Why Am I So Obsessed With Whether Or Not Taylor Swift Is Queer?
By: Katelyn Pilley
Tags: Coming Out, Queer, Pop Culture, Taylor Swift

My Spotify Wrapped (Most Swifties would scoff at that 2% though)

As evermore dropped at midnight last Friday and on the heels of my Spotify Wrapped confirming my hopeless obsession with Taylor Swift, I find myself, along with the army of queer Swifties, running the numbers in my head as to whether Taylor Swift is queer. As someone with a mostly developed prefrontal cortex, I recognize this is deeply unfair to both Taylor Swift and gay artists everywhere. However, I find myself unable to stop pouring over her albums like sacred texts looking for sapphic references, like a kid with access to an overflowing bowl of candy, eating sweets until my stomach hurts.

I was not always a “Swiftie” in a traditional sense. When Taylor Swift rose to popularity, I was knee-deep in a pop-punk phase that would come to define my youth. I would not be caught dead listening to Taylor Swift even though her albums sat hidden amongst the 2006 Warped Tour lineup in my iTunes library. I had not yet realized I could contain multitudes and that my rigid definition of self would not shelter me from the kind of negative attention saved solely for teenage girls. I wanted so desperately to be the cool scene girl and admitting to liking Taylor Swift was like admitting you hated skinny jeans: probably the lamest thing you could do. I was not ready to die on the Swiftie hill, I was not capable of dying on any hill really.

Around this time, I also had my first kiss, my first “relationship” (as much as one can call the collision of teeth in middle school a relationship). We wrote each other love poems and posted them to our respective Blogspots. I had trouble parsing through my deep desire to be desired, my ~big lesbian crush~ on her, and my nervousness around coming out therefore othering myself in the world’s stage that is middle school. I have no recollection of how long we dated or what we sent back and forth in yahoo emails, in blog comments, in passing notes. I do remember she broke up with me on the bus ride home from the annual orchestra trip and feeling like I never cried so hard in my life. I felt profoundly seen in the chapters of Twilight where Edward leaves Bella and her days turn into nothingness. Nothing quite like your first experience falling for a girl combined with being in the sixth grade. The lesson I thought I learned from this experience was that maybe I actually wasn’t bisexual because it didn’t work out. I went back into the closet as quickly as I had come out. By 8th grade, I had firmly cemented myself into the identity of “boy crazy” thinking sharing my first kiss with a girl was some sort of fluke, a rip in time from another dimension where I was totally different and totally weird.

Taylor Swift still sat in my iTunes library, albums I would listen to when no one was looking. My step-dad bought me a “How to Play This Current Taylor Swift Album on Guitar” with each album cycle. There was something about the way she captured the intensity of her emotions that sat heavily on my chest. In the same way I listened to My Chemical Romance when I felt like I was spiraling out of control, I’d listen to Taylor Swift to be whisked to a world of romance or a world of heartache, depending on my mood and whatever boy I was obsessed with at the time.

As I went on to college, I found myself listening to Red on my flights home. When 1989 dropped my sophomore year I furiously googled song meanings, trying to piece together the what and more importantly who the songs were about. Taylor Swift’s confessional style of writing, hiding easter eggs of relationships past in the verses and bridges, spoke to the unruly poet in me. That same year of college, I started bringing my own relationships into the light, performing brutally candid, sometimes cringy, poems on stages across my college campus. I felt like I was parsing through pieces of myself in public, in real-time. I found hills worth dying on. Yet, I still saw my foray into sapphic romance as an embarrassing story instead of the stepping stone to a much larger arc in my life.

It would take me two years after this moment in time to finally accept that I liked girls. Then it would take another year to come out to my friends after drunkenly kissing a girl on the dance floor on my 23rd birthday. I was a gay baby for approximately 3 months before falling deeply in love with the woman I am still with today.

My queer identity slowly unwrapped itself and with each minor revelation, I realized the easter eggs I had left myself along the way. One day, soon probably, I’ll list them all. But an important one stands out, I had intense jealousy and suspicion over extremely close, borderline romantic, female friendships. I’m not talking about your average close best friendship either. I’m talking about the ones where the girls would stay up all night talking, cuddling in the same bed the way “gal pals” do, having a lingering feeling that everything is on the brink of explosion. I remember watching two girls I knew grow close. Rumors swirled that these two seemingly straight girls were romantically linked because they spent so much time together. I bought into them more intensely than the average teenage rumor cycle. I firmly believed that these two girls were somehow secretly together and spent a long time parsing through the clues of someone else’s public friendship. I projected all of my secret queer desires onto a friendship I was watching from the outside. In hindsight, I very clearly had a crush on one of the girls and wanted nothing more than to be her chosen friend. I did a similar thing with celebrities, becoming obsessed with whether or not they were secretly gay, Taylor Swift being the obvious one but also Kendall Jenner and Shawn Mendes. It was as if I could figure out The Truth about someone else’s sexuality, I would figure out The Truth about my own.

