Weeks after Taylor Swift released 1989, SNL did a sketch called “Swiftamine.”
Like Dramamine, the fictional drug was intended to relieve nausea and vertigo, because in the fall of 2014, “realizing you love Taylor Swift” became “the leading cause of vertigo in adults.”
Nine years ago, Swifties hadn’t even reached Peak Cringe yet, but as blondie moved from tween-pleasing country into YA pop, her influence was building steadily. The SNL sketch sums it up as a bit of cognitive-auditory dissonance.
Brain says: “Oof, Taylor Swift? She's always wearing, like, a 1950s bathing suit."
And ears say: "Shut up, this is a perfect song."
My mom and I laughed at the sketch because it was very us. I was 20 and I had just started to love Taylor Swift. Throughout my middle school and high school years, I had very snottily rolled my eyes at the girls who wore Red tour T-shirts to school. A part of this was internalized misogyny around her boy craziness, but a much larger part was the music itself; at the time I maintained that Taylor “wouldn’t know country if it bit her on the butt1” and none of the singles I’d heard were any good.
So I was a perfect target for Taylor’s pop turn, which converted me into a casual fan. Her 1989 tour antics gave me more to love. In Los Angeles, she brought St. Vincent out on stage with her (and Beck?????????????) for a signature Annie Clark guitar solo. Everywhere she went, Taylor was surrounded by a group of talented/well-compensated friends, who made appearances in her music videos or cheered for her in the crowd. She was friends with Lorde. I wanted to be friends with Lorde! I STILL want to be friends with Lorde.
There was another similarity between us, then, one that I couldn’t have predicted would become a point of vicious conflict for the Swiftie fandom and a major parasocial figure of my own life. Long before I cared about Taylor Swift, I’d picked up an issue of Teen Vogue and quickly became obsessed with a young model who often appeared in the magazine. She was a St. Louis-born ballerina who turned to modeling as a teen. She was only two years older than I was. Her name was Karlie Kloss, and just before I started getting interested in Taylor Swift, she and Karlie became best friends.
Or rather, gal pals. Everywhere Taylor went, Karlie was. Obviously, it was marketing, but it felt so much more intimate – so much more real – than Taylor’s relationships with men that the press had seized on for so long. In the leadup to 1989 and the media frenzy following its release, Karlie and Taylor seemed inseparable. In March 2015, they shot a cover for Vogue, with an accompanying video. That video featured a contest to be the “best best friend” and it ended with this image:
There was…speculation.
Now, let me pause here to talk a little bit about Kaylor/Gaylor discourse, as it happened way back in the olden days of 2014/2015. This was when Tumblr was kiiiinda shameful – Yahoo owned it and if you don’t know what “DashCon” was, well, go look that up2. And then, you’ll understand why I was embarrassed to be super active on Tumblr.
Now, I did not broadcast this fact. A few select, fellow losers knew. But my Tumblr was where I got to be an unabashed fan. I re-shared gifs of TV shows, movies, and video games I liked. I posted photo after photo of celebrities I had crushes on. And over time, some trends emerged. I liked anime princesses, I liked Sailor Moon, I liked supermodels, I liked vintage Hello Kitty T-shirts, I liked hamsters, I liked glittery rainbows, I liked rainbow glitter, I liked daybeds with tufted duvets piled high with stuffed animals. And I very clearly liked women.
This is not something I was open about for much of my life. I dated the same boy all throughout high school, and he knew I also liked girls. He had "no problem" with it, as long as I "made sure to tell him all about it" if I kissed any of my female friends (ew). This is a pattern that would repeat itself through my early adult relationships with men: if I mentioned bisexuality, reactions ranged from disgust/accusations of betrayal to unsubtle pleas to "open up the relationship" to women who may be interested in me.
The moment I broke up with my high school boyfriend, I started dating women, but I didn’t really talk about it. A line I heard a lot throughout my teens and early twenties was that bisexual women are “only trying to get attention.” I can’t argue with this, exactly, because I was trying to get attention – from the people I wanted to date.
Like with the men I dated, the reactions I experienced from women I pursued went one of two ways. After seeing each other a few times, women tended to thank me for the “fun” “experiment” and never date another woman again. Or, after seeing each other a few times, they would get upset when I did not want to become exclusive and start planning a future together. More than once, a woman surprised me with the fact she was polyamorous, and seemed shocked that I was not interested in dating her and her partner(s). Dating, it turns out, is a hellscape. Someone should really make a movie or TV show about this!
It’s hard to conceptualize in 2023, when the landscape of social media is so radically different, but in the nascent years of my active dating life, Tumblr was the best place to find patient people giving a wide variety of perspectives. It was where I looked to understand what I was going through. It was my first significant exposure to queer culture, because I could navigate the community on my own, following discussions and research and debate and absolute shitshows without ever saying a word. And I had nothing to say, really, in those early days. I was just relieved to know that I was not alone.
