My first exposure to Queen was by accident. I had a crush on a boy in middle school, and it being 2002, I sought to express my affection by burning him a CD. I dialed him up on my parents’ landline, twirled the coiled wire around my fingers, and asked him what bands he liked. “Queen,” he began to say with mock confidence. And then, “Nah, man. Just kidding.”

I’d never heard of Queen, nor did I understand why it would be a joke to pretend to like them. I was gay then, as I am now, but I hadn’t admitted it yet despite my pursuit of a male classmate. I later listened to a few Queen songs, and I liked them, sure. But it would take years for the band to grow on me, for me to figure out who Freddie Mercury was — then to figure out who he really was, and why he was such an important figure for queer people.

When the biopic about Mercury was announced in 2010, it was flagged for erasing the musician’s bisexuality and the circumstances of his death as a victim of the AIDS crisis in 1991. If those aspects of his life are indeed overlooked in the final product, it will be entirely in line with popular media’s straight-washing of Mercury; despite being one of the most famous bisexual people of all time, his queerness is often flattened and reduced to mere eccentricity. His bandmates have perpetuated this narrative.

The surviving members of Queen, Brian May and Roger Taylor, were said to have creative control of the film, titled Bohemian Rhapsody. It was rumored the movie would focus less on Mercury and more on the band’s gritty origin story. Before Mr. Robot’s leading man Rami Malek signed on to play Mercury, Borat’s Sacha Baron Cohen was slated to play the bisexual superstar. Cohen ultimately left the project after reported clashes with the band, who allegedly didn’t want to focus on Mercury’s sexuality or his battle with AIDS. When them. reached out to 20th Century Fox, the studio behind the film, for a response, they said they had no comment

When the trailer for the film dropped on Tuesday, controversy began anew with LGBTQ+ people crying foul on social media about its lack of queerness. Mercury is seen interacting with two women, and his interaction with a man is short and ambiguous. A notable voice in the LGBTQ+ community, TV writer and producer Bryan Fuller took to Twitter to accuse the trailer of “hetwashing.”

Others took aim at the alleged erasure of AIDS in the trailer. If the film does end up erasing this aspect of Mercury’s life, then it is particularly shameful considering that dominant society’s neglect of the AIDS crisis led to so many deaths. It’s a neglect that continues to present-day, and while queer films like BPM are telling the stories of the victims of that era, it remains a disturbing truth that the history of what was then called “the gay plague” is not being told in full.

“It is still fascinating to me, after all these years, that Queen’s management spent decades trying to convince the world that Freddie was heterosexual while he was alive, but then conceded to his homosexuality after he had died,” Lesley-Ann Jones, author of two biographies on Mercury, tells me via email. “They would not, however, allow for his bisexuality — even though they embraced and promoted Mary Austin (Mercury’s longtime girlfriend) as his ‘one true love!’”