It was accepted that Freddie was homosexual when he was here. Normally it would have been ‘Oh, God, you know, it’s just ghastly.’ But with Freddie somehow it wasn’t. It was OK.”
Mercury returned to Zanzibar after the end of British colonial rule in 1963. This led to a revolution that saw the poorer Indians attack the richer Indians. In response, the Bulsara clan fled to London and eventually settled in Feltham (Middlesex). Mercury, who had left Farrokh in Mumbai behind, but still using Bulsara’s last name, enrolled at Isleworth Polytechnic, West London, to study graphic design. He was quickly caught up in the Swinging London era.
“Most of our family are lawyers or accountants, but Freddie insisted he wasn’t clever enough and wanted to play music and sing,” His mother said. The TelegraphIn 2012, laughter. “My husband and I thought it was a phase he would grow out of and expected he would soon come back to his senses and return to proper studies. It didn’t happen.”