Freddie Mercury cut his best friend out of his life because he didn't want to tell him he had AIDS.
Freddie Mercury
The Queen frontman - who died in 1991 aged 45 due to complications caused by the illness - flatly denied that he was suffering from the disease a year to Peter Straker, his good pal of 15 years, before he passed away and the West End star never saw the 'Bohemian Rhapsody' hitmaker again.
Peter said: "All I got from Freddie was that he had this blood thing, and I thought it could have been leukaemia or something like that.
"He started to get these blotches and I asked about these and he said he had some blood condition. I knew about AIDS but it just never entered my head.
"We had lunch and he was quite blotchy and he had make-up on, and we went upstairs and we were sitting down watching telly on his bed and I said to him, 'Have you got AIDS?' and he said, 'No, I haven't got AIDS.'
"And I said, 'If there's anything wrong with you, I'm always here for you,' and we parted that evening. That was the last time I saw him."
Peter was so devastated about the situation he didn't attend Freddie's funeral.
However, he did try to contact the singer in the last year of his life but was constantly turned down by the star's employees, who later lived to regret their actions.
According to the Daily Mirror newspaper, Peter is quoted in a new book about Freddie, 'Somebody to Love' - which is by Matt Richards and Mark Langthorne, to mark the 25th anniversary of his death tomorrow (24.11.16) - as saying: "When I used to telephone they would never put me through.
"They'd just say he was busy, he was out, but they got instructions from him, and Joe followed him to the letter.
"Again, after he died, they all came to see me in a show in the West End and were all apologising, saying, 'I wish we'd put you through.' I said, 'It's too f**king late now.' "
While Freddie didn't tell Peter about suffering from AIDS, he did inform his bandmates, Brian May, Roger Taylor and John Deacon, at a meal in Montreux, Switzerland, in May 1989, two-and-a-half years before he passed.
He also told a number of his staff and his lover Jim Hutton, who was HIV positive.
The rock star issued a statement confirming he had AIDS just 24 hours before he died at his home in Kensington, west London, on November 24, 1991.
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