#At least he has RuPaul to keep him company

[tmntkiseki]

He looks so pissed

[bananaofswifts]

IT’S A SUNDAY AFTERNOON in Tribeca, and I’m in Taylor Swift’s loft, inside a former printing house that she has restored and fortified into a sanctuary of brick, velvet, and mahogany. The space is warm and cozy and vaguely literary—later, when we pass through her bedroom en route to her garden, 10 percent of my brain will believe her wardrobe might open up to Narnia. Barefoot in a wine-colored floral top and matching flowy pants, Swift is typing passwords into a laptop to show me the video for “You Need to Calm Down,” eight days before she unleashes it on the world. I have a sliver of an idea what to expect. A few weeks earlier, I spent a day at the video shoot, in a dusty field-slash-junkyard north of Los Angeles. Swift had made it a sort of Big Gay Candy Mountain trailer park, a Technicolor happy place. The cast and crew wore heart-shaped sunglasses—living, breathing lovey-eyes emoji—and a mailbox warned, LOVE LETTERS ONLY. Swift and a stream of costars filmed six scenes over about a dozen hours. The singer-songwriter Hayley Kiyoko, known to her fans as “Lesbian Jesus,” shot arrows at a bull’s-eye. The YouTube comedian-chef Hannah Hart danced alongside Dexter Mayfield, the plus-size male model and self-described “big boy in heels.” The Olympic figure skater Adam Rippon served up icy red snow cones. Swift and her close friend Todrick Hall, of Kinky Boots and RuPaul’s Drag Race, sipped tea with the cast of Queer Eye. The mood was joyous and laid-back. But by the end of the day, I wasn’t sure what the vignettes would add up to. There were shoot days and cameos I wouldn’t observe. For security reasons, the song was never played aloud. (The cast wore ear buds.) Even the hero shot, in which Swift and Hall sauntered arm in arm through the dreamscape at golden hour, was filmed in near-total silence. For weeks afterward, I tried to sleuth out a theory. I started casually. There was a “5” on the bull’s-eye, so I did a quick search to figure out what that number might mean. Immediately I was in over my head. Swift has a thing for symbols. I knew she had been embedding secret messages in liner notes and deploying metaphors as refrains since her self-titled debut in 2006—long before her megafame made her into a symbol of pop supremacy. But I hadn’t understood how coded and byzantine her body of work has become; I hadn’t learned, as Swift’s fans have, to see hidden meanings everywhere. For instance: In the 2017 video for “Look What You Made Me Do,” a headstone in a graveyard scene reads NILS SJOBERG, the pseudonym Swift used as her writing credit on Rihanna’s hit “This Is What You Came For,” a Swedish-sounding nod to that country’s pop wizards. After an excessive amount of ad hoc scholarship—a friend joked that I could have learned Mandarin in the time I spent trying to unpack Swift’s oeuvre—I was no closer to a theory. Pop music has become so layered and meta, but the Taylor Swift Universe stands apart. Apprehending it is like grasping quantum physics. My first indication of what her new album, Lover, would be about came just after midnight on June 1, the beginning of Pride Month, when Swift introduced a petition in support of the federal Equality Act. This legislation would amend the Civil Rights Act to outlaw discrimination based on gender identity and sexual orientation. (It has passed the House, but prospects in Mitch McConnell’s Senate are unclear.) Swift also posted a letter to Senator Lamar Alexander, Republican of Tennessee, asking him to vote yes. The request, on her personal letterhead (born in 1989. LOVES CATS.), denounced President Trump for not supporting the Equality Act. “I personally reject the president’s stance,” Swift wrote. Back in the kitchen, Swift hits play. “The first verse is about trolls and cancel culture,” she says. “The second verse is about homophobes and the people picketing outside our concerts. The third verse is about successful women being pitted against each other.” The video is, for erudite Swifties, a rich text. I had followed enough clues to correctly guess some of the other cameos—Ellen DeGeneres, RuPaul, Katy Perry. I felt the satisfaction of a gamer who successfully levels up—achievement unlocked! The video’s final frame sends viewers to Swift’s change.org petition in support of the Equality Act, which has acquired more than 400,000 signatures—including those of Cory Booker, Elizabeth Warren, Beto O’Rourke, and Kirsten Gillibrand—or four times the number required to elicit an official response from the White House. “Maybe a year or two ago, Todrick and I are in the car, and he asked me, What would you do if your son was gay?” We are upstairs in Swift’s secret garden, comfortably ensconced in a human-scale basket that is sort of shaped like a cocoon. Swift has brought up an ornate charcuterie board and is happily slathering triple-cream Brie onto sea-salt crackers. “The fact that he had to ask me … shocked me and made me realize that I had not made my position clear enough or loud enough,” she says. “If my son was gay, he’d be gay. I don’t understand the question.” I have pressed Swift on this topic, and her answers have been direct, not performative or scripted. I do sense that she enjoys talking to me about as much as she’d enjoy a root canal—but she’s unfailingly polite, and when we turn to music, her face will light up and she will add little melodic phrases to her speech, clearly her preferred language. “If he was thinking that, I can’t imagine what my fans in the LGBTQ community might be thinking,” she goes on. “It was kind of devastating to realize that I hadn’t been publicly clear about that.” I understand why she was surprised; she has been sending pro-LGBTQ signals since at least 2011. Many have been subtle, but none insignificant—especially for a young country star coming out of Nashville. In the video for her single “Mean” (from 2010’s Speak Now), we see a boy in a school locker room wearing a lavender sweater and bow tie, surrounded by football players. In “Welcome to New York,” the first track on 1989, she sings, “And you can want who you want. Boys and boys and girls and girls.” Two years later, she donated to a fund for the newly created Stonewall National Monument and presented Ruby Rose with a GLAAD Media Award. Every night of last year’s Reputation tour, she dedicated the song “Dress” to Loie Fuller, the openly gay pioneer of modern dance and theatrical lighting who captured the imagination of fin-de-siècle Paris. Swift, who has been criticized for keeping her politics to herself, first took an explicit stance a month before the 2018 midterms. On Instagram, she endorsed Democrats for the Tennessee Legislature and called out the Republican running for Senate, Marsha Blackburn. “She believes businesses have a right to refuse service to gay couples,” Swift wrote. “She also believes they should not have the right to marry. These are not MY Tennessee values.” Swift says the post was partly to help young fans understand that if they wanted to vote, they had to register. To tell them, as she puts it, “Hey, just so you know, you can’t just roll up.” Some 65,000 new voters registered in the first 24 hours after her post, according to Vote.org. Trump came to Blackburn’s defense the following day. “She’s a tremendous woman,” he told reporters. “I’m sure Taylor Swift doesn’t know anything about her. Let’s say I like Taylor’s music about 25 percent less now, OK?” In April, spurred by a raft of anti-LGBTQ bills in Tennessee, Swift donated $113,000 to the Tennessee Equality Project, which advocates for LGBTQ rights. “Horrendous,” she says of the legislation. “They don’t call it ‘Slate of Hate’ for nothing.” Swift especially liked that the Tennessee Equality Project had organized a petition of faith leaders in opposition. “I loved how smart it was to come at it from a religious perspective.” Meanwhile, the “Calm Down” video provoked a Colorado pastor to call Swift “a sinner in desperate need of a savior” and warn that “God will cut her down.” It also revived heated debate within LGBTQ communities about the politics of allyship and corporatization of Pride. Some critics argued Swift’s pro-LGBTQ imagery and lyrics were overdue and out of the blue—a reaction the new Swift scholar in me found bewildering. Had they not been paying attention? Nor did it strike me as out of character for Swift to leverage her power for a cause. She pulled her catalog from Spotify in 2014 over questions of artist compensation. She stared down Apple in 2015, when the company said it would not pay artists during the launch of its music service. (Apple reversed itself immediately.) As a condition of her record deal with Universal Music Group last year, the company promised that it would distribute