In Defence of Gaylor

Before Taylor Swift’s Lavender Haze dropped, there was a war raging online about the song. Was Blondie was using or appropriating the language of the queer community to tell a story about her heterosexual relationship? Was Swift even aware of the gay rumours, the colour’s profound, complicated and explicit relationship with queerness, or the furore she caused telling us the song was about her boyfriend Joe? One camp was shouting ‘she said it’s about misconceptions around her relationship, stop casting aspersions she’s gay’; the other was crying ownership of lavender imagery, dealing with egregious homophobia, bringing up old photos and lyrics to show they weren’t making things up. When the song dropped, it was telling people to stop assuming she’s married or pregnant… and as the angels rolled their eyes, the Gaylors went apeshit.

How long has Gaylor been a subculture of Swift’s fans? How serious are these people?

On the one hand, this is a union of trolls, causing mischief not to Taylor Swift but a subgroup of her fans. It’s a semi-unserious perspective to zoom in on a pop star’s manicure to suggest the ‘both ends for degeneracy’ can be found there, and suggestions that Swift is secretly co-parenting Karlie Kloss’ baby or that she’s having girls-only threesomes with two other singers are not in earnest. Since only homophobes are upset by detailed close readings of songs like ‘Breathe’ and ‘Ivy’ as queer, this kind of stan war is a way to participate in internet bloodsports without causing undue harm, and it’s mainly an exchange of fun trivia and pics of their faves, wishing for certain things about them to be true, as celebrity gossip always is. People love a conspiracy theory, and, as they go, ‘this singer is queer like me’ is hardly harmful. On the other hand, queerness has always lived in the shadows, and behind names like ‘mirrorballtits’ and profile pictures of Swift as a Victoria’s Secret angel is a community of mainly women who have been touched by Swift’s art and recognise aspects of themselves in her. The theory has, in fact, helped many gay fans of Swift’s work interrogate or embrace their identities. Swift herself knows – and has said – that storytelling is integral to her brand and, like Bruce Springsteen or Bob Dylan, includes references in her songs to an ordinary life she cannot possibly have experienced: ‘I thought I saw you at the bus stop, I didn’t though’*, ‘your roommate’s cheap-ass screw-top rose’* She has often taken care to remove identifying features from her music so that the autobiographical nature of her writing doesn’t reflect on others – what evidence do we really have that ‘Back To December’ is for Taylor Lautner, beyond timelines and conjecture? And yet, to her fans, these headcanons matter. The faceless yearning in her music speaks to queerness, and to the female queer experience in particular: how many of us fell in love with a friend without realising it was super gay? ’I don’t want you like a best friend‘. How many of us have been utterly oblivious to a woman flirting with us, even when she’s being explicit? ‘I only bought this dress so you could take it off’. Swift’s relationships are part of a mythology that extends to her storytelling – the ‘Taylor Swift extended universe’, if you will, and as somebody who has been in the public eye since she was sixteen it’s impossible to tell from the outside how much of anything is real. This is a woman without total freedom to choose her own outfits, only to hire the stylist and the publicist who will help her represent herself. How many of her relationships have been manufactured to achieve a particular flavour of press? Was there ‘a lover in the foyer [who] doesn’t even know you’? There have been at least some. Like any good Gaylor, I have my ideas as to which ones, but ultimately it doesn’t matter. On the only level that matters to fans, speculations like this are part of a game, a mass literary criticism we bat back and forth to deepen our understanding or change our perspective. We all read the same media and, whilst knowing that it is and ever has been a circus, draw our conclusions. No song, poem, image is about one thing only, all our life experiences come into our art, and as somebody who both journals and is talked about endlessly in the press, Swift surely looks back and outwards for new perspectives to write about. Just as Blank Space was about what it would really mean to embody this idea of the ‘black widow’ image she had, just as she got really into snakes when she was cancelled, whether ‘gay Taylor’ is real or not, it’s something she’s curious about and has made its way into her work.

