Freddie Mercury spent his final days with his boyfriend, Irish barber Jim Hutton. He was the one who was with Queen’s lead singer in the bedroom of his Garden Lodge home, where he died on November 24, 1991 from the consequences of AIDS diagnosed in 1987.
That year, when Freddie Mercury discovered his illness, he wanted to end the relationship with Hutton, but he didn’t even want to hear about it. “I love you, Freddie. I’m not going anywhere,” he replied. And so it was.
Together they lived in Garden Lodge, the residence located in the Kensington area (London) that was the set for Mercury’s latest photos. These were made by Hutton, in the spring of 1991, months before his passing.. Mercury appears in them much thinner, without a mustache and with a Hawaiian flower shirt that fits him especially loose. Accompanied by his cat Oscar, one of the five who lived with the couple.
The legacy that Mercury left Hutton
When Mercury died, Hutton had to leave the house. The singer left written in his will that half of his fortune and Garden Lodge residence would go to Mary Austin, who was his partner between 1970 and 1976. They broke up when Mercury told him he was gay but they always bonded together a great relationship.
Hutton was left around £500,000 and a piece of land in Ireland, where the hairdresser came from, where he built a house he settled in after Freddie died. Jim was forced to leave the Garden Lodge house almost immediately after losing his partner, leading to a tense relationship between Mary Austin and Jim Hutton.
The first few months without Mercury were spent at The Mews, a house in front of Garden Lodge that she had to leave on March 1, 1992. He later moved into the home he built in Ireland with the artist’s money and lived there until his death. Jim Hutton passed away on January 1, 2010 from lung cancer. He was 61 years old.
“It is with great sadness that the beloved Jim Hutton has passed away.” He died at his home in Ireland. He was a lovely and funny man that Freddie loved very much, so let’s hope there is another life after that and that he and Freddie are reunited. This would be an awesome party! My thoughts are with his family and friends. “Rest in peace, my friend,” wrote Jacky Gunn, president of the Queen International Fan Club.
Jim Hutton and the HIV diagnosis
Just like Freddy Mercury, Jim Hutton was also diagnosed with HIV. In 1990 he was diagnosed with the disease but he didn’t want to tell his partner until late 1991, shortly before his death. Unlike Mercury, Hutton was able to receive treatment that allowed him to live with his disease. The four-year difference between one diagnosis and another was game-changing.
“If I had contracted the disease just a little while later, Freddie would still be with us, I’m sure,” Queen guitarist Brian May said in 2018 about the loss of his partner.
Jim Hutton’s 18 years without Freddie Mercury
In the 18 years he lived without Freddie, Jim Hutton decided to ease his pain by writing a book about their relationship. Mercury and I was released in 1994. “I decided to write it for my own benefit, for a psychological reason, to somehow alleviate the pain that I lost Freddie,” he explained in his first TV interview.
“I once asked him why out of all the people in the world he could have had he chose me to spend the last moments of his life with.” I look at me and said, ‘You fought for me, you won me.’ Freddie was the greatest love of my life and I know I will never love like that again,” she revealed in the book.
How long were Freddie Mercury and Jim Hutton together
Jim Hutton fired Freddie Mercury after six years together. The couple began their relationship in 1986, although they had actually met before in a London bar.
Hutton, of Irish nationality and hairdresser by profession, was with her boyfriend at the bar that night. “John Alexander, my boyfriend back then, went into the bathroom and some guy took advantage to flirt with me.” I was 34 and he was a little older. He was casually dressed in jeans and a white vest and, like me, had a mustache. He was skinny and not the kind of man I found attractive. I prefer bigger, curvy men. ‘I’ll buy you a drink’, he said to me. I had my beer almost full and said ‘No thanks.’ Then he asked me what I was doing that night. ‘You better ask my boyfriend,’ I told him,” Hutton wrote about the night he and I met on Mercury.
Coming back from the bathroom her boyfriend told her that a boy had wanted to have sex with him. “I pointed out who it was and he said, ‘That’s Freddie Mercury!’ ‘. Something that meant nothing to me because I was never last in music and had never heard of Queen. John, for his part, was flattered by the fact that a famous singer had taken an interest in his boy,” the book notes.
Coincidence led to that six months later they met in a restaurant and two years later they were reunited at a London club. In 1986 Hutton was single and accepted the artist’s proposal for a drink.
That’s how it all started and that same 1986 they decided to informally marry—the only possible way for the time—and went on their honeymoon to Japan. They always wore rings to symbolize their union.
They would have been an official marriage today, but then Freddie Mercury wouldn’t even talk about his homosexuality publicly (on a few occasions). Bohemian Rhapsody was his way of telling his family he was gay. This is how Lesley-Ann Jones, author of the biography of Freddie Mercury, picks it up, and so Jim Hutton himself defended it, although Mercury never confirmed it.
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