proceeds from any sale of its Spotify shares to all of its artists. And this summer, Swift furiously called out Scott Borchetta, founder of Big Machine Label Group, for selling her master recordings to the music manager Scooter Braun. (When I ask Swift if she tried to get her masters from Big Machine, her whole body slumps with a palpable heaviness. “It was either investing in my past or my and other artists’ future, and I chose the future,” she says of the deal she struck with Universal.) Swift’s blunt testimony during her 2017 sexual-assault case against a radio DJ—months before the #MeToo reckoning blew open—felt deeply political to me and, I imagine, many other women. Swift accused the DJ, David Mueller, of groping her under her skirt at a photo session in 2013. Her camp reported the incident to his employer, who fired him. Mueller denied the allegation, sued Swift for $3 million, and his case was thrown out. Swift countersued for a symbolic $1 and won. In a Colorado courtroom, Swift described the incident: “He stayed latched onto my bare ass cheek” as photos were being snapped. Asked why photos of the front of her skirt didn’t show this, she said, “Because my ass is located at the back of my body.” Asked if she felt bad about the DJ’s losing his job, she said, “I’m not going to let you or your client make me feel in any way that this is my fault. Here we are years later, and I’m being blamed for the unfortunate events of his life that are the product of his decisions—not mine.” When Time included Swift on the cover of its “Silence Breakers” issue that year, the magazine asked how she felt during the testimony. “I was angry,” she said. “In that moment, I decided to forgo any courtroom formalities and just answer the questions the way it happened…I’m told it was the most amount of times the word ass has ever been said in Colorado Federal Court.” Mueller has since paid Swift the dollar—with a Sacagawea coin. “He was trolling me, implying that I was self-righteous and hell-bent on angry, vengeful feminism. That’s what I’m inferring from him giving me a Sacagawea coin,” Swift says. “Hey, maybe he was trying to do it in honor of a powerful Native American woman. I didn’t ask.” Where is the coin now? “My lawyer has it.” I ask her, why get louder about LGBTQ rights now? “Rights are being stripped from basically everyone who isn’t a straight white cisgender male,” she says. “I didn’t realize until recently that I could advocate for a community that I’m not a part of. It’s hard to know how to do that without being so fearful of making a mistake that you just freeze. Because my mistakes are very loud. When I make a mistake, it echoes through the canyons of the world. It’s clickbait, and it’s a part of my life story, and it’s a part of my career arc.” I’d argue that no heterosexual woman can listen to “You Need to Calm Down” and hear only a gay anthem. “Calm down” is what controlling men tell women who are angry, contrary, or “hysterical,” or, let’s say, fearing for their physical safety. It is what Panic! at the Disco singer Brendon Urie says to Swift in the beginning of the “ME!” music video, prompting her to scream, “Je suis calme!” I cannot believe it is a coincidence that Swift, a numbers geek with an affinity for dates, dropped the single—whose slow, incessant bass is likely to be bumping in stadiums across the world in 2020 if she goes on tour—on June 14, a certain president’s birthday. It’s enlightening to read 13 years of Taylor Swift coverage—all the big reviews, all the big profiles—in one sitting. You notice things. How quickly Swift went from a “prodigy” (The New Yorker) and a “songwriting savant” (Rolling Stone) to a tabloid fixture, for instance. Or how suspect her ambition is made to seem once she acquires real power. Other plot points simply look different in the light of #MeToo. It is hard to imagine that Swift’s songs about her exes would be reviewed as sensationally today. I wonder if, in 2019, any man would dare grab the microphone out of a young woman’s hands at an awards show. I stared into space for a good long while when I was reminded that Pitchfork did not review Taylor Swift’s 1989 but did review Ryan Adams’s cover album of Taylor Swift’s 1989. I ask Swift if she had always been aware of sexism. “I think about this a lot,” she says. “When I was a teenager, I would hear people talk about sexism in the music industry, and I’d be like, I don’t see it. I don’t understand. Then I realized that was because I was a kid. Men in the industry saw me as a kid. I was a lanky, scrawny, overexcited young girl who reminded them more of their little niece or their daughter than a successful woman in business or a colleague. The second I became a woman, in people’s perception, was when I started seeing it. “It’s fine to infantilize a girl’s success and say, How cute that she’s having some hit songs,” she goes on. “How cute that she’s writing songs. But the second it becomes formidable? As soon as I started playing stadiums—when I started to look like a woman—that wasn’t as cool anymore. It was when I started to have songs from Red come out and cross over, like ‘I Knew You Were Trouble’ and ‘We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together.’ ” Those songs are also more assertive than the ones that came before, I say. “Yeah, the angle was different when I started saying, I knew you were trouble when you walked in. Basically, you emotionally manipulated me and I didn’t love it. That wasn’t fun for me.” I have to wonder if having her songwriting overlooked as her hits were picked apart and scrutinized wasn’t the biggest bummer of all. Swift: “I wanted to say to people, You realize writing songs is an art and a craft and not, like, an easy thing to do? Or to do well? People would act like it was a weapon I was using. Like a cheap dirty trick. Be careful, bro, she’ll write a song about you. Don’t stand near her. First of all, that’s not how it works. Second of all, find me a time when they say that about a male artist: Be careful, girl, he’ll use his experience with you to get—God forbid—inspiration to make art.” Without question the tenor of the Taylor Swift Narrative changed most dramatically in July 2016, when Kim Kardashian West called her a “snake” on Twitter, and released video clips of Swift and Kanye West discussing the lyrics to his song “Famous.” (No need to rehash the details here. Suffice it to say that Swift’s version of events hasn’t changed: She knew about some of the lyrics but not others; specifically, the words that bitch.) The posts sparked several hashtags, including #TaylorSwiftIsASnake and #TaylorSwiftIsCanceled, which quickly escalated into a months-long campaign to “cancel” Swift. To this day Swift doesn’t think people grasp the repercussions of that term. “A mass public shaming, with millions of people saying you are quote-unquote canceled, is a very isolating experience,” she says. “I don’t think there are that many people who can actually understand what it’s like to have millions of people hate you very loudly.” She adds: “When you say someone is canceled, it’s not a TV show. It’s a human being. You’re sending mass amounts of messaging to this person to either shut up, disappear, or it could also be perceived as, Kill yourself.” I get a sense of the whiplash Swift experienced when I notice that, a few months into this ordeal, while she was writing the songs that an interpolation of a ’90s camp classic, Right Said Fred’s “I’m Too Sexy.”) Nonetheless, most critics read it as a grenade lobbed in the general direction of Calabasas. One longtime Nashville critic, Brian Mansfield, had a more plausible take: She was writing sarcastically as the “Taylor Swift” portrayed in the media in a bid for privacy. “Yeah, this is the character you created for me, let me just hide behind it,” she says now of the persona she created. “I always used this metaphor when I was younger. I’d say that with every reinvention, I never wanted to tear down my house. ’Cause I built this house. This house being, metaphorically, my body of work, my songwriting, my music, my catalog, my library. I just wanted to redecorate. I think a lot of people, with Reputation, would have perceived that I had torn down the house. Actually, I just built a bunker around it.” In March, the snakes started to morph into butterflies, the vampire color palette into Easter pastels. When a superbloom of wildflowers lured a mesmerizing deluge of Painted Lady butterflies to Los Angeles, Swift marked it with an Instagram post. She attended the iHeartRadio Music Awards that night in a sequin romper and stilettos with shimmery wings attached. Swift announced the single “ME!” a month later, with a large butterfly mural in Nashville. In the music video for the (conspicuously) bubblegum song, a hissing pastel-pink