Taylor Swift is the most successful solo artist of her generation, has as high of an approval rating as any celebrity in recent memory and is in a very strong and stable relationship with Travis Kelce.
And yet:
The singer and her team are extreme unhappy at the moment.
For a good and shocking reason.
In a 5,000-word New York Times opinion piece this week, editor Anna Marks cited a list of LGBTQ references in many of Swift’s songs … and then suggested that Swift had, perhaps, for years been trying to signal that she’s a member of the queer community.
Yes, the same woman who used to garner backlash for dating too many men is actually a closeted lesbian, according to this viewpoint.
“In isolation, a single dropped hairpin is perhaps meaningless or accidental, but considered together, they’re the unfurling of a ballerina bun after a long performance,” Marks wrote.
“Those dropped hairpins began to appear in Ms. Swift’s artistry long before queer identity was undeniably marketable to mainstream America.
“They suggest to queer people that she is one of us.”
Taylor Swift & The Queer Community
To her immense credit, Swift has long been a friend of the LGBTQ community.
She has taken stands in support of her fans amid a frightening number of anti-gay bills introduced around the nation, calling her concerts a “safe space” for LGBTQ people.
“Rights are being stripped from basically everyone who isn’t a straight white cisgender male,” Swift told Vogue in 2019.
“I didn’t realize until recently that I could advocate for a community that I’m not a part of.”
Somewhat related to this topic, meanwhile, Swift wrote in the prologue to her re-recorded “1989” album last year that she surrounds herself with female friends because society used to speculate about whether she was romantically involved any male with whom she spent almost any time.
“If I only hung out with my female friends, people couldn’t sensationalize or sexualize that — right? I would learn later on that people could and people would,” she wrote.
Marks has once again proven Swift to be correct.
This, despite Swift and Kelce allegedly being so in love that they may get married at some point.
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Will Taylor Respond?
“Because of her massive success, in this moment there is a Taylor-shaped hole in people’s ethics,” someone close to Swift told CNN in response to the editorial.
“This article wouldn’t have been allowed to be written about Shawn Mendes or any male artist whose sexuality has been questioned by fans.
“There seems to be no boundary some journalists won’t cross when writing about Taylor, regardless of how invasive, untrue, and inappropriate it is – all under the protective veil of an ‘opinion piece.’”
For her part, Marks seems to be aware of how unusual it is to print an article in a reputable publication that pries so wildly into the personal life of a celebrity.
“I know that discussing the potential of a star’s queerness before a formal declaration of identity feels, to some, too salacious and gossip-fueled to be worthy of discussion,” she wrote.
“I share many of these reservations.
“But the stories that dominate our collective imagination shape what our culture permits artists and their audiences to say and be.
“Every time an artist signals queerness and that transmission falls on deaf ears, that signal dies.
“Recognizing the possibility of queerness — while being conscious of the difference between possibility and certainty — keeps that signal alive.”