The clock on the giant video screen had hit zero. Pink and orange parachutes appeared. My sister and I started screaming as a woman emerged and began to sing about a cruel summer. I would have screamed for the next 3.5 hours of the Taylor Swift concert, except for one, unfortunate glitch. When I reached down beneath the seat for my merchandise bag, I discovered that it, along with my wallet, was nowhere to be found. Some Swiftie saw my joy as opportunity. I sank into my chair and began to cry.
Several months and two podcasts later, I’ve come to see this moment the way a writer like Swift might: as a metaphor for a relationship that might not be all that good for me. A poignant representation of a love I’ve poured a lot of money, time, and heart into because it means so much to me. You see, I’m a so-called gaylor, if a gaylor means that Taylor Swift’s music helped me come out as queer to myself and others simply because I saw some of my own journey reflected in what she had written. Perhaps she wanted people like me to see this journey in her words because she is, as the Gaylor theory supposes, a secretly closeted woman. Maybe that’s just what I needed to see in the bright but very straight light a pop star refracts for the cold, hard cash of rainbow capitalism.
In episode three of Queer Cinema Catchup, I caught Joe up on the Gaylor theory and my relationship to it. In this blog, I’m going to unpack that relationship just a bit more, avoiding problematic speculation, exploring parasocial identification, and leaning into the kind of queer readings that scholars have applied to all kinds of art, including Shakespeare.
While these are big, culturally weighty lenses, the story here is more personal. In fact, it begins when I was fifteen and heard Our Song from Swift’s debut album for the first time. The lyrics made me worry I would never get the chance to wish I had kissed a guy when I should have because I had just moved to a new state and knew no boys because I attended an all-girls Catholic high school. As a rule-follower who studied rather than socialized, that same problem persisted through my isolated teen years, leaving me feeling a little ashamed when an excited classmate showed me the Love Story music video in our school's computer lab. I felt sure she was longing for a particular Romeo while I was stuck wondering what love even felt like. I did not know then what I know now: Swift had never had a relationship when she created these pitch perfect fantasies of teenage love.
At sixteen, I decided that when it came to Swift, I would act a bit cynical about her and her love songs, to protect myself. Girls should want more than a great love story, I would think, even if underneath all my walls, I wanted one, too. My younger sister, however, wouldn’t let me escape a Swiftie youth. While I drove us to school, she controlled the radio and played Taylor so often that soon I knew the words to every single song. For some, gay reason, I especially liked the one where Taylor sang about a perfectly fine boy she was dating who could not compare to an unnamed, genderless you with whom she missed screaming and fighting and kissing in the rain. By the time I got to college, I was ready to defend her against the haters in my friend group just before she began to shake them off herself as 1989 became the soundtrack of my and everyone else’s early twenties.
In those early twenties, I still didn’t find love as captured by the fantasies and big feelings of Swift’s lyrics. I started to worry something was wrong with me, which eventually led me to question if a traditional relationship was even what I wanted. It was terrifying to wonder if I might be queer. For years, I told no one about these worries, choosing to fret in silence out of fear and shame.
So, Taylor Swift’s next album, Reputation, came and went without me really listening all that closely. One night, however, while drinking wine with some friends, Swift came up. Someone said their music industry pal had heard Swift was planning to come out as gay on the cover of Rolling Stone. We all laughed. The hyper-feminine, linked-to-so-many-men, people-pleasing, lover of love was not gay. My friend insisted we should listen to Reputation again. We would hear the truth for ourselves in her songs about hidden love and gorgeous lovers. Inside, I felt shock give way to warmth. If Swift were queer, maybe I, another hyper-feminine, good girl, could be too. When I did listen to Reputation more closely, I could hear what my friend meant. I would fall from grace just to touch your face sounded pretty fruity to my Catholic school girl ears.
As I waited for this Rolling Stone bombshell, I decoded the gay in songs like Ours (our love can withstand judgment from the outside), New Romantics (terrible, true rumors about freewheeling love), and Dress (I don’t want my lover like a best friend; a best friend with whom I've had so many secret moments in crowded rooms; a best friend for whom I bought a dress either one of us could wear just to take it off the other). Then, I delved into more dangerous territory: the internet and all it had to say about the singer’s personal life and dating history. Amid the Harry Styles and Tom Hiddleston of it all, there was plenty of gay fodder that I won’t delve into here for fear it’s too speculative and invasive. In the loud echo chamber of the online world, these breadcrumbs were made out to be smoking guns I could then back-up with the songwriter’s own lyrics.
When the internet began to theorize that Swift’s next album release would coincide with a public declaration of her queer identity, I felt certain the moment was here. That certainly grew as Lover’s debut coincided with Taylor wearing tons of rainbow; releasing the single Me! On Lesbian Visibility Day; living in a trailer park with numerous LGBTQ+ icons in the You Need to Calm Down music video; and performing at the Stonewall Inn. Eventually, I read some rumor that Swift would come out at the NYC pride parade on June 30, 2019, finally declaring once and for all that she wasn’t straight. Summer ticked closer. My anticipation grew. I began to think to myself that if Swift really did come out, I would, too.
Instead, on June 30, 2019, Taylor took to Instagram to detail the now infamous sale of her masters, a first step in what would lead to the incredible success of her re-recordings and the Eras Tour to which I have, quite literally and very recently, sacrificed my wallet. Before any of that happened, however, I had to make my own way in a coming out journey without Swift as my guide. Except that isn’t wholly true. In the time between then and now, Taylor has famously put out four new albums, Folklore, Evermore, Midnights, and The Tortured Poets Department. Whatever the artist might say about the fictions that inspired them, these new lyrics sounded just as gay to me as the rest of Taylor’s discography had. All that queer subtext gave me a dreamscape with which I could imagine my own queer life, in all its triumphs and tribulations. I listened, I came out, I lived.
Of course, that dreamscape didn’t mean I wasn’t aware of reality. Taylor (er, her associates) have a lot to say about gaylor theories, and it’s hard to reconcile these statements with what I heard and still hear in Taylor’s music. Her words, however fictional and fantastical, helped me process my own identity. As a result, a connection has forever been forged between me and her work, for her songs feel personal to me now, and I will for-evermore remain a zealot for her pen and heart.
The problem, then, lies in the fact that some part of me still fantasizes that Taylor Swift might come out someday. The impact of such a high profile, feminine, lover of love revealing that she likes women in any capacity feels significant in a way that I, as a queer person, understand all too well. For all its progress, society still does not always see people like me as equal and normal; as capable of universality; as worthy of celebration as the straight default. I could argue, then, that this coming out fantasy is a hope for the greater good, but it’s not. It’s still, after all this time, about making peace with myself. I can know this intellectually. I can write about it. Take away meaning from it. But my heart and all its big feelings cannot really believe it. That’s why I think back on my stolen wallet like the metaphor in a Taylor Swift song. Something akin to the scarf I left at your sister’s house. Maybe for me it’s something like this: the wallet you stole reminds me of my innocence and the wish for a great love story, no matter who I happen to love.
But I and many other people did spend a lot of money to scream-sing about that forgotten scarf in a crowded football stadium. It’s cathartic to have words you can belt that capture the pain of both your own and many, many others’ distinct, personal stories, however different they might be from one another. Who knows, maybe someone out there feels that same relief in reading about my stolen wallet. To quote my favorite singer, it is nice to have a friend.
