The Queen and Adam Lambert tour just wrapped up its 24-city North American run on a very successful note, selling out venues and gathering together fans of different generations.
Adam Lambert, who filled in for the legendary Freddie Mercury, was met with apprehension from Queen purists at first. After several stages, however, he proved himself worthy to be fronting the stage with surviving Queen members, Brian May and Roger Taylor.
After constantly being compared to the late frontman, Lambert insisted that he's not trying to imitate the great musician during the Queen and Adam Lambert tour.
"I'm Adam onstage. I'm not playing Freddie. I'm not trying to be him," he told The Advocate in an interview. "However, he's so amazing. His recordings and his performances were so incredible that I can't help but be inspired by them. And on a technical level, I don't want to move too far away from the music that they've created, but I do want to put my own stamp on everything."
He's also quite proud that Mercury's sexuality didn't hinder the singer from being successful, with his fans appreciating his music first and foremost.
"It doesn't have to matter whether you're gay, straight, bi, black, white, whatever, man, woman. That's not the point. That's not the thing that's bringing us together," the 32-year-old hitmaker said about sexuality in the industry. "The thing that's bringing us together is music. [We're] entering a period of time now where we're getting towards that post-gay sensibility, which is, so what? But it took a lot of fighting to get there."
Despite the more accepting society today, the 'For Your Entertainment' singer admitted that there are still a lot of discrimination in record labels and the music industry in general.
He added, "You have to make a choice: do I want to be [in] this for the cause, or do I want to be able to run my business a certain way? It's difficult. It's really difficult."
The silver lining to this problem however, is the younger generation now are less judgmental when it comes to sexuality.
"This next generation coming up is like, 'Hey, it doesn't f-g matter... My sexuality, doesn't [determine that] this is the type of music I listen to, or this is the type of activities I'm into, or these are the type of people I hang out with," the openly gay singer explained. "It's getting to the point now where we're more mainstream, and we're allowed to do anything we want, and we're allowed to be with anybody we want."
Lambert also expressed his excitement at meeting fellow musicians who are either openly gay or doesn't let their sexual preference define their work. Jake Shears from the Scissor Sisters and Sam Sparro are just some of the singers he respects. He also met Sam Smith in London and thought he was wonderful.
Meeting all these individuals gave him a sense of "certain fraternity."
The Queen and Adam Lambert tour will be setting off for Australia this August, then to Asia later on.
