Excerpt from Entangled States by Karmela Padavic-Callaghan, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Excerpt
Entangled States

While working on calculations for my PhD late into the night, I'd pull up Queen's 1986 Live at Wembley Stadium on YouTube, hoping that its energy would keep me awake. Most of the time, however, my equations would go unsolved as I got emotional watching Freddie prance around the stage, awash in the crowd's adoration.

Freddie in the white track pants with the red stripes. Freddie in the short yellow jacket. Freddie in the white singlet and sweating. Throughout that show, he is an icon from the very first second to the last. As I grew older, I could recognize that he was also not just any icon, but specifically a queer one. When I moved to New York, seemingly every butch queer woman and transmasculine person I met admitted to having once worn that white singlet outfit as a Halloween costume. I now have friends who call me "cutie" in the same cadence with which Freddie greets the Wembley audience as he says, "Hello again, my beauties."

I have long understood that musicians that I adored as a child, such as AC/DC, never wrote their music with a fan like me in mind, and that I would have probably felt unsafe had I found myself in a bar full of their acolytes. Queen felt different. Now I understand how, as a child, I grew so obsessed with them and specifically with Freddie, who never became a romantic crush. I wasn't drawn to him because I was in love with him; it's just that the seeds of what drew me to his energy—a singular queer masculinity and power—were already within me.

One dramatic plot point in the Freddie Mercury documentary from my childhood took place in the 1980s, just a few years after Queen's staggering breakout success with the hit song "Bohemian Rhapsody," when Freddie cuts his long hair short and ditches the flamboyant and feminine trappings of glam rock. As a kid, I had sung along to Queen records and imagined being famous. If I were to imagine becoming famous now, I would certainly make space for the dramatic documentation of the moment when I too turned more butch.

But "Innuendo" also gets its own moment in my story, and its own performance. In this case, however, the year is 2021 and the performer is my mom. We are attending her pole dancing class in Croatia, and I am crying.

She was a regular in the class; I was just visiting and trying to keep up. At the start of the class, we did a mix of yoga and calisthenics, neither of which was exactly foreign to me but now I was doing them outside my usual context. Unlike at my New York gym, here I was surrounded mostly by women in their forties and fifties, mostly in outfits that were skimpier than my own regular workout clothes. The class evolved from there, first with a moment of spiritual affirmation and talk about the divine feminine, then the practice of some very technical moves—one of which was new to the class and included hanging off the poles—and, ultimately, actual dancing. All the women seemed to move through the class with ease and comfort, immersing themselves in this mix of physical training, new-age sisterhood, and tapping into their sensuality. All regulars, they joyously stretched, crunched, and rolled, demonstrating a confidence that made me jealous.

The physical strain of the class didn't bother me, and the pole dancing move that was being taught that evening wasn't beyond what my body— used to strenuous exercise—could handle. I could do the parts of the lesson that required being strong—flexing a leg, broadening the shoulders, tightening the core, gripping the pole. What I could not do was be confident and elegant, the part that would have made it dancing and not just working out. Women spread around several poles in the studio and alternately practiced the new move and cheered each other on. My mom spun and swung on her pole easily and her cheers were natural and genuine. She fit into the space just right and was enjoying every second of being there. Excitement and joy emanated from her brightly.

Excerpted from Entangled States by Karmela Padavic-Callaghan. Copyright © 2026 by Karmela Padavic-Callaghan. Excerpted by permission of Beacon Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.