Released in China last week, the biopic dedicated to Freddie Mercury is among the top box office, although many associations have regretted that the passages of the film evoking the homosexuality of the singer have been removed.
Bohemian Rhapsody , the film dedicated to the Queen's career, has been doing quite well in China since it was released, even though the work has been expunged from most of its references to singer Freddie Mercury's homosexuality. Several scenes, including those where Freddie Mercury reveals his sexual preferences to his wife or kisses another man, have been censored, provoking the anger of homosexual advocacy groups.
"This Chinese version is like a piece of fiction," storm Hua Zile, founder of "The voice of comrades", an association that has more than one million subscribers on the social network Weibo. The film in its censored version "is an affront to real life" Freddie Mercury, he believes. "For homosexuals, it is extremely regrettable."
Homosexuality, decriminalized but still censored
Homosexuality has not been banned in China since 1997 and was removed from the list of mental illnesses in 2001. But references to same-sex love are being banned from television screens and online video platforms, and the trend has only grown in recent years. "For the LGBT community, this is a setback," laments Duan, the Beijing LGBT Center association, who prefers not to give his full name. "It is impossible to freely broadcast or share content," he says.
The film earned Best Actor Oscar for Rami Malek for his portrayal of Freddie Mercury, the singer who died in 1991 when he revealed the day before he died of AIDS. The actor's speech of thanks at the presentation of his Oscar was also censored in China: on the online video site Mango TV, the Chinese subtitles omit to translate the words where Rami Malek evoked a film dedicated "to a homosexual man".
Bohemian Rhapsody's redaction did not stop the film from reaching the top five spots in China's most-watched film rankings since it was released last week. Some viewers did not understand that they had seen a redacted version. "I did not know it had been censored," says Dian Dian, a movie-goer. "I thought it was just shot in a very subtle way."