snake explodes into a kaleidoscope of butterflies. One flutters by the window of an apartment, where Swift is arguing in French with Urie. A record player is playing in the background. “It’s an old-timey, 1940s-sounding instrumental version of ‘You Need to Calm Down,’ ’’ Swift says. Later, in the “Calm Down” video, Swift wears a (fake) back tattoo of a snake swarmed by butterflies. We are only two songs in, people. Lover, to be released on August 23, will have a total of 18 songs. “I was compiling ideas for a very long time,” Swift says. “When I started writing, I couldn’t stop.” (We can assume the British actor Joe Alwyn, with whom Swift has been in a relationship for nearly three years, provided some of the inspiration.) Swift thinks Lover might be her favorite album yet. “There are so many ways in which this album feels like a new beginning,” she says. “This album is really a love letter to love, in all of its maddening, passionate, exciting, enchanting, horrific, tragic, wonderful glory.” I have to ask Swift, given how genuinely at peace she seems, if part of her isn’t thankful, if not for the Great Cancellation of 2016, then for the person she now is—knowing who her friends are, knowing what’s what. “When you’re going through loss or embarrassment or shame, it’s a grieving process with so many micro emotions in a day. One of the reasons why I didn’t do interviews for Reputation was that I couldn’t figure out how I felt hour to hour. Sometimes I felt like: All these things taught me something that I never could have learned in a way that didn’t hurt as much. Five minutes later, I’d feel like: That was horrible. Why did that have to happen? What am I supposed to take from this other than mass amounts of humiliation? And then five minutes later I’d think: I think I might be happier than I’ve ever been.” She goes on: “It’s so strange trying to be self-aware when you’ve been cast as this always smiling, always happy ‘America’s sweetheart’ thing, and then having that taken away and realizing that it’s actually a great thing that it was taken away, because that’s extremely limiting.” Swift leans back in the cocoon and smiles: “We’re not going to go straight to gratitude with it. Ever. But we’re going to find positive aspects to it. We’re never going to write a thank-you note.” Though people will take the Perry-Swift burger-and-fries embrace in the “You Need to Calm Down” video as a press release that the two have mended fences, Swift says it’s actually a comment on how the media pits female pop stars against one another. After Perry sent Swift an (actual) olive branch last year, Swift asked her to be in the video: “She wrote back, This makes me so emotional. I’m so up for this. I want us to be that example. But let’s spend some time together. Because I want it to be real. So she came over and we talked for hours. “We decided the metaphor for what happens in the media,” Swift explains, “is they pick two people and it’s like they’re pouring gasoline all over the floor. All that needs to happen is one false move, one false word, one misunderstanding, and a match is lit and dropped. That’s what happened with us. It was: Who’s better? Katy or Taylor? Katy or Taylor? Katy or Taylor? Katy or Taylor? The tension is so high that it becomes impossible for you to not think that the other person has something against you.“ Meanwhile, the protesters in the video reference a real-life religious group that pickets outside Swift’s concerts, not the white working class in general, as some have assumed. “So many artists have them at their shows, and it’s such a confounding, confusing, infuriating thing to have outside of joyful concerts,” she tells me. “Obviously I don’t want to mention the actual entity, because they would get excited about that. Giving them press is not on my list of priorities.” At one point, Swift asks if I would like to hear two other songs off the new album. (Duh.) First she plays “Lover,” the title track, coproduced by Jack Antonoff. “This has one of my favorite bridges,” she says. “I love a bridge, and I was really able to go to Bridge City.” It’s a romantic, haunting, waltzy, singer-songwritery nugget: classic Swift. “My heart’s been borrowed and yours has been blue,” she sings. “All’s well that ends well to end up with you.” Next, Swift cues up a track that “plays with the idea of perception.” She has often wondered how she would be written and spoken about if she were a man, “so I wrote a song called ‘The Man.’ ” It’s a thought experiment of sorts: “If I had made all the same choices, all the same mistakes, all the same accomplishments, how would it read?” Seconds later, Swift’s earpods are pumping a synth-pop earworm into my head: “I’d be a fearless leader. I’d be an alpha type. When everyone believes ya: What’s that like?” Swift wrote the first two singles with Joel Little, best known as one of Lorde’s go-to producers. (“From a pop-songwriting point of view, she’s the pinnacle,” Little says of Swift.) The album is likely to include more marquee names. A portrait of the Dixie Chicks in the background of the “ME!” video almost certainly portends a collaboration. If fans are correctly reading a button affixed to her denim jacket in a recent magazine cover, we can expect one with Drake, too. Lover. “We met at one of her shows,” says McCartney, “and then we had a girls’ night and kind of jumped straight in. In London we’ll go on walks and talk about everything—life and love.” (Swift has no further fashion ambitions at the moment. “I really love my job right now,” she tells me. “My focus is on music.”) Oh, and that “5” on the bullseye? Track five is called “The Archer.” Yet something tells me the most illuminating clue for reading both Lover and Reputationmay be Loie Fuller, the dancer to whom Swift paid homage on tour. As Swift noted on a Jumbotron, Fuller “fought for artists to own their work.” Fuller also used swirling fabric and colored lights to metamorphose onstage, playing a “hide-and-seek illusionist game” with her audience, as one writer has put it. She became a muse to the Symbolists in Paris, where Jean Cocteau wrote that she created “the phantom of an era.” The effect, said the poet Stéphane Mallarmé, was a “dizziness of soul made visible by an artifice.” Fuller’s most famous piece was “Serpentine Dance.” Another was “Butterfly Dance.” Swift has had almost no downtime since late 2017, but what little she does have is divided among New York, Nashville, Los Angeles, and Rhode Island, where she keeps homes—plus London. In an essay earlier this year, she revealed that her mother, Andrea Swift, is fighting cancer for a second time. “There was a relapse that happened,” Swift says, declining to go into detail. “It’s something that my family is going through.” Later this year, she will star in a film adaptation of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Cats as Bombalurina, the flirtatious red cat. “They made us the size of cats by making the furniture bigger,” she says. “You’d be standing there and you could barely reach the seat of a chair. It was phenomenal. It made you feel like a little kid.” But first, she will spend much of the summer holding “secret sessions”—a tradition wherein Swift invites hundreds of fans to her various homes to preview her new music. “They’ve never given me a reason to stop doing it,” she says. “Not a single one.” Speaking of: Inquiring fans will want to know if Swift dropped any more clues about how to decode Lover during this interview. For you I reviewed the audio again, and there were a few things that made my newly acquired Swifty sense tingle. At one point she compared superstardom in the digital age to life in a dollhouse, one where voyeurs “can ‘ship’ you with who they want to ‘ship’ you with, and they can ‘favorite’ friends that you have, and they can know where you are all the time.” The metaphor was precise and vivid and, well, a little too intricately rendered to be off the cuff. (Also, the “ME!” lyric: “Baby doll, when it comes to a lover. I promise that you’ll never find another like me.”) Then there was the balloon—a giant gold balloon in the shape of a numeral seven that happened to float by while we were on her roof, on this, the occasion of her seventh album. “Is it an L’?” I say. “No, because look, the string is hanging from the bottom,” she says. It might seem an obvious symbolic gesture, deployed for this interview, except for how impossible that seems. Swift let me control the timing of nearly everything. Moreover, the gold seven wasn’t floating up from the sidewalk below. It was already high in the sky, drifting slowly toward us from down the street. She would have had to control the wind, or at least to have studied it. Would Taylor Swift really go to such elaborate lengths for her fans? This much I know: Yes, she would.

