No‐One But You (Only The Good Die Young)

The nAIght comes down.

Took these screenshots from the last seconds of the video, but in motion it's even worse. I was worried about the animated photos -that still look bad- but I wasn't prepared for this.

I'm glad any person with functioning eyeballs is currently trying to pop them out of their sockets and slamming Queen Productions in the comments of everything, this is HIDEOUS.

"In these days of Artificial Intelligence beginning to invade our whole lives, these mechanical guys personify Robotic Insurgence. In our still-developing current show, Back to Humans - is the soundtrack to us as humans reclaiming our control." - Brian May

I'm done.

1. Could've paid actual artists instead of a dude with a keyboard (artist specialised in AI my big ass, this sucks even for being AI), Beatles have been making beautiful animated videos for years and got lots of praise.

2. Could've done like the A Kind of Magic video and gather fanarts from fans literally for free and it would've looked gorgeous.

Btw for sure we'll get a video for Mad the Swine as well. Don't let them do this again, Queen music deserves better.

Freddie Mercury was bisexual though

Nope, this is false! 🏳️‍🌈 Freddie was gay, there’s a lot of misinformation out there about his non-existent affairs with women, and much of it can be chalked up to a shit biographer named Lesley Ann Jones (aka my arch nemesis).

I've been deeply fascinated by Freddie Mercury and studying his personal life for years and years so excuse the following infodump (or jump in for a queer history lesson!)

Contrary to popular belief, Freddie was an out gay man. “Gay as a daffodil, my dear!” He’s clearly stated his sexuality in a handful of interviews; “I’ve done all that but I’m gay. Mary was my last woman.” (This interview was removed from youtube but you can find it mentioned in Freddie Mercury: A Life, in His Own Words which is a compilation of his actual quotes from interviews over the years.) Those statements got buried from the media in favor of promoting his more promiscuous quotes like "Darling, I'm doing everything with everybody." (Journalists LOVE to include this quote when talking about his AIDS...) He did purposely retain an aura of mystique around his sexuality, especially because it was much safer (trendy, even) for musicians to flirt with bisexuality than to be homosexual back then.

Here's a quote from Peter "Phoebe" Freestone, Freddie's personal assistant of twelve years, close friend, and "agony aunt" in his memoir, Freddie Mercury: An Intimate Memoir by the Man Who Knew Him Best:

"When the interview appeared, it was half the length that he imagined it would be. When confronted, Judy Wade said that it would have been impossible to have printed the whole text. She said she was holding back for his benefit, not for hers. Admissions such as, "I'm just going for a line and I'll be back in half-a-minute," would not have done anyone any good. However, she was fully prepared to underline in her second sentence that admission of being a fully 'out' gay man, although this does not lay the later myth which was popular which claimed that Freddie had never admitted his gayness."

Freddie's close friend Thor Arnold, a gay man and member of the "New York Daughters" (Freddie's gay friend group in NYC, of course Freddie was "mother!") corrected misinformation when fans on the Queenzone forum argued that Freddie was bi:

"Freddie NEVER tried to hide to his friends that he was TOTALLY gay. In his industry, he had to hide it to some extent although as I have said before, he certainly gave clues. This is the same man who came up with the name QUEEN for his band. This is the man who dressed very sexually, ambiguously 'glam' up until 1980. This is the man who threw an Easter bonnet party and had us all create Easter hats. This is the man who used the term darling (or Dahling) more than he used proper names, and renamed his friends with old actresses names. These things are doubtful for a straight or bi man. Many gays don't even act like this... I've never seen Freddie look twice at a woman but I have seen him look 3 or 4 times at an attractive man and say, 'Thor, Thor... Oh just look at him... Just gorgeous. I'd love some of THAT' We were genuine friends of Freddie and he would never hide that he was really bi. FREDDIE WAS A GAY MAN through and through...everyone...please get used to it."

LAJ, the biographer I previously mentioned, worked VERY hard to straight-wash Freddie in her book by erasing his gay relationships. She was obsessed with his relationship with Mary Austin and is the main reason modern journalists consider Freddie to have been in profound, romantic love with her his whole life. In reality, they dated for a few years in the 70s and remained close friends after they split up (because Freddie was having affairs with his boyfriend). However, he did rely on her as his "beard" to keep up with appearances for the press.

LAJ completely skipped over Freddie's first official boyfriend, saying it was "a covert fling with a young theatre." His name was David Minns. Freddie loved him so much he left Mary to be with him. They were in a serious relationship for three years.

If you're a Freddie fan, you're familiar with Mary's story of him coming out to her, saying "I think I'm bisexual," and her response, "I think you're gay." This story is probably not the truth. Mary has been very inconsistent with her story of how Freddie came out to her.

Another version she told for BBC Radio:

"I don’t know what sparked the conversation. But I remember standing in the kitchen and he was trying desperately to articulate how he was feeling, and his lifestyle and I just said, 'so you are telling me you're gay?' And he just smiled and 'we'll take it as a yes, you know, we'll leave it at that.' And that was it, it has been a long road getting to that point."

