Parsi is another ethnic group in South Asia, but they have a specific migration history. who each have their own language and culture. For example, in South Asia, there are dozens of different ethnicities: Gujarati, Bengali, Punjabi, Tamil, etc. Although in our mainstream American race discourse - because of indigenous genocide and erasure - we don’t often talk about ethnicity, it’s an ever prominent aspect of life in other countries. His family was ethnically Parsi, which is an ethnic group that might need a little explaining. When I looked into it, the answer was pretty clear: he’s both.įreddie Mercury, whose birth name was Farrokh Bulsara, was born in the then British-controlled Stone Town in Zanzibar. When I said “You know he’s Persian, right?” she responded with “What? No, he’s Indian.” My world was turned upside down. I was getting boba with a close friend who is Indian and somehow we got on the subject of Freddie Mercury. It wasn’t until I got to college that this was challenged. So after my dad ingrained this in my head, I took it as fact - Freddie Mercury was Persian. When I was a little gay Persian kid running around California, one of the things my dad would sometimes mention is how “the guy from Queen is Persian.” I feel like this is common among immigrant dads: they can point to every celebrity with a shared ethnicity. In fact, I don’t think many folks even know what to guess in terms of Freddie Mercury’s race (most probably assume he’s just white). Interestingly, this isn’t the only debate surrounding Mercury’s identity - in addition to LGBTQ groups wanting to claim him, so do different racial groups. ![]() It makes conversations easier if we can point to a famous person in history and say “This person is one of us!” (Even the film’s star, Rami Malek, got a little flummoxed when discussing Mercury’s status as a queer icon in an interview with INTO.) In a lot of ways, it makes sense that LGBTQ folks try to claim Mercury and place him into different categories. Some folks say that Mercury was gay, some say he was bisexual, some say he was queer and some say that he didn’t like being defined by labels so we shouldn’t be trying to label him now. ![]() With Bohemian Rhapsody, the film about Queen’s eccentric frontman Freddie Mercury, just around the corner, discourse about Mercury’s sexuality has rocked the internet.
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