FEATURE:
bad reputation
IN THIS PHOTO: Whilst Taylor Swift has shown huge support for the L.G.B.T.Q.I.A.+ community and fought for their rights, a recent feature from The New York Times suggesting she is queer has provoked criticism and accusations of homophobia/PHOTO CREDIT: Luis Sinco
Why a Recent New York Times Article Suggesting Taylor Swift Is Queer Provoked Such Backlash
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THERE has been a lot of discussion around…
ILLUSTRATION CREDIT: Angie Wang
an article published by The New York Times that borders on the obsessive. One that feels Taylor Swift sends out coded messages through her songs saying that she is queer. A 5,000-word guest edit by Anna Marks entitled “Look What We Made Taylor Swift Do” – Look What You Made Me Do is the title of a track from Swift’s 2017 album, reputation -, it is almost obsessive and forensic in ‘revealing’ or at least strongly suggesting that Taylor Swift is queer. In a tone that suggests she is hiding it. You can read the piece here. Rather than celebrate her success and the fact her Eras Tour has broken records and is the most successful concert film ever, she has been subjected to this ‘exposé’. It would be interesting to see a piece about how Swift’s music resonates with the L.G.B.T.Q.I.A.+ community and how ‘Swifties’ – the name given to her fanbase – find strength and identification through those songs. Instead, this excess and rather needless feature seems to want Taylor Swift to come out. It has prompted an angry response. Is it appropriate for the media to do that?! Not a tabloid feature, it does have that feel of try to out someone or suggesting that they are coding something that should be declared and made public. Here are some segments from that New York Times feature:
“On April 26, Lesbian Visibility Day, Ms. Swift released the album’s lead single, “ME!,” in which she sings about self-love and self-acceptance. She co-directed a campy music video to accompany it, which she would later describe as depicting “everything that makes me, me.” It features Ms. Swift dancing at a pride parade, dripping in rainbow paint and turning down a man’s marriage proposal in exchange for a … pussy cat.
At the end of June, the L.G.B.T.Q. community would celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall Riots. On June 14, Ms. Swift released the video for her attempt at a pride anthem, “You Need to Calm Down,” in which she and an army of queer celebrities from across generations — the “Queer Eye” hosts, Ellen DeGeneres, Billy Porter, Hayley Kiyoko, to name a few — resist homophobia by living openly. Ms. Swift sings that outrage against queer visibility is a waste of time and energy: “Why are you mad, when you could be GLAAD?”
The video ends with a plea: “Let’s show our pride by demanding that, on a national level, our laws truly treat all of our citizens equally.” Many, in the press and otherwise, saw the video as, at best, a misguided attempt at allyship and, at worst, a straight woman co-opting queer aesthetics and narratives to promote a commercial product.
Ms. Swift’s “Lover” was the first record that she created with nearly unchecked creative freedom. Lacking her old label’s constraints, she specifically chose to feature activism for and the aesthetics of the L.G.B.T.Q. community in her confessional, self-expressive art. Even before the sale of her masters, she appeared to be stepping into a new identity — not just an aesthetic — that was distinct from that associated with her past six albums.
When looking back on the artifacts of the months before that album’s release, any close reader of Ms. Swift has a choice. We can consider the album’s aesthetics and activism as performative allyship, as they were largely considered to be at the time. Or we can ask a question, knowing full well that we may never learn the answer: What if the “Lover Era” was merely Ms. Swift’s attempt to douse her work — and herself — in rainbows, as so many baby queers feel compelled to do as they come out to the world?”.
Once a record of good repute and standing, The New York Times has not covered itself in glory with this feature! Why it was even commissioned to start with seems very odd. Capitalising on Taylor Swift’s success, it does seem a negative reaction to that. Whereas it could have been framed in a more positive way regarding sexuality and themes explored in her songs, it is something rather tawdry and baiting. Whether Swift is queer or not is queer is no business of ours. She has not stated her sexual preference or how she identifies. At a time when L.G.B.T.Q.I.A.+ artists are still not as embraced as they should be, I wonder whether this set things back. Rather than celebrating the community and showing support, there are articles (like the one in The New York Times) that almost force people to come out! Accusatory and needlessly obsessed with something that does not need to be written about. How many artists of Taylor Swift’s standing have similar articles written about them asking if they are straight?! There is a sense of homophobic and prejudice in the article. Many have reacted to it. I want to bring in some reaction and analysis.
