Princess Diana’s night out at a gay bar with Freddie Mercury is making headlines again as a new book recounts the late royal’s escape from the palace dressed in male drag.
The story is one of many enmeshed in Diana’s mythology dissected in “Dianaworld: An Obsession” (out Tuesday) by biographer Edward White, who cites actress Cleo Rocos’ 2013 memoir for evidence of the princess’ wild London night.
In “The Power of Positive Drinking,” Rocos claimed that the she, along with her friend Kenny Everett and Mercury, disguised the late Princess of Wales in drag so she could go to one of London’s most popular gay bars, the Royal Vauxhall Tavern.
The trip allegedly happened in 1988 after Rocos, the princess, the Queen frontman and Everett spent an afternoon “drinking champagne in front of reruns of ‘The Golden Girls’ with the sound turned down” so they could improvise dialogue with “a much naughtier storyline.”
When Diana — “in full mischief mode” — learned of her friends’ plans to go to a gay bar that evening, she insisted on going.
Rocos and Everett attempted to dissuade her, with Everett telling Di that the bar was “not for you ” and “full of hairy gay men.” The princess was intransigent. Mercury then supposedly chimed in with, “Go on, let the girl have some fun,” and the matter was settled.
Everett decided that, if the show must go on, he would disguise Di in drag: “a camouflage army jacket, hair tucked up into a leather cap and dark aviator sunglasses.”
“Scrutinizing her in the half-light we decided that the most famous icon of the modern world might just . . . JUST, pass for a rather eccentrically dressed gay male model,” Rocos recalled. “She did look like a beautiful young man.”
As the group “inched through the leather throngs and thongs” at the Royal Vauxhall, Diana’s friends were terrified the ruse would collapse.
“When we walked in…we felt she was obviously Princess Diana and would be discovered at any minute. But people just seemed to blank her. She sort of disappeared. But she loved it,” Rocos remembered.
“We were nudging each other like naughty schoolchildren. Diana and Freddie were giggling… Once the transaction was completed, we looked at one another, united in our triumphant quest. We did it!”
Per Rocos, the princess sent Everett’s clothes back to him the following morning with a note: “We must do it again!”
The story has been disputed by Mercury’s former assistant and friend Peter Freestone, however.
“No, not at all,” Freestone replied when asked by Express Online in 2019 whether the night out ever took place. “Maybe Diana went with Kenny but Freddie wasn’t there. He never met her.”
As White wrote in his new book, Diana’s trip to a London gay bar with Freddie Mercury “sounds far-fetched, like one of the many apocryphal yarns of royal transformation that litter folklore and fairytales.” Yet, it also fits with Diana’s documented penchant for escaping royal life undercover so she could experience the wider world.
“[T]here are other, slightly less fantastical, tales about Diana disguising herself on nights out, such as when she accompanied Hasnat Khan to Ronnie Scott’s jazz bar in Soho, the princess obscuring her true self beneath a wig and glasses,” White emphasized.
Apocryphal or not, the story — which inspired the cabaret musical, “Royal Vauxhall” — “has been taken up as an illustration of her connection with the gay community and a metaphor for her own search for a family in which she felt truly accepted,” White added.