[artificialqueens]

(treat me nice) never let me go [branjie] 8/15 - pinkgrapefruit

chapter 8. don’t make me spell it out for you

previous chapters  1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

A/N -

look i know it’s been 4 months but i promise you it will be less next time…. i swear <3

let me know what you think!

*

Freshly cut grass and expensive champagne fill Vanessa’s nostrils as she tries to daintily walk through the field. She’s got one soft hand in Brooke Lynn’s own, fingers intertwined in a way she’s not quite ready to unpack yet, and the other hand is gripping tightly to wicker picnic basket Nina found for them - a red plaid blanket carefully tucked through the handles.

With Vanessa in her - almost vintage style - skater dress, and Brooke in a white shirt - sleeves rolled, and a pair of blue skinny jeans, they look like an idyllic couple ready for a day at the races. Brooke had assured her back at the hotel that it is the least formal day, and she can’t help but pray she is right.

As they get closer, Vanessa can hear the noise of the announcer filtering through the general hubbub of tipsy twenty and thirty-somethings, and it makes her stop in her tracks, eyes transfixed on the crowds. She drops Brooke’s hand.

“What if someone recognises me,” she asks, voice hard to hear above the ever-rising din. Brooke gives her a soft, but reassuring smile, coming to stand in front of her, arms winding around her waist, gently holding her.

“I assure you they have not spent that much time in Olympic.” Vanessa gives a chuckle at the sentiment but refuses to relax into Brooke’s grip.

“You did.”

Brooke rolls her eyes good-naturedly, picking Vanessa’s hand up again and giving it a gentle tug. “Alright, You look great. You look like a lady.” Vanessa scrunches up her nose. “You’re gonna have a wonderful time, let’s go.” She lets herself live in the way their fingers interlock for a few more seconds.

“Alright, Miss Brooke Lynn.” She allows herself to be pulled towards the crowd, and when she is - she can’t turn back.

*

They walk through the stalls and tents arm in arm, gently muttering snarky comments to each other under their breath. The races had never been Brooke’s favourite when she was a young upstart, but as she’s grown up and into her job, she found them valuable for networking and just enjoying herself.

They’ve just found a good spot to set up when Ru wanders over to them, already gunning for Brooke. The blonde just sighs heavily, visibly straightening her back and transforming in front of Vanessa’s eyes.

“Vanessa, I want you to meet my boss - RuPaul Andre Charles.” She offers her hand out as demurely as she can and he kisses it softly. She has to inhale sharply to stop herself recoiling at the action - it feels so wrong to her.

“It’s always a pleasure to meet one of Brooke’s girls,” Ru smiles. Brooke watches the encounter with a vacant look in her eyes as if she’s watching something that isn’t really there.

“Let me get you ladies a drink, champagne, Vanessa?” She nods, and, to her relief, he leaves. She leans closer to Brooke just to feel something that isn’t the cold breeze that follows Ru wherever he goes.

“Real genuine guy,” she jokes, but she still feels unsettlingly open and unguarded.

“Mhm,” Brooke agrees, placing each hand on Vanessa’s waist and coming to stand behind her so she can place her chin on her shoulder.

“I can see why you needed me.” This gets Brooke to crack a smile and if Vanessa turned around she’s pretty sure she’d be able to see the woman’s shoulders come back down from her ears.

*

They relax in their bubble for a few minutes more, just watching the world move around them, before they spot Ru coming back their way. Brooke sighs.

She smiles at the brunette, squeezing her hand once before pointing at two innocuous looking women. “That’s Nicky and Gigi, they’ve made marrying an art form - they’ll keep you entertained for a few minutes,” She states plainly in a tone that suggests this is not the time to argue.

Vanessa just nods her head, pressing her lips softly to Brooke’s cheek to try and convey a level of ‘togetherness’ and starts to walk over to the women who are giggling behind their gloved hands. She smoothes her skirt in preparation, bare hands gliding down the pale blue of her dress.