PHOTO CREDIT: Kevin Mazur/Getty Images for iHeartMedia
Laura Snapes, writing for The Guardian, felt that the number of mentions in Taylor Swift’s songs suggesting she may be queer are not accidental. That may she has rebuked her L.G.B.T.Q.I.A.+ fans. Why is it impossible to think that the reference that might suggest sexual desire are actual about friendship?! Or, more importantly, why does she have to reveal her sexuality or make her lyrics overtly queer?! What business is it of ours?! She does not owe her fans that announcement. As someone afforded virtually no privacy or part of her life uncovered, is this the final stone that needs to be unturned so that she is completely exposed?!
“The response felt almost as heavy-handed and misguided as the original piece. Male artists including Shawn Mendes and Harry Styles have in fact been the subjects of massive speculation about their sexualities: the NYT writer previously published a similar piece about Styles, while Mendes has spoken of the pressure of the constant discourse about his identity. (“I thought, ‘You fucking guys are so lucky I’m not actually gay and terrified of coming out,’ ” he told Rolling Stone. “That’s something that kills people.”) And there is no way that gimlet-eyed Swift has made the many references listed by accident: if you lead a horse to water, don’t be surprised when it drinks. Dignifying an overblown essay with such a severe response may in turn act as a rebuke to fans who have found identification and solace – or even just benign entertainment – in imagining, say, that Swift’s gaspingly sexy Reputation song Dress may be about her once-prominent friend, the model Karlie Kloss (“I don’t want you like a best friend”!), rather than its more likely subject, her then-boyfriend Joe Alwyn”.
It’s these playful and personal mutations that keep a star like Swift interesting at a time when her carefully managed media omnipresence and tightly plotted breadcrumb trails have started to feel a little tedious, laden with thudding predictability. (Does the snake-green dress she wore to the Golden Globes at the weekend mean that the serpent-referencing Reputation (Taylor’s Version) is coming? Is the pope Catholic?) For many onlookers, that wearying feeling struck again when reading her lone recent interview, for Time’s person of the year cover, which seemed disappointingly uninquiring and intent on validating her version of events – namely that she was “cancelled” in the wake of her feud with Kim Kardashian and Kanye West, when in fact it resulted in one of the most successful albums of her career – rather than pushing deeper into the fertile ground where her self-conception rubs up against public interpretation. The most abiding images of Swift this past year show pop’s biggest outlier standing alone on stage at the Eras tour, bedazzled with sequins. She cuts a formidable figure in her class of one – but it’s in the unruly exquisite corpse of pop fandom and stardom that the most meaningful rewards are found”.
That suggestion that an artist who has become a bit predictable or subjected to little media scrutiny or scandal. Swift is the master of her own narrative. Why should the queer suggestion compete with other interpretations? I think that that assumption somewhat misses the point. Regardless of her fame and perceived lack of revelation regarding her sex life and relationships, The New York Times were analytical in a very intense way. Why should the subject of Taylor Swift’s sexuality compel such obsession?! Again, it comes to the argument or whether it is intrusive and inappropriate or an article that is trying to make her more identifiable to her L.G.B.T.Q.I.A.+ fans. Rather than her songs holding back when they should maybe embrace an important part of her fanbase, it is needless decoding and obtrusion.
In the same way that Taylor Swift loves her L.G.B.T.Q.I.A.+ fans and they are very important to her, she has long been the subject of speculation around her sexuality. Not the first time this has been brought up, Swift has also said how she is not L.G.B.T.Q.I.A.+. Why then, now, curiously timed around the Eras Tour success and this new level of fame, should Anna Marks decide to focus on entirely the wrong thing?! There are a couple of other opinions from The Guardian that I think are interesting. This is what Arwa Mahadawi wrote in her feature as she asked whether it was okay for people to speculate about Taylor Swift’s sexuality:
“Swift, for her part, has said she isn’t part of the LGBTQ+ community and asked people not to sexualise her female friendships. Was the Times unethical to gloss over all of this and give rumours about her sexuality so much airtime? Swift’s inner circle reportedly thinks so. According to CNN, Swift’s associates (a vague term which could mean anyone from Swift’s PR person to someone who once sat in the same restaurant as her) were disgusted by the article, and accused the Times of sexism.
Outing someone against their wishes is clearly morally wrong, but that’s very different from overanalysing a bunch of song lyrics
“Because of her massive success, in this moment there is a Taylor-shaped hole in people’s ethics,” a source told the outlet in response to the Times piece. “This article wouldn’t have been allowed to be written about Shawn Mendes or any male artist whose sexuality has been questioned by fans.”
