#Peter Phoebe Freestone

[fivedollarradio]

Peter describes extraordinary Freddie's reaction to his AIDS diagnosis: "He said, ‘Never regret anything. You’re wasting time when you can’t change it. Get on with what you want to do. He thought he was sick in 1986 and it was confirmed in 1987.

"He didn’t get depressed. He wasn’t afraid. It was a fact he was going to die. In those days there was absolutely nothing could change that. So he got on with his music. He did so much in those last four years."

Nothing new here, I doubt it’s even a new interview with Phoebe, but it came up in my news feed the other day and I thought some of you might be interested.

On to the topic of Phoebe and some of his recent quotes in the media. I swear this isn’t directed at any one person,but increasingly in this fandom it seems as though you must prove your worth by constantly condemning things those close to Freddie have said, and while certainly he’s had his share of people who did him dirty, any sort of contextualization is often taken as excuse, and it’s a big reason why I’ve been pulling away from it lately. Phoebe said Freddie never complained, he never saw him cry. Jim in his book has said otherwise. I believe Phoebe and I believe Jim. Freddie I’m sure showed different sides of himself to different people, and by many accounts wasn’t open with even those closest to him. For example, Phoebe is the most likely to understand Freddie’s experiences at boarding school, but said that it was a topic he knew not to touch, so obviously there was some distance there, even though he worked with Freddie for more than a decade of his life. Maybe the employer/employee thing put some distance between despite everything else. I don’t know. And his more recent glossing over Freddie’s image? Maybe that’s because Phoebe’s own profile has risen in the past few years he feels compelled to.

The “Freddie was brave and strong and never complained in the face of death” makes me a little uncomfortable too. It’s a nice image, but I hope he WAS messy sometimes. Being brave isn’t the most important thing. 

[debdarkpetal]

[freestonefest]

Welcome to Freesstone Fest 2024!!

Get ready to celebrate and appreciate Peter "Phoebe" Freestone, Freddie Mercury's personal assistant and close friend.

The dates for the event are 24th-26th of May, 2024. In the weeks leading up to it, we will provide facts about our favourite gentle giant.

Where to post:

The main places to post will be here on Tumblr and on AO3! If you use other sites, post the link here on Tumblr and tag us here at @freestonefest and use the #freestonefest2024 tag to make sure we see it!

What we want:

Any fan media celebrating Peter "Phoebe" Freestone! Fic, art, phone wallpapers, playlists, anything! Just as long as it's focused on Phoebe!

Day 1 - Friday, 24th May:

But then I fooled around and fell in love

Childhood Friends AU

Seaside Rendezvous (A Day at the Beach)

Day 2 - Saturday, 25th May:

Workin' 9 to 5 / What a way to make a livin'

Coffee Shop AU

Sick Day

Day 3 - Sunday, 26th May:

Everybody was dancin' in the moonlight

Arranged Marriage AU

Meet Cute/Meet Ugly

ALL ABOUT PHOEBE!! Anything you'd like to write, draw, create- please make sure it's centred around Phoebe!

Make sure you tag your works appropriately! If it's NSFW, use the correct categories on AO3 and tag it as such here on Tumblr as well! We wanna make sure people know what they're getting into.

Prompts are just to give inspiration! If you have something else you wanna do, do it!

Any ship is welcome, as long as they're centred around Phoebe!

AUs are welcome and encouraged!

Please do not post or interact with the NSFW content if you are not 18+. Thank you.

Historical accuracy is not a requirement! That's the joy of events like these. Even though Phoebe himself is an open book, his recollection of events and dates is, at times, contradictory of even himself. So. Feel free to have fun with it all!

Please don't interact with hateful comments. Delete them as soon as you can.

Feel free to reach out with any questions you may have!! Our inbox is open!

I also want to thank @fanellifest for the inspiration to host this event. The work they put into their weekend for Joe Fanelli was beautiful. Thank you for reminding that the love in this fandom can be spread to the other important people in the Queen limelight.