My experiences weren’t anomalies, unique to me and symptomatic of some moral/mental/social failing. I learned what a “unicorn hunter” was, in the context of sexuality, which was a relief and disgusting at the same time. It’s where I discovered a name for the strange “haha okay but really, are you straight or are you gay?” reaction that came from everyone I dated, eventually. I understood that, as a very feminine woman who had only publicly dated men, people would insist I was straight; I understood that, as I created playlists and elaborate date ideas for the women I was seeing, people would insist I was gay; it had never occurred to me that “bisexual erasure” was a phenomenon common enough to have a name.
Tumblr is also where I exercised my Swiftie fandom. Because I was such a “late bloomer,” a fan who only really started listening to Swift’s music during the 1989 era, I was nervous to engage with other fans. Many, many, many Swifties on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook posted harsh messages to “bandwagon” fans, decrying anyone who wasn’t a Swiftie since the “self-titled” era3, even arguing that “new fans” shouldn’t be allowed to attend 1989 tour dates.
I remember this so well that when Swift announced the Eras tour, and TicketMaster met the demand for tickets with a giant corporate fart, I laughed at the fans’ reaction. Many fans on TikTok and Twitter argued that only “real fans” – pre-Folklore fans – should be allowed to attend the tour. In other places, I saw longtime fans write and post apology letters to Taylor, begging her to understand why they could “only” attend one show. Other Swifties attacked their fellow fans, saying that attending one show in their geographical region wasn’t good enough, insisting on their solemn duty to attend the Eras tour and sing every word, unlike “fake fans” who would only know more recent releases.
This is not to say Tumblr wasn’t like that – some corners were, and are, and I’ll talk more about that in a minute – but in the era where I was most active, and the parts of the platform where I spent the most time, people were welcoming. There was a lot of forgiveness for people (like me!) who had judged Taylor Swift’s dating life, her lyrics or her approach toward country music. I learned that I did not like most of Red (which was definitely her most popular album at my high school) but I was very passionate about Speak Now. Generous fans created documents that listed iconic live performances, hard-to-find demos, and Swift’s best covers. There was an understanding that some of us were new to the Swiftie world, but ultimately, more fans in the fandom was a positive end result for everyone.
I didn’t realize this at the time, but I was seeking out a Swiftie community on Tumblr and a queer community on Tumblr because I didn’t know how to find those things offline. People were very quick to judge my lack of familiarity with Taylor Swift’s catalog. People were very quick to brush off my questions about navigating the dating world as a bisexual woman.
I was constantly tasked with “proving” my worthiness and veracity. In my dating life, that meant invasive questions about my sexual and relationship history. And over time, as I fell deeper into Taylor Swift’s back catalog, her music overwhelmingly resonated with my experiences as a woman dating women. There were lyrics that reflected everything I experienced. When people told me I’d “get over” my crushes on women (“I can't decide if it's a choice/Getting swept away”); when a woman who had called me her “girlfriend” for months labeled herself an “ally” (“Why are we pretending this is nothing?”); when I sabotaged friendships because I was too unwilling to talk about my feelings at the risk of “overstepping” (all of How You Get The Girl). All of these feelings – none of which were identifiable until I began navigating the world as my full, authentic self – had easy-to-find touchstones in Taylor Swift’s music.
Now, back to Karlie.
When I moved to New York4 in 2017, Taylor Swift had gone under the radar. After a dramatic online conflict with the Kardashian-Wests in 2016, she disappeared from social media/the public eye and worked on her sixth album, Reputation. In the interim, a burgeoning community of Gaylors (queer Swifties) gained steam on Tumblr. Keeping with Swift’s tradition of hiding “Easter eggs” in songs/liner notes/social posts, many self-identified Gaylors began analyzing her lyrics through a queer lens. Specifically, they documented words and imagery in Swift’s music and media appearances that seemed to represent her super-close gal-pal, Karlie Kloss. So, the Gaylor community had a new subset: Kaylors (those who believed Swift and Kloss had been romantically connected).
This was nothing new, actually. Before Kaylor became something of a viral portmanteau, there were “Swiftgron” shippers (people who noted lyrics in Red/1989 that appeared to be references to Swift’s friend Dianna Agron). And there were a number of other rumored romantic relationships with women that certain Tumblr users, accustomed to reblogging gifs of Merlin and Buffy for homoerotic undertones, quickly fixated on.
