Some ALW Phantom + Text Posts

You know the Grimm version of Snow White makes more sense than most versions if only because in that version Snow White was like 7 years old.

Ow🤌

IVE SAID IT BEFORE AND ILL SAY IT AGAIN. NOTHING ITS HARDER THAN LISTENING TO A SONG THAT YOU USED TO LISTEN TO WHEN YOU WERE IN SURVIVAL MODE TRAUMA RECOVERY.

like I’ll be like oh I haven’t heard this one in a while! This’ll be fun-BAM. August 2nd, 2023. It is 4pm and I have just woken up. Time to turn all the lights off close the blinds put my headphones on and become completely nonexistent. I haven’t conditioned my hair in a week. I have six nightmares a night. I wake up in a cold sweat multiple times. I either eat all day or don’t eat at all. I live off of the same movie every day. I cannot look in a mirror and I cannot sleep with my closet door open-

Nick Carraway really said: I don’t like people but have I mentioned 💖💕💖Gatsby 💖💗💕

IT IS TIME

ARE YOU TODAY’S DATE?

BECAUSE YOURE 10/10

The framing of this whole scene is... insane. Like something planned out for a fictional movie.

josh groban playing sweeney todd is great for many reasons but also because that means that this is who judge turpin shipped off to an australian penal colony.

and this is who came back 15 years later

I love this so much actually

there is SO much depth and beauty in the stories we hear in sweeney todd. a murderer who was once a doting father, so blind with hatred and anger towards the world that he couldn’t even see his own wife and daughter, staring him right in the face. a woman down on her luck and in love, trying so desperately to make a connection with a deeply broken and disturbed human. an unfortunately innocent and unknowing boy who ended up being the one who could sense the dark truth. a love at first sight that refused to die, even when torn apart by the disgusting perversion of a greedy abuser. sweeney todd is about all of these people, doing absolutely horrible things, all out of some form of love. that’s the beauty of sweeney todd. sweeney killed for a father and husband’s love. lovett baked real people with real lives into pies to maintain a shallow, lustful relationship she impossibly dreamed would bloom into true romance. turpin destroyed an innocent family because he could not contain his ‘love’ for a pretty woman and her daughter. toby slit a throat because his mother figure was all he had, and he loved her, simply and purely, as an innocent child loves a mother. their love is the purest of all in the story.

but my point is — yes, sweeney todd is about a murderer and his accomplice who cannibalizes and sells his victims. but it’s not. sweeney todd is about love. how love is even stronger and more dangerous than the deepest hate. it’s about how love can destroy people. this show is so beautifully, deeply, disgustingly human. and this dark, telling tale is somehow warped into some of the most gorgeous music to ever be written and made hilarious, lovable, and entertaining. musical theatre is truly magic. human nature is love and filth and greed. sweeney todd perfectly embodies both of these ideas.

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 openly 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 (…) 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.

Oh and I broke up with nick who is too afraid to ask out jay who is unhealthily obsessed with daisy who killed myrtle who was married to george who killed jay who hates tom who convinced george to kill jay. And then george killed himself

Hi I’m Jordan and this is my boyfriend Nick and this is Nick’s boyfriend Jay and this is Jay’s girlfriend Daisy and this is Daisy’s husband Tom and this is Tom’s girlfriend Myrtle and this is Myrtle’s husband George