“Hello,” she starts, pulling the facade of confidence she uses while escorting onto her face with practiced ease. “Vanessa,” She sticks out her hand firmly and shakes in the way Nina so painstakingly taught her to. `

“Gigi,” offers the taller brunette as the blonde introduces herself as Nicky.

“So you’re ze flavour of ze month,” Nicky muses, her french accent more pronounced as she blends her ‘th’ sounds in a way that sounds much softer than you would expect coming out of such a demure looking woman.

Gigi raises a perfectly sculpted eyebrow in response adding, “she’s just being testy,” to try and soften the blow. “Brooke Lynn is our most eligible bachelorette,” she explains, “She refuses any hand thrown her way.” And Vanessa has to fight the urge to snort a laugh a how nineteen-twenties it all sounds.

“Well, I’m not offering my hand, don’t worry. I’m just using her for sex.” Nicky tries to look scandalised at Vanessa’s admission, but it falls short and ends up bemused. “It’s mutual.” She tacks on the end, although she’s not sure it helps anything.

She’s about to start panicking about how she’ll deal with another half an hour of this when Yvie rides up beside them. She’s on her horse and suddenly Vanessa remembers something about the woman being a polo player, and she’s infinitely grateful for sitting through that dinner if it’s a means of escape.

“Yvangeline Oddly,” she introduces herself to the women Vanessa stands between, and she hears the gasps, further securing her suspicions that she knows nothing. Yvie looks at her and smiles. “Vanessa, lovely to see you again.” Her eyes are open and calm and Vanessa would rather spend a month with her than another five minutes with the demon housewives she’s been left with, so when Yvie asks if she will entertain her for a little while, Vanessa gladly agrees and ambles over to the stables where Yvie dismounts.

“Were you watching the Polo?” Yvie asks as she busies herself with removing the saddle and reins.

“What else would I be doing here?” Vanessa bats back, feeling an easy confidence she hasn’t felt in a few days. She’s strangely comfortable and she’s yet to discern why.

“Judging by many of the Lawyer wives - drinking heavily and trying to forget,” Yvie replies, and she’s smirking when she meets Vanessa’s eyes.  

*

“So who is she?” Ru asks - not trying to hide his judgement. Brooke rolls her eyes and leans back on her hand, the other gripping the stem of her champagne glass in a way that’s turning her knuckles white.

“I was asking for directions and there she was,” she explains, but she doesn’t quite get the air of finality right, and Ru nudges her to go on.

“What does she do? Does she work?” he asks like she’s under investigation.

“She’s in sales,” Brook mumbles into her glass, cursing herself for not thinking of this sooner.

“Sales, That’s terrific. That’s good. What does she sell?”

“Why do you want to know?” Brooke sounds exasperated and she can’t help it. She’s used to being cross-examined, but usually, Ru trusts her judgement enough to let her off once she’s answered the cursory questions.

“Just hear me out,” Ru starts and Brooke has to refrain from rolling her eyes a third time, hears her mother’s old saying in the back of her mind and keeps her eyes trained straight ahead. “I know you, Brooke, I hired you, for god’s sake. And you’ve been different this week - and I can’t help but feel like this girl is why.” He’s right, of course, he is, but she can’t let him know that. She feels an innate urge to protect Vanessa and she plans to act on it. “Especially when I see her talking to Yvie Oddly-”

“I introduced them at dinner the other night, so what?” Brooke cuts him off, tense.

“And now they’re best friends?” She lets her eyes find the stables and watches as Vanessa laughs with Yvie over her horse. She drops a strawberry into her mouth and uses her chipped thumbnail to wipe the juice from her chin. She has to pull her eyes away. “This girl appears out of nowhere. Now she’s talking to a girl whose company we’re trying to buy out. Convenient, don’t you think?”

“You sound paranoid, Ru.” She’s gone from tense to cold now, and she doesn’t care.

“How do you know that girl hasn’t attached herself to you, so she can bring information back to the Cains?” Brooke scoffs and it makes Ru more and more enraged until she can see his neck flush a muted scarlet. “This happens, Brooke Lynn. Industrial Espionage.”

“Ru.” She stops him dead in his tracks and he faces her properly. “Listen to me, she’s not a spy.” And Brooke prays to the heavens he will just leave it but he does not.

“What?”

“She’s not a spy, she’s a fucking hooker.”

His face twists and changes until he’s laughing, body fully shaking as he wipes a tear from under his eye. “Oh, she’s a hooker.” She watches as he drags his eyes up her body, even from afar and she wants to punch him.

“I picked her up on Olympia. In your car.” She is exhausted, hands raking through her hair as she pulls it out of its perfect ponytail.                              

“You’re the only millionaire I ever heard of… who goes looking for a bargain-basement streetwalker, you know?”

“She’s…. I’m sorry I told you.” Brooke bites her lip, teeth indenting into the cherry paint. Fuck.

*

Vanessa bids Yvie a good day as the latter prepares for her second event of the afternoon. She’s all prepared to go back to Brooke when Ru stops her - a large hand on her shoulder.

“Are you having a good day, Vanessa?” He asks and his voice sounds strained. She nods, affirming she is, before letting him continue. “It’s very different from Olympia, isn’t it?”

“What?” she lets out - not nearly as loud as she intended, but just as shocked. She gulps back the sudden urge to vomit on his very nice shoes and stands up tall. “What?” she asks again.

“Brooke told me, but don’t worry, your secret is safe with me.” He goes to walk away but turns around after only three feet. “And after all this is over maybe you can show me your skills.” He winks and he is gone.

She gapes as he leaves, mouth opening and closing like a fish out of water as her brain flicks through every possible thing this could mean but she cannot find a single response.

Not one.

[venus-says]

Kamen Rider Amazons Season 2

The Amazons are back... but this time they're boring!

It has been around one year or so that I've been running this blog, considering the number of things I've watched I came across a fair share of excellent things and I also have come across a lot of things that I didn't like, some of them were boring, some of them were emotional, there was a lot of frustration, a lot of joy, a lot of anger, and a whole lot of love.

But in this entire year, I have never come across something that I dislike just as much as I dislike Amazons Season 2.

After Season 1 I didn't have high hopes for the second season, I came to it open for whatever they would throw at me but I knew I shouldn't expect more than what season 1 delivered, a show that was mediocre but still fun. But that's not what I got from this season. This was bad, very boring, very difficult to go through, I wanted to give up on this show every time I finished an episode.

