Like many world and business leaders and would-be Orlando vacationers, Queen guitarist Brian May is thinking twice about crossing the pond these days. Amid mounting state violence, threats of immigrant detention, and civilian executions, May tells the Daily Mail that touring the States again has given him pause because “America is a dangerous place at the moment, so you have to take that into account.” Since July, masked state agents have been involved in eight fatalities, including the shooting deaths of Alex Pretti, Good, and Keith Porter earlier this year. Meanwhile, the Trump administration’s masked police force has arrested more than 352,000 people, cramming them in inhumane detention centers, before shipping detainees, including children, to countries they’ve often never been to before. Particularly in cities such as Minneapolis, Los Angeles, and Portland, ME, things continue to escalate, and today, they began arresting journalists. “It’s very sad because I feel like Queen grew up in America and we love it, but it’s not what it was,” May says. “Everyone is thinking twice about going there at the moment.” Since 2009, May and Queen drummer Roger Taylor has toured with singer Adam Lambert under the name Queen + Adam Lambert. They last played America in 2023.
May didn’t speak to any particular reason why he feels America is becoming a dangerous place, though an increasingly violent secret police force that’s hostile to immigrants seems as good a reason as any to avoid a country. The guitarist’s personal politics have drifted left over the last few decades, particularly as the U.K.’s Conservative Party moved toward the isolationism of Brexit. He’s particularly engaged with animal welfare, and per Stereogum, refused to play Glastonbury Festival because, he claims, its founders “like killing badgers, and they think it’s for sport and that’s something I cannot support because we’ve been trying to save these badgers for years.”
