This article was originally published on Substack in January 2024
There’s a New York Times op-ed going around claiming Taylor Swift is a member of the LGBTQ community. This is something Swifties have been espousing for years, since her friendship with Karlie Kloss and the imagery from her 2019 album Lover. Fans saw her holding hands with her female friends and equated that with queerness (which touches on fandom’s tendency to eliminate same-sex friendships in favor of romantic relationships). The imagery from Lover featured rainbows, pastel blues and purples, and allegedly gave off bisexual vibes. Fans and journalists heard “Betty” from folklore and labeled it “queer canon.”
Now there’s this piece outright claiming Taylor Swift is a “hero” of the queer community. That’s the word Anna Marks uses: hero. She quotes Chely Wright, an actual queer artist, who has said homophobia in the music industry won’t stop unless someone with a larger following comes out as gay. “We need our heroes,” said Wright. Marks posits, “What if someone had already tried, at least once, to change the culture by becoming such a hero? What if, because our culture had yet to come to terms with homophobia, it wasn’t ready for her? What if that hero’s name was Taylor Alison Swift?”
It’s a bold statement, if incredibly off the mark. The fact that this is in the New York Times is baffling to me (but it’s not like the NYT doesn’t have a history of publishing bad takes). This is yet another example of fans continually insinuating that Taylor Swift is gay, and it’s invasive to Taylor Swift and insensitive to the actual LGBTQ community. I’m eagerly the first one to say I can’t stand Swift, but this op-ed was disrespectful to her and the community on a lot of different levels.
Hell is empty and all the Swifties are here.
First, a question: why are Swifties the way that they are? Fandom culture used to be contained in the safe space that was Tumblr for years and years, and now that Tumblr is essentially a dumpster fire (along with Twitter) we have a containment breach on our hands, and fandoms have found a way to infiltrate real life. Maybe I’m being naive, but it feels like it never used to be this way. Fandom had its place, and it was firmly in corners of the internet where no one could see it unless they were looking for it. Social media has allowed fandoms to interact with their favs in an invasive and direct way that we never had in the early 2010s. Essentially, Hell is empty and all the Swifties are here.
What makes Taylor Swift’s fans so much worse than your average music enjoyer? Is it secret sexism reducing her fans to hysterical teenage girls? Is it simply an excuse to hate women? It’s possible, because if there’s one thing we know for sure it’s that the U.S. hates women. But there’s more to it than that, I think. It’s not a case for feminism, it’s simply a case for empathy and understanding that celebrities are human too.
And before you go “Oh boo hoo, she’s a billionaire, she’s not like us at all,” remember that celebrity status doesn’t make someone any less of a person with complex emotions and inner lives. Somehow, radical Swifties seem to have forgotten that. They treat Taylor Swift like the second coming of Christ, which is a lot for one person to handle.
Far be it from me to be sympathetic to Taylor Swift, but she does have a lot on her plate as one of the biggest pop stars in the world. Everything she does is under scrutiny, from where she goes to who she’s with to what she’s wearing. Fans take inconsequential details of her life and speculate on who she’s dating, what she’s working on, and whether or not she’s gay.
There are college courses about this girl, for crying out loud. The one at Harvard explores “fan culture, celebrity culture, adolescence, adulthood, and appropriation; how to think about white texts, Southern texts, transatlantic texts, and queer subtexts.” I understand the courses about her business model because, for all that I don’t like her music, I have to respect her business, but does Taylor Swift’s catalog truly warrant this close of a reading?
Then there’s that word in association with Taylor Swift again: queer. Swifties want so badly for there to be queer subtext in Taylor’s work that they’ll just put it there themselves. Like every song has to be autobiographical, and writing from a different perspective or, God forbid, a fictional perspective, doesn’t exist. Before we get back to Anna Marks’ bad take in the New York Times, let’s talk about “Betty” for a moment.
Swiftie journalists writing queer analyses of Taylor’s music surround themselves in an impenetrable veil of delusion that is so absurd it reads like satire.
“Betty” is a track from Swift’s 2020 album folklore. According to fans, it’s the gayest song she’s ever written, and it all comes down to the name she uses for the fictional speaker. The song itself tells the story of Betty and James, two high schoolers falling out of love, from James’ perspective. Apparently, because Taylor Swift was named after James Taylor, her using the name “James” automatically means she’s talking about herself. So when she sings “Slept next to her, but I dreamt of you all summer long,” that’s the gayest thing Swifties have ever heard even though it comes from the perspective of a man.
“When [Taylor Swift is] singing as James, telling a story about James, she’s telling a story about herself,” wrote Madison Malone Kircher for Vulture in 2020. “So this is a story about James (Taylor) and Betty … Toward the end of the song, James, heartbroken, gets picked up by another woman who drives by. ‘Slept next to her, but I dreamt of you all summer long,’ Swift sings. The ‘you’ is Betty. James is still a woman, lest the curse of compulsory heteronormativity try to convince you otherwise.”
I can’t tell if this is satire or not, because Swifties are just sort of like that. They dig and dig and connect the dots in a way that’s very Pepe Silvia, a very “I’ve connected the two dots”-“you didn’t connect shit”-“I’ve connected them” sort of way.