And it's not even that the plot is utterly bad, I could see it working. They had a child that was born as an amazon, we had normal people now becoming amazons like if the cells had become a virus, we have a new team hunting down the amazons for another company that has shady plans for the technology, and we have the returning conflicts from season 1 with Jin still trying to hunt down Mamoru who's now trying to lead the Tlaloc survivors into war and also trying to recruit more people to his cause since his group is the responsible for people being infected, and Haruka trying to stop him while at the same time he tries to aid his former companions of the Pest Control team that are back in action hunting amazons while they also try to deal with the events of 5 years ago, with an extra sprinkle of Mizuki who's left his passive personality behind since now she's also an agent. On paper, this all looks awesome, especially when you add in the fact that Chihiro is Jin and Nanaha's son, this sounds like it should be an amazing show. Except that is not.

This show has a terrible sense of pacing, watching this show felt like an eternity. This show just keeps dragging and dragging, it's like the story is never moving, then we have a turning point in episode 8, the only good episode of this season because it's showing Jin's side of the story, and you think the show is going to pick up and go strong for the rest of it, but it's just an illusion because it begins to drag again and it's painful. There were 3 or 4 times (if not more) that were perfect for the show to end, but it just never did and when came time for the show to finally end they don't even bore to give us a decent action scene at least because it wants to make a vague commentary about life to pretend that this show is about something other than just an edgy CGI mess. This shouldn't have been a 12-episodes-series, this should've been a movie so that they could cut off the excess and have a smaller script to try to make something decent.

It would probably still be awful because the new characters added to the cast are all horrible and unilateral and it's not fun to follow any of them around, but maybe with a shorter run time they could rework some stuff around, like that dude who we're supposed to believe is Chihiro and Iyu's friend and really cares for them when he doesn't even bother to visit his friend who lost a leg not even once, or giving up on the idea of making Nanaha becoming an amazon that later becomes this entity that doesn't do a lot, maybe they could just give up on the romance and cut all the scenes where Chihiro does awful men behaviour by believing any sign a girl makes means that they're definitely interested on them, or even not being stupid of adding this plot point that for the toxin or whatever that is in Iyu's armlet needs from 6 to 8 hours to kill her because whenever you wanna add a button to kill an individual you're controlling you really wanna give them a good amount of time to wreck havoc before shutting them down.

Or I don't know, maybe forget about adding new characters since you're not gonna work with them, just stick to doing something cool with the ones of season 1 and actually explaining things for us. Because I came out of this season without really knowing anyone of the new cast, we also never got an explanation about how Chihiro escaped, we also don't know how Mamoru got to make amazon!Nanaha to cooperate with his plan, heck even in the episode I liked, we don't get to know how Jin's body recovered from the wounds he received in Tlaloc. Honestly... this show... *sigh*

I can't even say they at least have good suites designs because Neo Amazon and New Alpha look awful. Just as awful as all the CG blood and CG kills, and the glossy filter they borrowed from the early seasons of Rupaul’s Drag Race.

This season was a mistake, and I'm emotionally dry. I need to go play some Hollow Knight and watch some Precure to regain joy in living as soon as possible because UGH. Anyway, these are my thoughts on Amazons Season 2, if you also watched this tragedy let me know what you think in the comments down below. Stay healthy, stay safe, never stop resisting, be aware of the water you drink, thank you so much for reading this post full of anger and disappointment, and until the next time.

[makistar2018]

Taylor Swift on Sexism, Scrutiny, and Standing Up for Herself

AUGUST 8, 2019 By ABBY AGUIRRE Photographed by INEZ AND VINOODH

Cover Look Taylor Swift wears a Louis Vuitton jumpsuit. Rings by Cartier and Bvlgari. To get this look, try: Dream Urban Cover in Classic Ivory, Fit Me Blush in Pink, Tattoostudio Sharpenable Gel Pencil Longwear Eyeliner Makeup in Deep Onyx, The Colossal Mascara, Brow Ultra Slim in Blonde, and Shine Compulsion by Color Sensational Lipstick in Undressed Pink. All by Maybelline New York. Hair, Christiaan; makeup, Fulvia Farolfi. Fashion Editor: Tonne Goodman

Photographed by Inez & Vinoodh, Vogue, September 2019

IT’S A SUNDAY AFTERNOON in Tribeca, and I’m in Taylor Swift’s loft, inside a former printing house that she has restored and fortified into a sanctuary of brick, velvet, and mahogany. The space is warm and cozy and vaguely literary—later, when we pass through her bedroom en route to her garden, 10 percent of my brain will believe her wardrobe might open up to Narnia. Barefoot in a wine-colored floral top and matching flowy pants, Swift is typing passwords into a laptop to show me the video for “You Need to Calm Down,” eight days before she unleashes it on the world.

I have a sliver of an idea what to expect. A few weeks earlier, I spent a day at the video shoot, in a dusty field-slash-junkyard north of Los Angeles. Swift had made it a sort of Big Gay Candy Mountain trailer park, a Technicolor happy place. The cast and crew wore heart-shaped sunglasses—living, breathing lovey-eyes emoji—and a mailbox warned, LOVE LETTERS ONLY.

Swift and a stream of costars filmed six scenes over about a dozen hours. The singer-songwriter Hayley Kiyoko, known to her fans as “Lesbian Jesus,” shot arrows at a bull’s-eye. The YouTube comedian-chef Hannah Hart danced alongside Dexter Mayfield, the plus-size male model and self-described “big boy in heels.” The Olympic figure skater Adam Rippon served up icy red snow cones. Swift and her close friend Todrick Hall, of Kinky Boots and RuPaul’s Drag Race, sipped tea with the cast of Queer Eye.

Speak Now “Rights are being stripped from basically everyone who isn’t a straight white cisgender male,” Swift says. Celine coat. Dior shoes. Fashion Editor: Tonne Goodman. Photographed by Inez & Vinoodh, Vogue, September 2019

The mood was joyous and laid-back. But by the end of the day, I wasn’t sure what the vignettes would add up to. There were shoot days and cameos I wouldn’t observe. For security reasons, the song was never played aloud. (The cast wore ear buds.) Even the hero shot, in which Swift and Hall sauntered arm in arm through the dreamscape at golden hour, was filmed in near-total silence.

For weeks afterward, I tried to sleuth out a theory. I started casually. There was a “5” on the bull’s-eye, so I did a quick search to figure out what that number might mean. Immediately I was in over my head.

Swift has a thing for symbols. I knew she had been embedding secret messages in liner notes and deploying metaphors as refrains since her self-titled debut in 2006—long before her megafame made her into a symbol of pop supremacy. But I hadn’t understood how coded and byzantine her body of work has become; I hadn’t learned, as Swift’s fans have, to see hidden meanings everywhere. For instance: In the 2017 video for “Look What You Made Me Do,” a headstone in a graveyard scene reads NILS SJOBERG, the pseudonym Swift used as her writing credit on Rihanna’s hit “This Is What You Came For,” a Swedish-sounding nod to that country’s pop wizards.

