Ooh, Fun Stuff! Disclaimer That I Don't Think It Serves A Purpose To Speculate On Anyone's Sexuality

Ooh, fun stuff! Disclaimer that I don't think it serves a purpose to speculate on anyone's sexuality when they never made any public statements or we're having to really reeeeally reach for evidence to fit our hopes (Queen fandom is...bad for that). I think it's just as likely as not that he was Queer in some way, and it wouldn't change too much about his story. I think if marginalized folks see themselves in him, it at least speaks to his experience of life being in the margins for a whole host of reasons. Could be that was a lil 💅 could be other things.

As far as his personality/mental health goes, I really believe Syd was on the schizophrenia spectrum, not ASD. Reading interviews he gave around the time everything went to shit for him, and in conjunction with everything that his loved ones have (publicly) said about his mindset, his thought processes were more disorganized than most people. He had a tendency for loose associations and tangentiality in his speech, eccentric creativity, low tolerance for constraints of any kind. And some of those characteristics overlap with ASD, but it's specifically the disorganized thought processes and loose associations that lead me that direction. Drugs making it worse is kind of a tale as old as time in that regard. The timing is also right - age of onset for full presentation of symptoms in schizophrenic disorders is late teens to early 30s, if he was on the autism spectrum he'd have had signs in childhood. I admittedly don't know about his childhood and don't know if his family have discussed that.

I need to go watch the full documentary for context, but I wonder if he was writing Arnold Layne around the time he did the whole "pretending" thing. Wouldn't surprise me if part of his creative process was just doing "odd" things for the experience of it.

Here’s the Roger clip of him talking about when Syd said “I’m a homosexual” and was wearing a frock lol