Anonymous asked: Freddie being bisexual is something very important to me, and the bi erasure of him hurts me terribly, but I don't have any sources to back me up whenever friends casually go "He's gay." What are the most reliable sources on Freddie?

First of all, I want to say that this isn’t something you should need stacks of books to “prove.” It is a matter of easily verifiable fact that Freddie Mercury publicly identified as bisexual throughout the mid-’80s (the latest point at which he gave any statements on the subject).  Here are some relevant quotes, drawn from Freddie Mercury: His Life in His Own Words, a compilation of various comments from interviews and similar sources:

“ … Yes I’m gay. I’ve done all that. I’m as gay as a daffodil, dears. But I couldn’t fall in love with a man the way I could with a girl. … I had a girlfriend I lived with for five years – Mary. I had boyfriends as well. … I’ve had a lot of lovers, of course. I’ve had more lovers than Liz Taylor! Both male and female. … My sex drive is enormous. I sleep with men, women, cats – you name it. I’ll go to bed with anything!”

Obviously he’s being somewhat flippant and evasive about details in these cases, because it’s none of the media’s business, but the overall point remains: after coming out of his already shaky closet in the mid-late ‘70s, Freddie Mercury consistently identified himself as someone capable of romantic/sexual love for multiple genders. We have no reason to believe this was a lie.

And that is all you need to know, or it should be, but unfortunately because Freddie’s life doesn’t fit neatly into the usual boxes constructed (mostly by straight and white people) for queer identity, people lose their shit.

The idea here–propagated repeatedly by popular biographies mostly written by straight people–is that because he doesn’t seem to have had any sexual relationships with women after he broke up with Mary, he could not really have been bisexual (and probably his relationship with Mary was somehow fake). But bisexuality doesn’t work that way! Not all bisexuals (dare I say, not most bisexuals) have even gender ratios across their relationship histories.

People like to claim that Freddie lied to the media all the time, so obviously he was lying when he said he loved women, but that’s a vast oversimplification both of Freddie Mercury’s stated and lived sexuality and of his relationship with the media. If you look at his actual words and compare them to his life, he very rarely seems to have lied save when absolutely necessary to protect his privacy. He certainly misdirected media attention onto his arguably romantic but almost certainly not sexual friendships with women, in order to protect his male lovers from getting hounded by the press. But that doesn’t explain away his persistent insistence that his love for Mary Austin was real, his flat declarations that he loves regardless of gender.

And, frankly, the popular idea that a man who would lovingly shout reclaimed slurs at audiences in the tens of thousands, who named his fucking band Queen, was too insecure and closeted to admit that he was really just gay, and so instead called himself bisexual (as if that was less scary to admit to the entire world?)…is obvious bullshit.

Freddie Mercury was bisexual because that was how he described his identity as a queer man. At no point in his life did he ever show any indications he considered absence of attraction to women an aspect of his sexual identity, in the way the modern use of the word “gay” suggests, and we should respect that.

Does it bother you that a man that obviously gay should presume to call himself bisexual instead? Interrogate that thought.

–all of this is to say, this isn’t a question that needs sources, but the book I mentioned early on can be found on Amazon. It is rather poorly organized, but nevertheless invaluable in understanding the way Freddie Mercury presented himself to the world. I would also recommend reading the various memoirs written by people who knew him, although keep in mind that all of them are human beings with their own human foibles and are going to bring their personal perspective to the table.

Anti-rec almost any other biography, although I have found Mark Blake’s A Kind of Magic to be at least tolerable. The others I have tried are all condescending and dismissive and bent on fitting Freddie’s unique personal story into their own narratives on many subjects.

Anonymous asked: What's your opinion on the sexualization of Halloween?

dreamgrl1998:

halloween is inherently sexy. demons? the devil? ghosts and goblins? Hot