#paul speculation

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 unique 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 is 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.

It’s definitely way off the mark for people to think he would have been open to any kind of actual, committed, gay relationship in the 60s in secret or with any level of openness, let alone a fully public one. I don’t think for one second he ever would have approached Paul for some kind of labeled relationship. 

But I don’t think it’s divorced from reality that people perceive him as more open about it. While of course we can’t presume to know, but if you believe, as I do, that Paul did experience some level of same-sex attraction and/or experimented in some way- then John was the more open about it of the two.

Like many things in John’s life, he managed to rattle around between both extremes of the horseshoe. I think I relate to John in the way that he deeply yearns to be seen and understood while being absolutely terrified at times of the practice of it. Paul is much happier to keep it all himself thank you very much, never you mind about it, no reason to make a fuss and all that- that old wartime chin up mentality. 

John needs his pain and messiness to be observed. The altercations make sense in a backward way- he was more impulsive and open about it, so he gets into more scraps when he feels it’s gone too far out of his control after fanning the flames himself. 

But I also don’t think it’s that unusual that he had very different reactions about these things in different circumstances. I think he was willing to have a joke, even be vulnerable and let things slip and also to experiment with men when he felt he was with people he sufficiently trusted. He was a painfully public figure- there are other stories about all four of them having little freak outs when they suspected someone in their midst might be recording/photographing them or might sell them out. 

John smacked a journalist’s tape recorder out of his hand when he jokingly went to ask a girl John was chatting up a question with it, according to Larry Kane, then apologised for it after he realised it was only a joke and it hadn’t been on. And that was just the hint of good old fashioned hetero infidelity. 

It was illegal and could be utter social death (with the threat physical violence against you) in Liverpool to be outed even as a non-famous person, and that motivated his reactions. But also he was so used to people trying to expose him and sell him out to the press (see people stalking Cynthia and Julian to break the story) I think he was probably genuinely scared that when someone he didn’t trust started ribbing him, it could seriously damage him.

He obviously did go through periods of greater and lesser acceptance- but he beat up Bob then told Pete Shotton about him and Brian quite nonchalantly right afterwards, if I’m remembering right. (Someone correct me if I’m wrong on the order/timeline). And when he falls asleep on the floor of his attic with Pete, he doesn’t freak out about the closeness or no homo Pete, he freaks out that the housekeeper will find them, suspect something and (presumably, he worries) will tell Cynthia or worse. They all had to sack staff for leaking things and stealing things at various points. 

Not to justify his reactions- but I think choosing what to share vs the immediate panic of realising someone might be about to find something out or reveal something against your will are very different. And it makes sense he reacted in the second scenario, even if it was obviously in destructive ways. 

In 1963, it was far more socially acceptable to beat a man up than to be gay- the story about Bob barely dented them. Whereas Brian had been beaten, arrested and tried for being gay. Hence John’s Marlon Brando/Oscar Wilde quote (which is extra good because Brando also turns out to have had relationships with men which John probably didn’t know lol, but he correctly sensed the artifice and bravado in Brando’s image))

I suspect that through Brian, Victor Spinetti, Bob Fraser etc, he soon came to realise that there was a code of silence in journalism, politics,the law etc if you were a successful person and even if someone rang it in, the English papers weren’t going to run it, and among other factors that chilled him out a bit. And also just greater acceptance of it having been around more gay men and physically being out of Liverpool in much more liberal London. He told Hunter Davies the Brian thing for the book- perhaps he thought he wouldn’t run it, perhaps he wanted him to, perhaps he didn’t think about it either way and just wanted him to know. But whatever the thinking- it was something he chose to share. 

Even in the US- I suspect he reacts when he feels he is losing control of the situation, being rejected or laughed at, and maybe this person will go and tell people and make it a joke or an unclean thing- so back out comes the macho front. Even when at times it feels like he wanted people to know, I doubt the fear of suddenly realising someone around him might go and tell on him ever left him. He was resistant to seeing a psychiatrist about his mental health because he was scared they would sell the story and leak his notes. And they very well might have, people did worse.

If he had lived I think he would have chosen to share more on his own terms. 

Sorry this was long but I have lots of feelings about Johnny

This all feels like a pretty fair take on John's relationship with his sexuality, thank you for typing it up and bringing up how fame played into the whole thing – (Although slight correction: according to Pete Shotton, John told him about the Spain incident before the Wooler stuff – the rumours basically exploded upon their return, which was like a month before Paul's birthday) – but I'm mainly going to respond in the context of the post you're responding to.

The phrase I used was "on board with the whole gay thing" not "open", and I think these are two distinct things. I would agree that John was more open, because, as you described, John was more open about everything.