Let’s not go overboard here, eh? Yes, much of the discourse surrounding Swift is steeped in sexism and double standards. But I’m not sure that charge can be levelled at this particular piece. Marks has, after all, written a similar sort of article (albeit much shorter) about Harry Styles – who has been accused of queerbaiting and whose sexuality is constantly being questioned by fans.
Further, while I think Marks’s piece was highly inadvisable, I wouldn’t go as far as to say it was unethical. Outing someone against their wishes is clearly morally wrong, but that’s very different from overanalysing a bunch of song lyrics. Particularly when those lyrics are set up to be overanalysed in the first place. As Marks notes in her piece, “Swift has explicitly encouraged her fans to read into the coded messages (which she calls ‘Easter eggs’) she leaves in music videos, social media posts and interviews with traditional media outlets.”
PHOTO CREDIT: John Salangsang/Golden Globes 2024/Getty Images
It’s a genius marketing move, encouraging fans to engage deeply with her content and get them speculating about what deeper meaning the megastar might be weaving into her songs. Is it any wonder that some fans go down rabbit holes?
Speculating about a celebrity’s sexuality on online forums is one thing, but there’s a case that speculation in serious media outlets is completely different. Certainly, Chely Wright, a queer country singer whose struggles to come out in the early 2000s kicked off Marks’s piece, thinks so. “I think it was awful of [the New York Times] to publish,” she wrote. “Triggering for me to read – not because the writer mentioned my nearly ending my life – but seeing a public person’s sexuality being discussed is upsetting.”
I can understand why Wright would feel upset about the article, but – and I say this as a gay woman – I take umbrage with the idea that it is upsetting to see a public person’s sexuality being discussed in 2024. I mean, come on now: celebrities have their sexuality discussed all the time. Newsflash: talking about a celebrity dating someone of the opposite sex is discussing a public person’s sexuality.
It is unfortunate, I think, that Wright’s criticism accidentally plays into homophobic ideas that only queer people have sexualities while heterosexual love lives are just the default. And quite a lot of the outrage over the Times piece, I should note, does seem to be tinged with homophobia. Certainly all the outraged op-eds in the likes of the New York Post seem disgusted with the very idea that anyone might suspect Swift to be gay. “What’s so wrong about her being a straight white woman who makes great music?” an irate Post article demanded.
I’m not entirely sure what Marks set out to achieve with her piece (which, again, was ill-advised), but I do think she has achieved something. She has shown us that the entertainment industry is perfectly fine with its biggest stars flirting with LGBTQ+ imagery. It’s fine with its biggest stars draping themselves in rainbow flags and making statements about allyship. Dare to suggest that those stars might actually be gay, though, and you’ll see quite a lot of old-fashioned homophobia coming out”.
Maybe intended to celebrate an artist at the height of her powers that might be this role model and tangible inspiration for other queer people, was the intention to reveal this queer icon – in a music scene where queer artists are perhaps accepted by not spotlighted as they should be. Is the music industry doing enough to show the visibility and enormous importance of L.G.B..Q.I.A.+ artists?! I know there is an irony in me writing a feature that will nearly be 5,000 words angrily reacting to an original 5,000-word feature! Why go to such excessive lengths to pick apart and slam an original piece that, in itself, was strangely over-analytic and needless?! It is not only about Taylor Swift. It is the way the media needs to know private details and people’s sexuality. A feeling that this should be public information. Taylor Swift shrouding something in mystery when she should be honest with her fans. As Swift has made no suggestion she is queer, what The New York Times feature is seems to be muck-racking. When artists are slammed for queer-baiting, isn’t this what The New York Times are doing?! This opinion piece raises some interesting points:
“Swift has embraced the LGBTQ+ community in the past, calling her concerts a “safe space” for LGBTQ+ people and publicly defending them in a 2019 interview with Vogue magazine against a record number of anti-gay bills introduced in states across the country. “Rights are being stripped from basically everyone who isn’t a straight white cisgender male,” she said. “I didn’t realize until recently that I could advocate for a community that I’m not a part of.”
