I Love Everyone in this Bubble Tea Bar

Jeeves and Wooster as incorrect quotes

Do you know when he stopped? Do you have the last time he did? (that's probably hard to find, sorry) Do you have any hunches as to why? My impression was that he was getting more open about this if anything

Yeah, it is easy to get the impression that Paul still uses these metaphors to this day because he has grown increasingly open about his love for John, and the media frames their relationship as a love story more than ever before. However, the surprising truth is that he hasn't actually used them since the late 80s (if any of you has an example that proves otherwise, please let me know). While he still occasionally refers to The Beatles' breakup as a "divorce," that is always in reference to the band as a collective entity, not his specific relationship with John. Paul’s usage of romantic and marriage language was strictly confined to a window between the early 70s and 1987. Immediately following the band's split, his analogies were raw: “You just don’t want to know about your ex-wife or ex-husband. After all the bitchiness, you feel the desire for a complete break.” A bit later, he echoed this: “There’s no hard feelings or anything, but you just don’t hang around with your ex-wife. We’ve completely finished.”

The 80s, however, brought his most explicit and surprisingly candid romantic analogies:

1981: "I understood what happened when he met Yoko. He had to clear the decks of his old emotions. He went through all his old affairs, confessed them all. Me and Linda did that when we first met. You prove how much you love someone by confessing all that old stuff. John's method was to slag me off."

1984: "Then also we were like married, so you got the bitterness. It’s not a woman scorned this time, it’s two men scorned — probably even worse. And I had to make way for Yoko. My relationship with John could not have remained as it was and Yoko feel secure."

1985: "Really all that happened was that John fell in love. With Yoko. And so, with such a powerful alliance like that, it was difficult for him to still be seeing me. It was as if I was another girlfriend, almost. Our relationship was a strong relationship. And if he was to start a new relationship, he had to put this other one away."

1987: “It’s just like divorce. It’s that you were so close and so in love that if anyone decides to start talking dirty — great, then Pandora’s box is open. That’s what happened with us.”

Also worth noticing is that this was also the only period in which Paul claimed John told him "Jealous Guy" was written about him, which is something he has never repeated since. By the 90s, the shift began. In the Anthology documentary, he did say, "I can't just let John take control of the situation and dump us as if we were jilted girlfriends," but here he utilized his now classic, protective plural "us," softening the phrase into a rather playful analogy. Since then, that specific category of romantic language has vanished from his vocabulary. Granted, Paul has become incredibly open in other ways recently. For example, he now openly admits that the reason they cried together in Key West was simply because of how much they loved each other (whereas in the early 2000s, he cautiously rationalized it as "probably" being about their mothers' deaths). He also speaks about John far more frequently and fondly today than he did in the 80s. In the immediate aftermath of John's death, it was likely too painful to open up, and Paul was still actively doubting whether John had truly loved him. Yet, paradoxically, that painful '80s era was the only time he used no-nonsense, openly romantic metaphors.

So, what changed after 1987? It is probable that the release of Albert Goldman’s biography in 1988, claiming that John was homosexual, had some impact on this. Paul then began making defensive counterclaims that John was very straight and that he had "slept with John a million times [sharing hotel rooms] and nothing happened", and "why not me? I'm handsome!", a defensive mantra he repeated consistently up until around 2015. He would also say things like, "If I saw John doing something, it would be ass bobbing up and down, fucking some chick." Now, in 1983, Peter Brown's book The Love You Make did strongly imply that John slept with Brian, but he didn't explicitly claimed that John was gay. When asked about it in the early 80s, Paul’s tone was much more relaxed and less defensive, saying things like: “I mean, the trouble is that he’s not here to fend for himself... John sometimes said, 'I may be gay one day, if some fella really turns me on.' He was that open about it... As far as I'm concerned, he didn't. I mean, was Peter in the room with them?” But after Goldman's book in 1988, Paul suddenly inserted himself into the narrative as proof of John's straightness, arguing that John was most likely not gay because he never made a pass at him. Coincidentally, the 90s marked the beginning of Paul's unprompted "I'm secure in my sexuality" and "I'm completely ungay" talking points.

Probably to avoid the media running away with the gay subtext, Paul permanently retired the highly revealing terms he used in the '80s ("his old affairs," "I was like another girlfriend," "in love", "ex-husband", "we were like married"). Instead, he opted for safer, more carefully chosen words that still acknowledged their profound love without inviting speculation. Fortunately, since 2016, Paul has let his guard down again. And the cultural shift surrounding the Get Back documentary and "Now and Then", which redirected the media's focus toward their deep affection rather than their late 60s and 70s acrimony, has probably made him more comfortable. I remember being very surprised when I saw him admit that he liked the idea of John writing Now and Then about him (I can't picture him saying that in the 2000s and early 2010s).

So, you know, it's not JUST a "quality of life" improvement. It's also a *quantity of life* improvement.

This was only 55 years ago. You can understand a lot of what’s wrong with the US if you realize that the average age of our elected senators is about 63. “Good old days” is a dogwhistle.

“The couple is given a choice: flee or go to jail. After they were arrested, the Lovings were sentenced to a year in prison. Then, a judge offered them a choice: banishment from the state or prison. They chose to leave Virginia at the time, but after several years, the Lovings asked the American Civil Liberties Union to take their case.Bernard Cohen and Philip Hirschkop, two young ACLU lawyers at the time, did.”

My father just had his 70th birthday.

When my parents first met it'd been less than a decade since the ruling was official.

They were convinced it'd be overturned and did not want their children to have to suffer for it, so they did not get married and searched desperately for each other in their own races. They could not find the love they had together in anyone else. They did eventually get married.

Too late for them to have the amount of children they'd desired. They had two, adopted a third, and that was that.

It was near enough to now that I, my sisters, and my parents were directly affected by it.

The Watsonville riots of the 1930's where white mobs attached Filipino farmworkers for being seen in dancehalls with white women, are part of a very long history of whiteness violently asserting its need to "protect" the purity of it's women and future children. And these kinds of backlashes are not in the past, we've just moved to different battlegrounds, the same accusations, of defiling the purity of white womanhood and white childhood are now leveled at the dangerous "othering influences" through book bans and other right wing conservative censorship efforts.

According to PEN America’s Banned Book Index, 41% of banned books include LGBTQ+ themes. 40% feature characters of color and 21% address issues of race or racism.

Remember, if we don't keep standing up loudly for equality the biggots on the right will be louder and keep dragging us further backwards from every step towards equality we make.

That's why I write stories for mixed, brown, bi, folks to see ourselves and our loves reflected in.

So some fanartist drew a “sexy” (read: booby) version of a (cartoon) character who is traditionally very non-sexualised. Fans of the character got mad about it because it’s kind of groundbreaking how that character is written and portrayed and this art totally ignores the entire point of the character. They demanded the art be deleted. In response to that other people said, well what the fanartist did may be distateful but they have every right to draw what they’re into. The two sides fight for days and each starts a harassment campaign and even report their “opponents’” accounts.

So far so typical. But things eventually come to a head and they decide that this will be settled by votes - not through a poll. Through donations to a children’s education charity via each side’s portal. Whoever can get the highest amount of donation wins.