Conversely, Paul is a private person about most aspects of his life. And, while I personally don't believe Paul is hiding a queer identity, so his behaviour to me reads as fairly open and shut societal homophobia sprinkled with his personal insecurity regarding his less-than-macho presentation, I also know a fair amount of bi Paul truthers on tumblr think he is pretty unbothered by his sexuality and guarding it mostly because he guards most aspects of his personal life.

tbh i’ve kinda given up on that whole topic because his side is so ambiguous it gets boring, there’s basically no direct info. it’s always john, ian james, mal evans, tara browne, and robert fraser, but the last two were clearly just platonic, and ian james just feels like a close childhood friend

i read a twitter thread saying paul cheated on linda with men and that some of those guys were basically “confirming” mccartney’s bisexuality, and that paul was super image-conscious and allegedly told his manager/publicist to scrub all that 😭 idk if that’s even real. and that diana ross supposedly saw paul and john at a gay club?? but again, it’s all just rumors and it stays in this weird limbo. i’m not even fully convinced. paul is literally an older man living in a time where being gay isn’t taboo anymore, so it would make sense for him to come out if that were the case… unless it’s about privacy or shame or whatever, idk. i feel like i’m lowkey leaning toward that idea just because of what i’ve read, but it’s still really shaky. i think i’m also leaning toward the idea that maybe paul just isn’t comfortable with the bisexual label and prefers to be seen as a man who’s obsessed with women, but obviously i don’t know, that’s his privacy

(this whole paul situation is starting to give me GAYLOR theory vibes i’m sorry 😭 it’s so corny but idk how else to describe it. if i said all that on twitter they’d crucify me 🫩)

i think there’s an interview where paul talks about john and brian during that spain trip, and he says he only ever saw john fucks with women, but that he kinda believes something might’ve happened between them there, he just brushes it off as a “deviation” from john 💀 and it’s so funny to me because it’s like.

Ah! So the love letter story originates from Francie Schwartz' book. She said she found it in Paul's car (bear in mind that would've been almost a year after Brian had died). Francie's generally questionable credibility aside, I don't think she elaborated further on the contents of the letter so whether she was herself reading into Brian's words (and we know Brian could get flowery and dramatic) or whether the letter contained an unambiguous confession is hard to say. Either way, the story isn't implausible, I just don't take it as a given. (Also I would expect if it was true that Paul would have compartmentalized that away and possibly even forgotten about it since)

Concerning men people link to Paul, so much of it feels to me like a transparent attempt to bolster McLennon specifically. These days, Robert Fraser is mostly brought up as someone who ostensibly made John jealous. Tara Browne even more so, since Paul doesn't really talk about him, and it's like all a strange metaphor: Paul wouldn't trip with John, but he would with Tara and We All Know that LSD is just a stand-in for sex, ergo ipso facto etc

As much as I criticize some of the rhetoric on here, I have to imagine it's worse on twitter, because the format encourages shooting off at the mouth with the punchiest one liner (in a way I think has done a lot of damage to internet discourse in general). I have never come across a source confirming Paul cheated on Linda, let alone with a man, and five years into this fandom and following this speculation, I cannot imagine that that would be a thing without my knowing of it (except if it's that member of Fleetwood Mac I wanna say who claimed Paul and George invited him to a threesome....? Didn't that guy like join a cult or something though 💀 I only half remember this story, my main memory was that the source didn't come across as stable and the claim was generally outlandish LMAOOOO)

Thinking it over, I think you're twitter person is possibly taking the plot of the book Rock Bottom (written by Paul's ex-publicist) as a literal description of Paul's behaviour.... That's a whole Other thing to unpack, so I'll leave it at that here.

I think it's possible Paul is bi and private about it or doesn't actually identify as such, but the concept that he's intentionally "dropping hints" in 2026 instead of just coming out irritates me lmao, makes me actively less sympathetic. I don't think that's a real thing, to be clear, I think it betrays a certain Everything Is About/For ME attitude many of these theories carry with them — this idea that content is specifically for you: not only is Paul bi, he wants you in particular to know and he is referencing this fact in a way you can understand (instead of say weaving actual inside jokes of his and John's that we as a third party would not be privy to into his lyrics). Incidentally, that is why the Gaylor comparison is often quite apt. (And one of my hot takes is going on lyrics alone, Gaylors have a stronger case, which is why when people bring up Paul's lyrics I'm like "well. none of this is Cruel Summer tho, is it?" even though I'm not a Gaylor.)

Are you referring to that anon's rant? If so, I know nothing about Paul going to drag bars and got the feeling the anon was misrepresenting some sources that say John did something like that in Hamburg (don't remember what the sources are and how reliable they are, but they do exist). Maybe I missed something, though; it wouldn't surprise me a ton if once or twice Paul found himself in a drag bar.

But I find it becomes kind of myopic to look at Paul's gender presentation exclusively in the context of his relationship to John instead of in the context of the time period. Yeah, he was at an all-time macho-low (in terms of his clothing at least) in 1967 when he was on good terms with John – but so was the rest of his entourage? They were hippies. Yeah, he was into sparkly tour outfits in the 70s, around the time he and John started talking again – but so was much of the rock scene around then. Yeah, he started wearing more normie clothes in the 80s and started boasting more about his normie lifestyle – the 80s were a period of society-wide conservatism (plus he was learning to accept that people were finding him too old to act a certain way and was generally leading a more lowkey life, see also: no more touring).