Kircher even references It’s Always Sunny in her article, writing, “Please picture that Pepe Silvia chart from It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia as you connect all these LGBT-clues,” which completely misses the mark of Pepe Silvia. The point of Pepe Silvia was there was no Pepe Silvia. Madison, honey, I don’t know what to tell you here other than you were continually grasping at straws that didn’t exist.
Swiftie journalists writing queer analyses of Taylor’s music surround themselves in an impenetrable veil of delusion that is so absurd it reads like satire. I’m going insane trying to figure out if it is satire, if this is journalistic trolling calling out radical Swifties, or if this is someone’s real opinion. If it’s satire, it’s great. If it’s real, it’s invasive at its best and completely neurotic at its worst.
If Taylor Swift ever actually comes out as gay, feel free to burn me as a witch.
Anna Marks has some good opinions about the LGBTQ community and the trauma that often surrounds queer people in America. Not every queer existence is shrouded in trauma, of course, but the unfortunate reality of the U.S. is that many are. So, Marks has some valid points about queerness in general, but her opinions on Taylor Swift as a queer hero read like a Tumblr post from 2011.
I don’t want to be a hater, because Marks makes a lot of good points about heteronormativity and American culture. She owns up to queerbaiting in her past work, and we love when writers hold themselves accountable. However, there’s just something about the entire argument that sets me on edge.
If Taylor Swift ever actually comes out as gay, feel free to burn me as a witch. Take me out back and send me home to Jesus for what I’ve said here. I will, however, hold onto my opinion that publicly speculating on her sexuality and identity is misguided and invasive. Taylor Swift is not a queer icon and that’s a hill I’m willing to die on.
Marks even admits she might get ridiculed for her op-ed, to which I say, I’m not trying to bully her. I just want to know why Swifties are so obsessed with Taylor being gay. I guess I want to know why it’s any of their business in the first place. She doesn’t owe anyone heterosexuality, but she doesn’t owe anyone homosexuality either. If her fans are so desperate to relate to someone, there are so many actual queer artists out there. You don’t have to read into the queer subtext of “Emily I’m Sorry” by boygenius, but maybe that takes the fun out of it for Swifties. They’ve been conditioned by Swift to search for Easter Eggs in her work to the point where they can’t stop, where anything clear-cut and obvious is Bad.
Now, I love Easter Eggs as much as the next investigative girly, but there has to be space for things that are a little more obvious. Not everything has to be a scavenger hunt. Therein lies the closeted conundrum: because fans have to scour her work for gay subtext, Swift is put firmly in the closet. Now, she’s a tragic homosexual, forced to hide who she really is for fear of her career imploding. Ever stop to think that maybe she’s just a straight ally?
Swift said in a 2019 interview with Vogue, “I didn’t realize until recently that I could advocate for a community that I’m not a part of.” These are the words of someone who just learned what allyship means. Is it possible she learned of the atrocities being committed against the LGBTQ community—as she also said to Vogue, “Rights are being stripped from basically everyone who isn’t a straight white cisgender male.”—and became an overnight ally, using buzzwords and rainbow imagery to the point where her fans interpreted it as her coming out?
I don’t have the answers to these questions because, like everyone else, I don’t know if Taylor Swift is gay. At this and every other point, only Taylor Swift knows if Taylor Swift is gay.
“How might [Swift’s] industry, our culture, and we, ourselves, change if we made space for Ms. Swift to burn that dollhouse to the ground?”
I want to give Taylor Swift her props, because, as Marks suggests, she did more or less overcome the traditional heteronormative image the media branded her with. In the 2000s when Swift burst onto the scene with songs like “Teardrops on My Guitar,” “Our Song,” and “Tim McGraw,” she was immediately put into a box and labeled. She was the girl who had too many boyfriends, and the media reported on every single one of them. As Marks writes, “The story the public told about her was that she laundered her affection to a litter of promising grown men, in exchange for songwriting inspiration.”
I understand the need to write about the men who have wronged you. Taylor Swift and I have that in common, only I do it with unsettlingly dark poetry and she does it with pop music. There’s something freeing about it, and yet she was continually put down for her subject matter. Is every one of her albums about an ex-boyfriend? I’m not that into Taylor Swift to know if that’s true (but I’m sure someone will tell me). Gay or not, she was labeled as a hopelessly straight girl who yearned for a man’s attention from the get-go. Essentially, it was very uncool of us as a society to do that.
Marks goes on to explain how interpretations of Swift’s work often “languish in stasis,” as fans are still imposing those same old traditional narratives on her grown-up work. Marks describes this as the “dollhouse” that Taylor Swift has constructed for her fanbase. “Her dominance in pop culture and the success of her business have given her the rare ability to influence not only her industry but also the worldview of a substantial portion of America,” Marks writes. “How might her industry, our culture, and we, ourselves, change if we made space for Ms. Swift to burn that dollhouse to the ground?”
I don’t believe she’ll ever burn the dollhouse to the ground. Taylor Swift has spent too long building her empire to destroy it now. She hasn’t constructed a dollhouse but a fortress, and she’s sitting safely behind its fortified walls and watching her fans throw themselves against the gates like starving peasants for just a crumb of proof that she could, behind all her billions of dollars and her sequins and her stadium tours, be just like them.
Image Credit: Amy Sussman, Dimitrios Kambouris, John Medina, Getty Images
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