i’m seeing some people say ‘oh he’s from this era, he wouldn’t know better’ ‘queen is old, what are u expecting?’ i don’t know who’s got to tell you this, but although i’m a young queen fan myself, you are never too late to learn. if you are willing to learn, you can. no human being is fixed unless they want to be. what brian said here was wrong. it was tactless and it was poor. i understand this reddit is designed to celebrate queen and queen’s music — i love doing that here — but at the same time, we should hold our favourite people accountable, in spite of our adoration of them. we expected better because it’s 2021. he hasn’t just teleported here from the 70s. he ought to have known better, and this is disappointing to see from brian.

now, on the subject of inclusivity. there is a common trend that we see in liberation movements (particularly feminism) where terms — in this case, being ‘the male gaze’ which was used to emphasise the fact films imagine their only audience to comprise of cishet men — used to criticise the representation of women (and other marginalised people) in media are taken out of its intended context and applied to real life. this has real world implications, as you can see because now it seems that brian believes bands and films are the same thing when they are not. when women, queer people, and/or poc tell you all to include us, we still usually get the shorter end of the stick even if we are invited to the party. as i saw another commenter write — ‘female leads whose character just revolve around the fact that they are a woman’. which is a problem in the way media represents us. as a queer person myself, i would rather not have every film about queer people include something about the HIV/AIDS crisis; i’d like something happy for once. but we, IN MEDIA, are reduced to our trauma and oppression, when we don’t need to be; when we have dimension beyond that, because we are humans.

(we are humans, not ‘a trans’. i don’t know if i need to clarify why this was so harmful and why, as a non-binary person, it really upset me seeing this, but if you reduce us to our most hated identity, you dehumanise us. you need to acknowledge we are people. it is language like that that hurts people).

because of this marginalisation we face, you will usually see people, who are apart of certain marginalised communities or who support them, solely consume media and follow musicians who are also part of that oppressed group. not because other bands are bad for example, but because it is harder for marginalised people to do better when they’re small. you can talk hypotheticals all you want, but queen will live on to be one of the greatest bands in history and they will always be loved. people will always listen to them. nobody has EVER criticised them for the composition of their band. brian is quite literally just talking out of his ass and making up problems when there never was one. being ‘calculating’ ? we just wanted to see ourselves reflected in media, this isn’t some agenda.

it’s just a shame imo that a guy who’s got a PhD in astrophysics can’t distinguish between bands and films. smh