Hi! First of all, thank you so much for your meticulous work of compiling the quotes and getting all the sources linked + for your measured and level-headed responses. We are as a fandom truely in luck to have a responsable and careful person in charge of tinhatting.
You possibly had it posted already, and I just might have missed it - but do you have a compilation of rumours or/and unverified gossip? Definitely not trying to make them seem true and make decisive conclusions based on them, but I'm curious if there's any overlap in reports.
I don't think I've ever made a post exclusively about rumors/unverified gossip, but I do know quite a few that I've read or heard myself:
Paul and John were reportedly seen holding hands backstage during the filming of The Music of Lennon & McCartney TV special. Another person said their granddad worked on the special and claimed that John and Paul were extremely intensely close: if one sat down, the other did too; if one got up, the other did as well. They also said John and Paul would stare at each other for long periods of time, and that people working in production made jokes about it.
Someone who was friends with a celebrity who was once at an event where Paul was said that, at one point, Paul started talking about John and how much he missed him. That he went on and on saying that it bothered him that he missed John more as time went on, that it just didn't heal, and that he missed everything about John, even the arguments.
There are rumors that John and Paul were sometimes seen walking Martha around London while holding hands.
That one of the reasons Paul and Jane broke up was because Jane was uncomfortable with Paul and John's relationship (and, btw, they seem to have ended their engagement before Paul was with Francie, so it wasn't because she supposedly found them in bed together.) Ray Connolly (who knew Jane and spoke to her after the breakup, also hinted at this.
Someone claimed that his grandfather was a taxi driver in Liverpool, and that a few days after John's murder, Paul went to Liverpool and took his taxi. He supposedly wanted to visit many random places around Liverpool that seemed particularly memorable or important to him and John.
A woman claimed to be acquainted with a music producer who knew Paul. They started talking about John and Paul, and he said that Paul does believe Just Like Starting Over is about him. She then said to him that she believed John and Paul had been "a couple," and he replied, "Well, no shit!"
In the 80s, Paul apparently used to go to Liverpool a lot, according to locals, to take nostalgic walks around Merseyside (which, of course, is very reminiscent of the lyrics of Get Enough).
A fellow Tumblr user said that an acquaintance's father used to be a part-time driver for the Beatles, and that he heard rumors among the staff about John and Paul's relationship.
A person who claimed to have worked in the industry between roughly 1967 and 1970 said that Yoko gave a very watered-down version of the names the studio staff had for Paul, and that they also had a very derogatory nickname for John.
They also apparently used to make jokes about how much time John spent at Paul's house around 1967 (this is something I was told).
Diana Ross supposedly saw John and Paul together at a gay bar in Los Angeles around 1974. Tom Doyle's 70s book, Man on the Run, claims that John and Paul were seen together backstage at the 1974 Grammy Awards, also in LA, talking and laughing together.
An Apple Scruff said that she and her friends did notice there was something unusual about John and Paul's dynamic, but they didn't quite understand it at the time because they were quite naive about homosexuality.
That Ringo and George were supposedly uncomfortable with the subject if someone asked them anything, however indirectly, about John and Paul's relationship, and generally preferred to remain silent.
That John and Paul "being more than friends" is kind of an open secret in the music industry, and that this is why you see people like Howard Stern often pressing Paul about it. (Btw, something interesting I found is that Tony Manero—the guy who claimed John made advances toward him at a bar in the 70s and that he supposedly told him, "You're prettier than Paulie. You have a nicer mouth than him. Paulie's got a small mouth."—actually went to Howard's show in the 90s).
Eric Griffiths (who was there at the fete) supposedly said that when Paul started playing for John, he was visibly nervous and his voice cracked at one point, and that John (who was drunk) reached over and stroked his hair. He also allegedly called him "Little Elvis."
A person who claimed to know a woman who was one of Paul's assistants in the early 2000s said that Paul is bisexual and makes no secret of it within his inner circle. They also claimed that Paul often talks about John in the present tense (saying things like, "John thinks the music should be like this"). This, of course, reminds me of what Peter Cox said after meeting Paul in the late 80s: that Paul would say things like, "John thinks this," or "John says that."
Someone said they had a friend who met Paul at a party in LA. They chatted for a long time, hugged at one point, and Paul supposedly whispered to her, "Nobody has hugged me like that since John."
Supposedly, around 1966–1967, Paul hosted a lot of parties at Cavendish, and some guests were shocked by John and Paul's behavior there, saying they acted almost like a couple.
Paul was allegedly often overly concerned about where John was and what he was doing. When he couldn't reach him, he would sometimes theorize about what John was up to and become angry. If someone questioned his behavior, he would snap at them
Many girls who dated Paul allegedly questioned his sexuality, which bothered him greatly. That he hated being called "queer" and tried to compensate by dating lots of women (which, tbh, kind of fits with his later "I'm secure in my sexuality" and "I'm obviously ungay due to my hunting of female hordes" mantra that he kept bringing up, unprompted, for decades. He would also tell John Dunbar that there were a lot of rumours about him being gay).
A woman who worked on the Help! music video claimed that John and Paul's behavior behind the scenes was "cute," and that after spending some time with them, it became clear to her that they were deeply in love. She also said that George and Ringo would sort of wander away whenever John and Paul began "chatting up each other" (journalist Phyllis Batelle described a somewhat similar dynamic, with John and Paul always together and "turning out" the other two whenever "they were on").
That John wrote in his diary that his dreams were usually about Liverpool and Paul.