I wish I could go back in time and ask myself to unpack why I had such strong opinions on whether or not someone was secretly gay. Why did it matter so much to me? Why did I need to do mental gymnastics to suss out whether or not someone batted for the same team? I wish I could also go back in time to tell myself that it’s okay to be queer and straight people don’t spend so much time thinking about whether or not they are straight.

As I’ve grown up and grown into the person I am, I’ve shed the incessant need to define myself in relation to others. I’ve figured out that everyone can contain multitudes and also that liking pop music doesn’t make you any less cool than the next human being. I’ve also realized, quite obviously, that other people’s sexualities are none of anyone’s business and the harder you want someone to be queer, the less you see them as an actual person, the more harm you cause. I know this with every fiber of my being and yet, with the release of Taylor Swift’s seventh album, Lover, I couldn’t help but scan the liner notes looking for easter eggs about her alleged romantic relationship with Karlie Kloss. Cornelia Street had to be about their time in New York together, right? False God is about worshiping the woman you love, right?

As Swift dropped folklore, I felt all consumed in the homoerotic detective work, transported back to sitting on an airplane heading 500 miles south to my hometown listening to Red, having no fucking clue who I was or who I loved but needing to know the same about Taylor Swift. Something about the album, written from the perspective of other people, had such a strong underlying current of yearning. Folklore would go on to be my most played album of the year, Taylor Swift my top artist. I couldn’t get over how gay it all felt, sending me into, for lack of fewer cliche words, Gay Panic. The army of queer Swifties was in a similar boat. Certain corners of the internet were abuzz with in-depth analysis of ‘Gaylor’. The TikTok algorithm targeted me with videos about ‘Kaylor’ and ‘Swiftgron,’ Taylor Swift’s public, intense female friendships that seemed a little too intense (If you are even a little bit queer and have a holdover penchant for fan theories from your Tumblr days, I’d highly recommend looking into this). I watched video after video further adding to the fervor. Swift, with each passing interview, firmly put her foot down that a song like ‘betty’ about loving a woman, sung by a woman, was written from the perspective of a man. I cannot imagine her level of celebrity and what that does to a person, but based on her close watch of her fanbase, she must see these theories and as a seemingly straight woman, is probably sick of our shit.

My own gay panic eventually faded. I would like the occasional #Gaylor meme and kept it moving. I settled into the album like an old cardigan wistfully thinking about the journey I went on to become who I am today, who I am becoming, accepting and proudly displaying my deep romantic love for women. Listening to the 1 became less about the Taylor Swift/Dianna Agron rumors and more about my own almost love if I had recognized that some of my female friendships felt like a little more than just friends. You know, the usual gay longing for the youth you missed out on because of internalized homophobia and compulsory heterosexuality.

When I awoke to the news of yet another album in the folklore extended universe, evermore, I initially felt thrilled. Another album of Taylor Swift exploring themes through fiction instead of following the usual “this specific song about this specific ex-boyfriend” formula. If evermore was anything like folklore, there would be a whole lot of yearning and as a bisexual mess, yearning is my favorite genre of music. After the initial shock and glow of another surprise album (someone please tell Taylor to take a break, maybe a nap, you don’t have to keep doing this), I started to feel worried. What if evermore didn’t feel as gay as folklore. What if us queer swifties pushed Swift to the brink and this whole album would be decidedly straight? What if we won’t have any songs to pour over, looking for clues? I had nightmares about it the night of the album launch.

I woke up first thing Friday morning to get a full album listen in before work, drinking my coffee, staring out the window like a Real Gay Adult. After my full listen, I took to Twitter and Tiktok to see what the homosexuals of the internet were saying. I know it’s wrong but I so badly want to believe there are pieces of both albums about Karlie or Dianna and their love and the fallout of a secret romantic relationship gone wrong.

Even though my developed adult brain recognizes that Taylor Swift is probably Straight, I still find myself needing gay projection. It’s like somewhere in my deep unconscious, there’s a part of me that feels like Taylor Swift writing entire albums about queer longing allows me to forgive myself for all the years I spent in the closet. I’m trying my best to hold space in my heart for all the time I spent closeted and yearning. I’m also trying to recognize that no amount of speculation and perceived romantic relationships are the same as true representation.

Maybe Taylor Swift is queer or maybe she is not. Maybe that girl I had a crush on in my teenage years is queer or maybe she is not. Maybe every single girl I’ve giggled with in lines for the bathroom at dive bars, questioning if it counted as flirting, was queer or not. It’s truly none of my business either way and speculating does more harm than good.

There are thousands of very real queer love stories and I have to remind myself that I get to live a life filled with them. From the woman I profoundly love that fills each room with laughter, to the queer community I feel at home in and proud to be apart of. I have to remember that I might’ve missed out on one kind of gay youth, but I am making up for lost time each day.

Anyways stream folklore and evermore by Taylor Swift.