it must be pretty torturous to be on tumblr and not think paul was queer lmao. do you think he was just like crazily obsessed with john to an unhealthy degree? i feel like if you apply occam's razor, all of paul's confusing statements and behavior make the most sense if there were romantic feelings involved, even if they went unacknowledged/unreciprocated, because it's either that or paul is certifiably insane lol
The main "torture" is the constant flood of posts implying that believing that is stupid, when I've spent a lot of time thinking about this and really try to assess new evidence whenever it crosses my dash, even forcing myself to reconsider when my initial kneejerk reaction is a confirmation bias-infected "DOESN'T MATTER!"
First, I do wanna point out that whether Paul and John were lovers wouldn't really affect whether Paul's attachment to John is healthy – I don't think interpreting his most intense tendencies towards John as based in romantic attraction automatically makes them healthy.
In short: I think it wouldn't be wrong to say that, on the whole, Paul has an unhealthy relationship with John/his memory (though I think it's about as good as it can be by this point and I want to emphasize that I don't think this means their relationship was lacking in love and/or meaning). I jot this down to the trauma of fame, the trauma of the Beatles breakup, the trauma of John's toxic behaviour towards Paul in particular, the trauma of losing John suddenly in a way that will always feel fundamentally unfair and never make a modicum of sense, the trauma of being publicly raked through the coals while John was elevated to a saintly status. Add onto that bonding over losing their mothers young, bonding through songwriting, bonding through dunique experiences like LSD. All of these factors are entirely independent of whether or not Paul was in love with John, and even one of them would suffice for their relationship to read as at least a bit odd IMO.
I feel like if you wanted my full assessment, we'd have to go through the different pieces of evidence one by one, because how I interpret them falls into one of several bins:
The rare instance where Paul is saying something that I agree are most easily read as romantic: it's your "Maybe if I had been a girl, I could go out and…" – that type of thing (Note that not every single quote about Yoko falls into this category). Overall, I think marriage analogies are complicated because of the way we put romantic relationships on a pedestal, but I cannot deny that that is the particular analogy Paul chose to make many times – there just aren't enough other indicators to sway me.
Quotes and behaviours indicating very deep and complicated feelings towards John, but that I don't think are necessarily romantic: it's your "delicious broth of boy", your "it's only me" anecdote, your "I wish I had sat and just hugged John all the time". Refer to my "In short:" paragraph for how I interpret these. Also, Paul being Weird™ about any implication that John wasn't straight belongs here too, because I think he has a complicated relationship with all that due to his complicated relationship with John.
Song lyrics: I generally put a lot less stock into these because I think you cannot often say for certain who a song is about, and even assuming certain songs are about John, artistic license makes it incredibly difficult to draw conclusions about the exact nature of Paul's feelings based on the lyrics, especially because his writing style is not all that diaristic and he quite often chooses words for their pure phonetic appeal. I always like bringing up "Girl" and "Day Tripper" in this context, because both of these songs are romantic on the surface, but, according to their own writers, they are in fact about religion and the drug scene. Generally, lyrics are malleable to many plausible interpretations, in a way I find unuseful to reconstruct history.
The "strong correlations": this is stuff like Paul admiring Joe Orton's work, him having a close relationship with Robert Fraser, adopting more campy fashion during certain periods, in short: Paul being adjacent to queer culture. I don't necessarily think these things mean nothing, (though I find it can come across somewhat backhanded to imply Paul would only enjoy Orton's Loot if he was queer, despite the fact the play clearly appeals to other things Paul was interested in, such as criticizing religion). I mostly think this is a very shaky foundation to build a theory on, and, frankly, there are plenty of quotes from Paul that read as intensely clueless regarding queer life ("If there was to be gayness…"). So it kind of becomes a net zero for me.
ERROR 404 MORE CONTEXT NEEDED: here's where I put stuff like Paul responding "in bed" to how he would spend a day with John. He could be joking, he could be being flippant because the question is personal, he could be revealing a very intimate but potentially platonic desire, he could be (inexplicably, tbh) alluding to the fact he would like to fuck John. Ultimately, a two word answer in a print article is essentially uninterpretable IMO.
Genuine nothingburgers, i.e. stuff that either does not mean anything in relation to McLennon or Paul's sexuality, or has been taken wildly out of context: my go-to example for this one is "John had beautiful hands" where the fact Paul is comparing John to his teenage son – whose hands he explicitly also praises – is almost always omitted. Also stuff like Paul saying "I am the binary" when the context is very obviously duality in the song "Hello Goodbye", which is a song about the push and pull of pessimism vs. optimism.
titsay
yousharknotpass
turnnoffyourmind
theartofmadeline
romaincrisis