Honestly, I am a bit mistrustful of Mary Austin's intentions in general. If you're curious as to why, this post is a good primer on the ways she might have betrayed Freddie's wishes, namely being cruel to his chosen family after his passing.

Freddie only had one other girlfriend before Mary in college, Rosemary Pearson. When asked about Freddie on ITV's This Morning show, she said that he was more interested in her male friends than in her, and she suspected then that he was gay. This was in the 60s.

LAJ refers to his relationships with women throughout her book, but she doesn't list any names. That's because they don't exist. I could name at least seven of Freddie's boyfriends off of the top of my head. Minnsy. Joe Fanelli. Tony Bastin. Vince the Barman. Bill Reid. Winnie Kirchberger. And of course, his husband Jim Hutton, whom he spent the last six years of his life with.

There is one name that LAJ has chosen to platform and exaggerate her importance, and that's German pornstar Barbara Valentin. If you've heard of her, you might think she had a relationship with Freddie in the 80s, you might have heard the story where he had wild threesomes with her, that they lived together, that he even proposed to her. Not one word of it is true. Freddie hung around Barbara during his time in Munich because she was his 'in' to gay clubs and cocaine dealers. She also served as his English translator and conveniently, another beard for the press.

Not a single person in Freddie’s life has ever corroborated that Freddie and Barbara were anything but friends. As for the claim they lived together, according to Peter Freestone:

In the event, Freddie never actually lived there although Barbara fulfilled a huge role in Freddie’s life at that time… Freddie became very disillusioned when with more and more frequency articles were appearing in the German press’s gossip columns… about the relationship between him and Barbara… After one article claiming to have knowledge of him and Barbara getting married, Freddie concluded that it could only be Barbara who was providing the information.

(He was actually living with his Bavarian boyfriend of the time, Winnie Kirchberger.) Freddie stopped seeing Barbara after he found out she was gossiping about being his lover and these stories started appearing in the newspapers. Barbara continued these lies after Freddie's death, making up ludicrous lies like how Freddie tried to kill her by smothering her with a pillow?? She also claimed that he put her at risk of contracting AIDS by having sex with her after his diagnosis in 1987, which is the lie that burns the most. Freddie stopped having sex altogether before his diagnosis because he was terrified of contracting it. Before there was any information of how it was transferred, he showered compulsively. There is such a fucked up narrative that Freddie threw caution to the wind and wasn't careful during the epidemic, that it somehow fits this twisted narrative that his death was a result of his immoral lifestyle. That's the pervasive homophobia that stained the Bohemian Rhapsody biopic.

LAJ is one of those biographers who publishes their books after the celebrity has died, so they wouldn’t be able to deny the information being written in the book. So if there's anything to learn here, is that you can't always trust a biography!

Anyway, Freddie was gay as a daffodil my dears, and he deserved better.

My Favorite Moments from Queen 1 (almost all from Disc 3)

I listened to it for the first time finally and UGHHHH we were FED

-Roger’s maniacal laughing in the Keep Yourself Alive De Lane Lea Demo (disc 2)

-Freddie: aw that was a good end Rog, I love that [Great King Rat, De Lane Lea Take 1]

-Mad the Swine Trident Take 3. Just the entirety of it. All that wholesomeness

-Roger: I tell you now, I’ve been deliberately playing off all week! […] Freddie: AHAHADJGGJJAHAAAH I can’t get this timing, hang on [My Fairy King Trident Backing Track In Development. Like all of it but especially the first 40 seconds]

-Brian: nOOOOO!! oh dear— […] Brian: *messing around on his guitar* Freddie: SHUT UP BRIAN [The Night Comes Down, De Lane Lea Takes 1 & 2]

-Roger: okay Brian? Brian, from the distance: r I G H T!!!! [Modern Times Rock N’ Roll, Trident Takes 8 & 9]

-*music* Roger: you f***ed it Brian Freddie: it was you Brian Brian: SHIIIIIIIIT [Jesus, De Lane Lea Take 2]

-Freddie: sorry about this, but Brian’s guitar is about to blow up [See What A Fool I’ve Been, De Lane Lea Test Session]

EDIT: I made a video compilation of these so y’all didn’t have to! Captioned (I tried my best…it gets hard when they talk over each other) and color coded. Freddie is black and white, Brian is blue, Roger is red, John doesn’t talk in these clips. If it’s plain white, I didn’t know who was talking. Enjoy :)

Freddie on the cover of Vogue! 👑

johny boy💝

📸 Pat McConnell

Shared by Tim Staffell who recently (2020) rediscovered the contact print of Smile's photo session.

These were scattered across the OIQFC magazine, Tim's TikTok, and Tim's subscription newsletter - so I thought I'd put them all together! I hope he'll share or sell proper scans of the whole thing one day.

Is this a prince? 🥹🙏🏼❤️

💖 ready Freddie ✨

reference!! :

also i was bored and watched iconic queen clips all evening just because i can :P