The rumours of Swift’s queerness date back to her very first album, when Swift was a country singer – though, it must be acknowledged, these rumours are based on lyric interpretations much moreso than later eras, and thus much easier to ignore for Taylor’s team. Ideas of who might have been former girlfriends and dalliances are all over the internet, with fans getting deeply invested in Taylor’s relationships, whether publicly ‘confirmed’ or fan ‘discovered’. Though fans on both sides of the theory clamour for her to confirm or deny her queerness, personally, I don’t want Taylor Swift to come out. Aside from the way the media treats queer celebrities, I think it’s a model for 21st century gay life to not need to put a label on your own identity, to not owe your identity to strangers. A person’s identity is not queerbaiting, and when you move in celebrity circles there’s an extra complication to shouting your truth: were Swift to explicitly come out, it would be all but an admission that Karlie Kloss is queer – what’s that going to do to a young mother, one who’s related by marriage to America’s most powerful toxic family**? Swift’s silence gives dignity to herself and others, acknowledges that as a teenager or an adult you can experiment or discover new things about yourself. Whilst I don’t think it’s good or healthy to be closeted, many bi- or pan-sexual celebrities, from David Bowie to Cara Delavigne, have spoken about how they conduct themselves exactly the same with female and male paramours, yet find that the public interprets hand-holding and hugging and family visits differently when the couple is anything other than obviously heterosexual. When Lizzo was in that strip club with Montero she might have been enjoying the skill of the performers, having a good time with her friends, or drooling over how good their asses looked in a thong; she might fuck women or not, and what business is it of mine? When Swift wore a wig in the colours of the bisexual flag, it doesn’t matter if that’s an experience she’s had or a potential she’s open to, it was an identity she wanted to associate herself with. Swift buys jewellery for, holds hands with, goes on roadtrips with her female friends, all or none of which might be queer acts. Whether Taylor is enjoying the hypothetical and writing songs imagining ‘what if’ she and Karlie had really kissed at that concert (you’re welcome, hetlors, for the best argument against a queer reading of Midnights, and don’t you dare use it against me) or whether they were intimate for years, all we need to know is that Swift is OK with queer interpretations of her work. Confirmation of this comes from her liking Gaylor tweets and tiktoks – and then, why wouldn’t she be? As, at the very least, a queer ally, she doesn’t see what could be wrong with being read as gay, and finds videos of ‘Taylor Swift’s most lesbian outfits’ as funny as the rest of us – because, whilst there is undeniably an aesthetic for wherever you sit in the queer community, you don’t have to own a flannel shirt and docs to be a lesbian, nor is every woman who dresses like this gay. Taylor Swift is already as out as she needs to be: out as a vocal proponent for queer issues, trans rights, actively lobbying for gay rights. She’s supporting queer artists and demanding that Nashville has a place for them, whether she’s one of them or not.

Schrödinger’s Queer

Even within Gaylor there are divisions: Swift is a Kinsey-5 lesbian and the boyfriends are all beards, Karlie is the only WLW relationship Swift has had and she’s confused about her sexuality, Tily, Swiftgron, Zoe Kravitz is William Bowery, is Toe real? Assumptions are made about her parents’ relative supportiveness, about the ‘slur spoken’, about who knows or how she might refer to herself. Swift has encouraged her fans to scour her art for clues, and behind each of this silly ship names are caches of images, lyrics, dates that prove one thing or another. They’re all fairly convincing – even when they have divergent proofs that require one of the other theories to be false. It feels very Old Hollywood. Truly, the one thing you learn when you enter the rabbit hole of masterposts and ’evidence’ is that nothing – nothing – you know about a celebrity isn’t at least partially constructed. Isn’t that true of all our relationships? Nobody knows the jokes and the language and the actions that underpin your particular intimacy except you.

As a bisexual woman in a relationship with a man, the Schrödinger’s queerness Swift finds herself in speaks to me. I’ve never brought a woman home to meet my parents, but as I discuss my experiences discovering and exploring my gay streak with queer femme friends there are overlaps in our experiences. I’m gay, and I’m also happy in my straight relationship. For every reason somebody comes up with that Taylor can’t be gay there is a rebuttal, and for me and the 84% of bisexuals*** who end up in straight-passing relationships (which is an entirely separate issue, but should surprise nobody), it’s validating to see somebody who’s a part of the establishment thrive, even if it’s only in the imaginations of her fans or in private, and see her glamorous, high-femme actions read as queer and the open-armed, fervent invitations for her to join the LGBTQ+ community.

Regardless of anything else, it is clear that Swift is happy in her relationship: she writes songs with her live-in partner, has grown confident and strident, looks back on her former actions and art with scrutiny and nostalgia, going from strength to strength. Swift’s body of work is an enigma of truth married with fiction, her life a perfect example of the gilded cage of celebrity experience. All of her fans – Gaylor or not – are obsessed with ideas we have created from her lyrics, her outfits, the visuals of her music videos… from what Swift and her team are feeding us. As the language of the internet says, we’re eating. We feast on Grammy’s appearances, music videos, forthcoming live shows, seeing a well-oiled machine at work sharing as much of another woman’s life as we can take from her, and as we take from her it is the moments of humanity or imperfection that seep through the cracks of her image we love the most, each of us feeling that a different moment is genuine and rare. In addition, though, we are all surely in agreement that, where the life of Taylor Swift is concerned, what her fans see, what the world sees, and reality are all different, the truth sitting beyond the perceptible. The ‘evidence’ of Swift’s queerness doesn’t have to be compelling to compel me: it is enough to see aspects of myself reflected in somebody I admire and who seems to have everything. The rest, I create myself: I learned to weave narratives into life from the best of storytellers.

On This Topic:

• … I’m not telling you who to follow, just that you need to be on twitter (or maybe tumblr I think?) if you want to keep up with Gaylor gossip
• I wear this bracelet all the time, it’s cute as hell, if you spot it you know it’s merch.
• See u here deranged Swifties.

To-Do:

• Call with MP RE: SPN
• BAAS registration is broken, fix it
• Article for MR

Today’s Culture:

• Kali Uchis has new music out and it’s great
• I’m reading Cleopatra & Frankenstein, it’s so nice to be back to enjoying contemporary books
• Bought some Glossier and I have controversial opinions: the mascara is 5* but cloud paint is nothing special. If you rate it, try this instead.

*The Bus Stop is a bar in Manhattan Swift is rumoured to have attended with Kloss
*Dianna Agron was living with Lea Michelle at the time they were rumoured to be together
*the longer you spend in Swift fandom in general the deeper you are versed in lore and the more vital these facts become
**The Kushners
***https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2013/06/13/a-survey-of-lgbt-americans/