[freddie-mercury-rising]

Reminiscing about Montreux.

This was September 1, 2023 on Lake Geneva in Montreux, Switzerland with the one and only Peter Freestone.

[sunnymeddows]

Behind every Freddie Mercury, there's a Peter "Phoebe" Freestone following along, looking bedraggled.

Bonus:

[alittlesilhouettoofaman]

Froger Love Is Looking for Role Players!

If you’re interested in playing any of these characters, fill out our questionnaire: https://forms.gle/Nx5iYy9wVgdeRstr7. 

[obsessivelollipoplalala]

So since Phoebe has a new book (with that awful edit by Nenu) but someone shared a snippet of it and this is what it said about Freddie.

Taken from Peter's book

Right Place, Right Time:

"Love was a never-ending topic for

Freddie, whether he wrote about it or was trying to find it. People often get mistaken when they believe that the love of Freddie's life was some singular person or a thing. Freddie often said that he felt sorry for people who feel like they are obliged to give all of their love to just one person during their whole life. For him, love was an emotion that he could freely expand without running out of its capacity, there wasn't any definite quantity of love he could give. He was always able to find a place in his heart for new friends. Imagine, what would a person capable of loving only one person do, if someone new and important came into his life? Love wasn't even reserved solely for the person Freddie was currently living with. Even though he loved some partners of his more than others, he definitely didn't have to take any love away from his friends because of his relationships. I know that some would swear that the love of Freddie's life was Mary Austin. No, she wasn't the love OF HIS LIFE. They had a special, strong bond and he loved her, but he loved all of his friends.

This is a mixed bag of a quote because on the one hand, yes, Freddie was a very loving friend, according to multiple sources. His romantic love certainly didn’t impact his capacity for platonic love, and it’s definitely bullshit to say Freddie only loved one person ever. Yeah, it’s nice that Phoebe is dispelling the Mary myth, especially since he’s low-key toyed with it in recent years.

Here’s where I get irritated: “Even though he loved some partners of his more than others”—damn Peter, you can’t even call Jim by his name, huh. You can’t even acknowledge that, yeah, their relationship was special even among the others Freddie had, not simply because of how much he loved Jim, but due to the longevity of their partnership.

I swear, it’s like he’s always found little ways to undermine their relationship over the past decade or so. And I reiterate: Phoebe was never in a romantic relationship with Freddie so he really knows less about that subject than he thinks, given how his takes contradict Freddie’s own words. It’s just annoying at this point.

[queen-fandom-calendar]

Hey! I'm gonna be running a Peter "Phoebe" Freestone Fest on May 24th, 25th, and 26th! Would you be able to put that on the calender? I'll also post it and the prompts this weekend to @freestonefest when I get the post ready!

This sounds epic! I am so thrilled about this. Much love for Phoebe. I will definitely add that to the calendar now! <3

Thanks a bunch!

[fatliberation]

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 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. These things are doubtful for a straight or bi man. Many gays don't even act like this... 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.

[rushingheadlong]

We will always remember you, Freddie ❤️

🌻 Donate to the Mercury Phoenix Trust 🌻

(Gif sources below)

Colored Freddie gifs are from his 1985 interview in Munich with David Wigg, clip taken from the Queen + Adam Lambert documentary The Show Must Go On

Black and White gifs are as follows (L-R, Top-Down):

Freddie Mercury Tribute Concert

Flowers left at Garden Lodge, clip taken from The Show Must Go On documentary

Queen + Bejart: Ballet for Life behind-the-scenes, clip taken from the Queen Official youtube channel

No-One But You (Only the Good Die Young) music video

Freddie Mercury statue in Montreux, clip taken from the Mercury Phoenix Trust youtube channel

Peter "Phoebe" Freestone speaking in Montreux, clip taken from the Mercury Phoenix Trust youtube channel