The release of Reputation poured fuel on the Kaylor fire. Songs like Dress (“I don't want you like a best friend/Only bought this dress so you could take it off”) raised eyebrows. For those who were intimately familiar with the symbology of Kaylor lore, songs like Don’t Blame Me incited fervor (“Halo, hiding my obsession” seemed to reference Victoria’s Secret angel Kloss, as did “I once was poison ivy, but now I'm your daisy,” because Kloss tagged Swift in a photo of a daisy after the pair took an intimate trip to Big Sur).
The entirety of Reputation advanced Gaylor discourse even further into the mainstream. I came out publically the old-fashioned way: through a Taylor Swift podcast. Taydar was an album-by-album, song-by-song journey through Swift’s career, where two queer women discussed the motifs that were the most poignant, the imagery that was the most familiar. By the time my friend Sarah and I started Taydar in 2019, we were met with a warm reception from our community. We were also met with skepticism, understandably: by spring 2019, there were Tumblr, Twitter, Instagram and Reddit accounts that were dedicated to “proving” Taylor Swift was gay, sometimes even through fabricated or misleading “evidence.”
And this struck a nerve, for me. I’m bisexual and my cohost Sarah, who’s a lesbian, is married to a bisexual woman. We knew all too well that asserting your own queerness is often met with demands of “proof” from friends, family, and strangers. So what if we approached Swift’s lyrics and media footprint with curiosity and a “queer mindset?” Scholars approached other writers’ work and lives the same way. A few people said we gave Swift’s catalog the “Emily Dickinson treatment.” The conversations helped Sarah and I understand our own affection for Swift’s music. And overwhelmingly, our audience said that looking at Swift’s work through a queer lens helped them appreciate the music more.
You Belong With Me, for example, was largely received as a teen love triangle anthem with misogynistic, “I’m not like other girls!” overtones when it was released in 2008. Looking back now, I see my earliest teen romances reflected. I was “boy crazy,” yes, but I was also obsessed with the girls who “dated” the boys that rejected me. The speaker meticulously catalogs everything about this "other girl," and maybe that obsession is born of jealousy, but maybe it's also born of desire. I know, for me, it often was. I didn’t understand why I was fixated on the ways other girls embodied femininity, I just knew that, no matter how perfectly I “achieved” it myself, I was not satisfied. Then I kissed a girl at a Marilyn Manson concert and I got it!
Still, even once I knew I liked women, I was pretty quiet about my sexuality, because I was convinced I was “bad” at it. I was a bad bisexual. And by being bisexual at all, I was a bad queer. The only thing that’s undone those fallacies in my mind is time and maturity. There is no correct or incorrect way to experience love, connection, community. There are harmful behaviors to express those feelings, sure! But I wasn’t failing all of my friends and loved ones by thinking Princess Leia and Han Solo were equally hot.
Letting go of these weird, backward, stymied ideas also became easier as the internet became worse. By that, I mean: Tumblr, Twitter, TikTok today. Over time, the supportive, inclusive communities that had shaped me became overrun with weird internal policing. On one extreme end, you’ve got puritanical views of sex scenes in film (are they ever really necessary????) and on the other, you’ve got people saying that fictional villain Hannibal Lecter should not be prevented from nonconsensual cannibalism because he’s using it to cope with trauma5.
And in 2022, when the Swiftie community was once again up in arms about who is/isn’t allowed to go to concerts, and how many tickets/T-shirts represent an appropriate “tribute” to Taylor Swift…I laughed. A lot. I didn’t engage in the discourse because it all stems from the same place. Before I had a full understanding of who I am, I worried that one thing – my sexuality, my Swiftie status – would become my whole identity. And that, because I was “bad” at that thing, or didn’t perform it in the way others expected, I would be excluded.
Now I know better, and I give myself a lot more leeway. I give myself permission to be a “bad Swiftie” and a “disaster bisexual” and a person who is competent and imperfect and whole. As a result, I get more pleasure out of art, romance, music, everything. I am bad at flirting with girls and I think the original version of All Too Well is better than the 10-minute version. I managed to get Eras tickets; they are nosebleeds, only a few seats down from where I saw the Reputation tour. I’m going with my mom and one of my best friends. I am certain that the songs will remind me of people – all kinds of people – I love or loved, successfully or unsuccessfully. I probably won’t get all the words right. There may even be a song I don’t recognize. I might buy a T-shirt. I am going to dance my ass off.
To borrow a phrase from my Gram Cracker, which she used to describe another country icon who went mainstream, and who shall remain nameless.
For the record, though, my Gram was right.
Fyre Fest but for band geeks and theater kids.
Taylor Swift’s debut album Taylor Swift
There’s a Taylor Swift song for that too
These are REAL OPINIONS I have seen online. They are bad. I am a Hannibal fan and even I know they are bad.