But she has not identified as a member of the queer community herself. In the prologue to the re-record of her 1989 album, released in October, Swift said she surrounded herself with female friends at one point in her career to counter ceaseless media speculation on her love life. “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, seemingly aware of the criticism her essay could face, pre-emptively tried to address potential backlash in her piece. “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,” she added. “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”
El Hunt, writing for The Independent, feels that a dangerous line was crossed by The New York Times. Rather than it being a fascinating and important essay on sexuality and artists’ privacy – or whatever the intention was! -, there is this element of homophobia. The feeling that queerness needs to be exposed, rooted out and revealed. It also puts pressure on other queer artists who have not come out that they may be subjected to such prurient obsession from the media. This beautiful community, queerness should not be seen as something dirty or shameful:
“Both of them are right – analysing every last detail of somebody’s existence for hidden clues that they’re harbouring some kind of secret doesn’t just buy into the idea that a queer person looks or acts a certain way, it implies that being LGBTQ+ is still something that needs to be exposed or rooted out. Have none of us learned from the countless tabloid outings, gleefully pasting celebrity’s private lives across their front pages, occasionally with tragic results?
It implies that being LGBTQ+ is still something that needs to be exposed or rooted out
For artists who find themselves embroiled in these seemingly baseless rumours, such as Swift, the whole thing must be deeply infuriating – and beyond that, we all lose out. A world where some straight men – such as the Puerto Rican rapper Bad Bunny, or the actor Tyler James Williams – are singled out, their playful fashion senses or affection for their male peers held aloft as ‘evidence’ sounds like an incredibly depressing, two-dimensional one to me.
For an artist who is either straight, or refuses to label their sexuality at all, there is simply no way to win. Those who breezily ignore the rumours and carry on as they are (often while politely refusing to label themselves publicly) are immediately branded as queerbaiters seeking to profit off the so-called pink pound.
It is not enough to show solidarity with a community that forms a beloved chunk of a musician’s fan-base anymore; surely there must be an ulterior motive or PR strategy whirring away behind the scenes. Hit back at speculation too firmly, and you risk being labelled homophobic ‒ so what if you’re gay? What does it matter anyway?! But to flip that same logic in its head, why get so obsessed about it in the first place, then?
Often it’s also implied that artists we suspect of being queer ‒ whether it's Taylor Swift or Billie Eilish, who recently accused Variety of outing her ‒ have some kind of duty to come out in order to bolster representation. “And so just for a little while longer, we need our heroes,” insists the New York Times.
Fame does not form a protective mystical shield from homophobic hate crimes
This isn’t just naïve, it does a huge disservice to the realities of homophobia, and is completely untethered from a period in which hate crimes based on sexual orientation have actually increased by 112 per cent over the last five years. Fame does not form a kind of protective mystical shield, either; actor Jonathan Bailey recently told the Standard about having his life threatened because he was gay. “That is the reality,” he said. “People’s lives are literally at risk.”
Given how much we hear about positive queer representation nowadays ‒ and granted, things are improving ‒ it’s tempting to buy into the incredibly optimistic suggestion that homophobia is mostly a thing of the past (it’s 2024! Love is love!) and the preserve of a few ignorant, poorly educated bigots. This could not be further from the truth.
Look, I love searching through popular culture for ‘gay morsels’ as much as the next bored lesbian. I would be flat-out lying if I denied having watched endless compilations of Rachel Weisz/Cate Blanchett/Kate Winslet waxing lyrical about starring in a film about queer love and sounding amusingly, accidentally, perhaps slightly-knowingly gay in the process; for me, that’s about the art itself, so it’s fair game.
And perhaps this is where the line is. If you ask me, reappraising somebody’s art through an LGBTQ+ lens in the first place is not a problem ‒ it’s so common that there’s an entire branch of academia dedicated to the practice, called queer theory. The analysis that follows can often shed really interesting light: who does a lyric belong to once it has left an artist’s mouth?
It’s an important and valid question that cuts right to the core of the magic of music in the first place; a song’s essence shifts depending on who sings it, or who hears it. When Shania Twain sings Man, I Feel Like A Woman, it’s a defiant expression of female empowerment; but when she performs it as a duet with Harry Styles, it automatically becomes a playful exploration of gender expression instead”.
It is interesting seeing various interpretations and reactions to the feature from The New York Times. Why it was published in the first place…and what message it sends out. I think there is a majority feeling that it is inappropriate and shows The New York Times in a bad light. Doing very little to improve their reputation, it does seem like a misjudged and dangerous write-up! Digging into lyrics to try and make Taylor Swift reveal she is queer – when she has said she isn’t -, it is homophobic and completely unnecessary. That New York Times feature is entitled “Look What We Made Taylor Swift Do”. Nobody made her do anything! Rather than writing nothing or producing a feature celebrating Taylor Swift’s achievements, instead we have this scandalous and obsessive deep-dive that seems completely unnecessary and tasteless. It has provoked huge anger. Look what The New York Times…
MADE us do!