Bohemian Rhapsody (2018) trailer

Wall of messages from fans at The Queen Studio Experience, clip taken from the Suisse Virtual Tours youtube channel

Love of My Life performed at Madison Square Garden in October 2023, clip taken from the Andrew Harts youtube channel

[your-one-day-ecstasy]

Chapters:  1/2

Fandom:  Queen (Band),  Bohemian Rhapsody (Movie 2018)

Rating:   Teen Audiences and Up

Warnings:   No Archive Warning Apply

Relationships:   Brian May/Freddie Mercury, Jim Hutton/Freddie Mercury, Anita Dobson/Brian May

Characters:   Freddie Mercury, Brian May, Chrissie Mullen, Anita Dobson, Jim Hutton, Joe Fanelli, Peter “Phoebe” Freestone,

Tags:  Maycury Week 2024, Late Realizations, Unrequited Love, Getting Together, Blurting Things Out at Inopportune Times,

Summary:  

Honestly, Brian needed to learn to just keep his mouth shut from time to time.

Written for @maycuryweek, prompt "Try to be straight for one more brunch.”

[debdarkpetal]

I Want To Break Free music video behind the scenes/making of from Peter Freestone's book.

Via deakycheaky on Instagram.

[freestonefest]

Smooth and Contently Watching Freddie's Every Move

Peter (Phoebe) Freestone

From Freddie Mercury Don't Stop Us Now! In New York by Thor Arnold and Lee Nolan

[freddie-mercury-rising]

Hi darling how are you??! Also do you know where I can watch that interview with Jim and Phoebe in 2006 I’ve been looking forever for the interview and I can’t bloody find it🙄😩

Hello there!

I'm doing okay, thanks!

Also, the only thing I seem to find is the German film/show directed by Utz Weber and Rudi Dolezal "Queen: Die Show" from 2006 which featured Jim Hutton and Peter Freestone.

It's in German, but around 23:40, Jim and Phoebe appear for their interview.

Let me know if that's the one!

[thatguythatreallylikesqueen]

I’m not sure who to thank on Tumblr, (please come forward with receipts so I can give you credit and proper gratitude!), but it was through there that I learned that Thor Arnold and Lee Nolan released a coffee table book about their friendship with Freddie!

This is not my first Queen-related impulse purchase, but it’s probably the only one so far that doesn’t have a slight bit of guilt and regret attached to it. But my thinking was to get it ASAP because these things tend to get REALLY expensive once they go out of print, and then stop being available altogether, and I wanted to avoid that.

Thor and Lee (christened ‘Kathleen’ by Freddie) don’t go super in-depth about anything that would be considered a gross invasion of his privacy, but instead have written vignettes - small glimpses of their adventures. And even then, genuine love and friendship is clear throughout. That makes sense, considering they were friends, and this book seems to largely be a response to the Bohemian Rhapsody film’s portrayal of Freddie as lonely and alone. The book starts and ends with scans of several notes written to Thor and Lee over the years from Freddie (mostly signing off as “Mother” or “Mama”), and there are TONS of amazing photographs that were taken by Lee throughout! (1981-1984, and some others taken in June 1991)

Freddie’s “New York Daughters” (Thor Arnold, Lee Nolan, John Murphy, Joe Scardilli) were not his only friends by a long shot, but they were important to him, and they clearly loved Freddie (and also Peter “Phoebe” Freestone!) first and foremost as a regular person.

[gothedrals]

Oh my god please say more about the drag queen thing

basically freddie used to give drag names to some of his closest friends, including the rest of queen. they were often based on last names: roger taylor = liz taylor, brian may = maggie may, john deacon = belisha beacon. freddie’s assistant, peter freestone, is still widely known as phoebe. I believe freddie’s partner jim hutton was lauren, and elton john, who also gave drag names to his closest friends, was sharon. freddie himself went by melina :)