After an excessive amount of ad hoc scholarship—a friend joked that I could have learned Mandarin in the time I spent trying to unpack Swift’s oeuvre—I was no closer to a theory. Pop music has become so layered and meta, but the Taylor Swift Universe stands apart. Apprehending it is like grasping quantum physics.

My first indication of what her new album, Lover, would be about came just after midnight on June 1, the beginning of Pride Month, when Swift introduced a petition in support of the federal Equality Act. This legislation would amend the Civil Rights Act to outlaw discrimination based on gender identity and sexual orientation. (It has passed the House, but prospects in Mitch McConnell’s Senate are unclear.) Swift also posted a letter to Senator Lamar Alexander, Republican of Tennessee, asking him to vote yes. The request, on her personal letterhead (born in 1989. LOVES CATS.), denounced President Trump for not supporting the Equality Act. “I personally reject the president’s stance,” Swift wrote.

Back in the kitchen, Swift hits play. “The first verse is about trolls and cancel culture,” she says. “The second verse is about homophobes and the people picketing outside our concerts. The third verse is about successful women being pitted against each other.”

The video is, for erudite Swifties, a rich text. I had followed enough clues to correctly guess some of the other cameos—Ellen DeGeneres, RuPaul, Katy Perry. I felt the satisfaction of a gamer who successfully levels up—achievement unlocked!The video’s final frame sends viewers to Swift’s change.org petition in support of the Equality Act, which has acquired more than 400,000 signatures—including those of Cory Booker, Elizabeth Warren, Beto O’Rourke, and Kirsten Gillibrand—or four times the number required to elicit an official response from the White House.

“MAYBE A YEAR OR TWO AGO, Todrick and I are in the car, and he asked me, What would you do if your son was gay?”

We are upstairs in Swift’s secret garden, comfortably ensconced in a human-scale basket that is sort of shaped like a cocoon. Swift has brought up an ornate charcuterie board and is happily slathering triple-cream Brie onto sea-salt crackers. “The fact that he had to ask me . . . shocked me and made me realize that I had not made my position clear enough or loud enough,” she says. “If my son was gay, he’d be gay. I don’t understand the question.”

I have pressed Swift on this topic, and her answers have been direct, not performative or scripted. I do sense that she enjoys talking to me about as much as she’d enjoy a root canal—but she’s unfailingly polite, and when we turn to music, her face will light up and she will add little melodic phrases to her speech, clearly her preferred language.

Balancing Act Later this year, Swift will appear in the film adaptation of Cats—as the flirtatious Bombalurina. Givenchy dress. Bracelets by John Hardy, David Yurman, and Hoorsenbuhs. Photographed by Inez & Vinoodh, Vogue, September 2019

“If he was thinking that, I can’t imagine what my fans in the LGBTQ community might be thinking,” she goes on. “It was kind of devastating to realize that I hadn’t been publicly clear about that.”

I understand why she was surprised; she has been sending pro-LGBTQ signals since at least 2011. Many have been subtle, but none insignificant—especially for a young country star coming out of Nashville.

In the video for her single “Mean” (from 2010’s Speak Now), we see a boy in a school locker room wearing a lavender sweater and bow tie, surrounded by football players. In “Welcome to New York,” the first track on 1989, she sings, “And you can want who you want. Boys and boys and girls and girls.” Two years later, she donated to a fund for the newly created Stonewall National Monument and presented Ruby Rose with a GLAAD Media Award. Every night of last year’s Reputation tour, she dedicated the song “Dress” to Loie Fuller, the openly gay pioneer of modern dance and theatrical lighting who captured the imagination of fin-de-siècle Paris.

Swift, who has been criticized for keeping her politics to herself, first took an explicit stance a month before the 2018 midterms. On Instagram, she endorsed Democrats for the Tennessee Legislature and called out the Republican running for Senate, Marsha Blackburn. “She believes businesses have a right to refuse service to gay couples,” Swift wrote. “She also believes they should not have the right to marry. These are not MY Tennessee values.”

Swift says the post was partly to help young fans understand that if they wanted to vote, they had to register. To tell them, as she puts it, “Hey, just so you know, you can’t just roll up.” Some 65,000 new voters registered in the first 24 hours after her post, according to Vote.org.

Trump came to Blackburn’s defense the following day. “She’s a tremendous woman,” he told reporters. “I’m sure Taylor Swift doesn’t know anything about her. Let’s say I like Taylor’s music about 25 percent less now, OK?”

In April, spurred by a raft of anti-LGBTQ bills in Tennessee, Swift donated $113,000 to the Tennessee Equality Project, which advocates for LGBTQ rights. “Horrendous,” she says of the legislation. “They don’t call it ‘Slate of Hate’ for nothing.” Swift especially liked that the Tennessee Equality Project had organized a petition of faith leaders in opposition. “I loved how smart it was to come at it from a religious perspective.”

Meanwhile, the “Calm Down” video provoked a Colorado pastor to call Swift “a sinner in desperate need of a savior” and warn that “God will cut her down.” It also revived heated debate within LGBTQ communities about the politics of allyship and corporatization of Pride. Some critics argued Swift’s pro-LGBTQ imagery and lyrics were overdue and out of the blue—a reaction the new Swift scholar in me found bewildering. Had they not been paying attention?

Nor did it strike me as out of character for Swift to leverage her power for a cause. She pulled her catalog from Spotify in 2014 over questions of artist compensation. She stared down Apple in 2015, when the company said it would not pay artists during the launch of its music service. (Apple reversed itself immediately.) As a condition of her record deal with Universal Music Group last year, the company promised that it would distribute proceeds from any sale of its Spotify shares to all of its artists. And this summer, Swift furiously called out Scott Borchetta, founder of Big Machine Label Group, for selling her master recordings to the music manager Scooter Braun. (When I ask Swift if she tried to get her masters from Big Machine, her whole body slumps with a palpable heaviness. “It was either investing in my past or my and other artists’ future, and I chose the future,” she says of the deal she struck with Universal.)

Swift’s blunt testimony during her 2017 sexual-assault case against a radio DJ—months before the #MeToo reckoning blew open—felt deeply political to me and, I imagine, many other women. Swift accused the DJ, David Mueller, of groping her under her skirt at a photo session in 2013. Her camp reported the incident to his employer, who fired him. Mueller denied the allegation, sued Swift for $3 million, and his case was thrown out. Swift countersued for a symbolic $1 and won.

Watch Taylor Swift Take Over Go Ask Anna:

In a Colorado courtroom, Swift described the incident: “He stayed latched onto my bare ass cheek” as photos were being snapped. Asked why photos of the front of her skirt didn’t show this, she said, “Because my ass is located at the back of my body.” Asked if she felt bad about the DJ’s losing his job, she said, “I’m not going to let you or your client make me feel in any way that this is my fault. Here we are years later, and I’m being blamed for the unfortunate events of his life that are the product of his decisions—not mine.”

When Time included Swift on the cover of its “Silence Breakers” issue that year, the magazine asked how she felt during the testimony. “I was angry,” she said. “In that moment, I decided to forgo any courtroom formalities and just answer the questions the way it happened...I’m told it was the most amount of times the word ass has ever been said in Colorado Federal Court.”

Mueller has since paid Swift the dollar—with a Sacagawea coin. “He was trolling me, implying that I was self-righteous and hell-bent on angry, vengeful feminism. That’s what I’m inferring from him giving me a Sacagawea coin,” Swift says. “Hey, maybe he was trying to do it in honor of a powerful Native American woman. I didn’t ask.” Where is the coin now? “My lawyer has it.”

I ask her, why get louder about LGBTQ rights now? “Rights are being stripped from basically everyone who isn’t a straight white cisgender male,” she says. “I didn’t realize until recently that I could advocate for a community that I’m not a part of. It’s hard to know how to do that without being so fearful of making a mistake that you just freeze. Because my mistakes are very loud. When I make a mistake, it echoes through the canyons of the world. It’s clickbait, and it’s a part of my life story, and it’s a part of my career arc.”

I’d argue that no heterosexual woman can listen to “You Need to Calm Down” and hear only a gay anthem. “Calm down” is what controlling men tell women who are angry, contrary, or “hysterical,” or, let’s say, fearing for their physical safety. It is what Panic! at the Disco singer Brendon Urie says to Swift in the beginning of the “ME!” music video, prompting her to scream, “Je suis calme!”

I cannot believe it is a coincidence that Swift, a numbers geek with an affinity for dates, dropped the single—whose slow, incessant bass is likely to be bumping in stadiums across the world in 2020 if she goes on tour—on June 14, a certain president’s birthday.

IT'S ENLIGHTENING to read 13 years of Taylor Swift coverage—all the big reviews, all the big profiles—in one sitting. You notice things.

How quickly Swift went from a “prodigy” (The New Yorker) and a “songwriting savant” (Rolling Stone) to a tabloid fixture, for instance. Or how suspect her ambition is made to seem once she acquires real power.

Other plot points simply look different in the light of #MeToo. It is hard to imagine that Swift’s songs about her exes would be reviewed as sensationally today. I wonder if, in 2019, any man would dare grab the microphone out of a young woman’s hands at an awards show. I stared into space for a good long while when I was reminded that Pitchfork did not review Taylor Swift’s 1989 but did review Ryan Adams’s cover album of Taylor Swift’s 1989.

I ask Swift if she had always been aware of sexism. “I think about this a lot,” she says. “When I was a teenager, I would hear people talk about sexism in the music industry, and I’d be like, I don’t see it. I don’t understand. Then I realized that was because I was a kid. Men in the industry saw me as a kid. I was a lanky, scrawny, overexcited young girl who reminded them more of their little niece or their daughter than a successful woman in business or a colleague. The second I became a woman, in people’s perception, was when I started seeing it.

“It’s fine to infantilize a girl’s success and say, How cute that she’s having some hit songs,” she goes on. “How cute that she’s writing songs. But the second it becomes formidable? As soon as I started playing stadiums—when I started to look like a woman—that wasn’t as cool anymore. It was when I started to have songs from Red come out and cross over, like ‘I Knew You Were Trouble’ and ‘We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together.’ ”

Those songs are also more assertive than the ones that came before, I say. “Yeah, the angle was different when I started saying, I knew you were trouble when you walked in. Basically, you emotionally manipulated me and I didn’t love it. That wasn’t fun for me.”

I have to wonder if having her songwriting overlooked as her hits were picked apart and scrutinized wasn’t the biggest bummer of all. Swift: “I wanted to say to people, You realize writing songs is an art and a craft and not, like, an easy thing to do? Or to do well? People would act like it was a weapon I was using. Like a cheap dirty trick. Be careful, bro, she’ll write a song about you. Don’t stand near her. First of all, that’s not how it works. Second of all, find me a time when they say that about a male artist: Be careful, girl, he’ll use his experience with you to get—God forbid—inspiration to make art.”

Without question the tenor of the Taylor Swift Narrative changed most dramatically in July 2016, when Kim Kardashian West called her a “snake” on Twitter, and released video clips of Swift and Kanye West discussing the lyrics to his song “Famous.” (No need to rehash the details here. Suffice it to say that Swift’s version of events hasn’t changed: She knew about some of the lyrics but not others; specifically, the words that bitch.) The posts sparked several hashtags, including #TaylorSwiftIsASnake and #TaylorSwiftIsCanceled, which quickly escalated into a months-long campaign to “cancel” Swift.

To this day Swift doesn’t think people grasp the repercussions of that term. “A mass public shaming, with millions of people saying you are quote-unquote canceled, is a very isolating experience,” she says. “I don’t think there are that many people who can actually understand what it’s like to have millions of people hate you very loudly.” She adds: “When you say someone is canceled, it’s not a TV show. It’s a human being. You’re sending mass amounts of messaging to this person to either shut up, disappear, or it could also be perceived as, Kill yourself.”

An overhaul was in order. “I realized I needed to restructure my life because it felt completely out of control,” Swift says. “I knew immediately I needed to make music about it because I knew it was the only way I could survive it. It was the only way I could preserve my mental health and also tell the story of what it’s like to go through something so humiliating.”

State of Grace Dior bodysuit and skirt. Photographed by Inez & Vinoodh, Vogue, September 2019

I get a sense of the whiplash Swift experienced when I notice that, a few months into this ordeal, while she was writing the songs that would become her album Reputation—and fighting off Mueller’s lawsuit—a portion of the media and internet began demanding to know why she hadn’t un-canceled herself long enough to take a position in the presidential election.

On that: “Unfortunately in the 2016 election you had a political opponent who was weaponizing the idea of the celebrity endorsement. He was going around saying, I’m a man of the people. I’m for you. I care about you. I just knew I wasn’t going to help. Also, you know, the summer before that election, all people were saying was She’s calculated. She’s manipulative. She’s not what she seems. She’s a snake. She’s a liar. These are the same exact insults people were hurling at Hillary. Would I be an endorsement or would I be a liability? Look, snakes of a feather flock together. Look, the two lying women. The two nasty women. Literally millions of people were telling me to disappear. So I disappeared. In many senses.”

Swift previewed Reputation in August 2017 with “Look What You Made Me Do.” The single came with a lyric video whose central image was an ouroboros—a snake swallowing its own tail, an ancient symbol for continual renewal. Swift wiped her social-media feeds clean and began posting video snippets of a slithering snake. The song was pure bombast and high camp. (Lest there be any doubt, the chorus was an interpolation of a ’90s camp classic, Right Said Fred’s “I’m Too Sexy.”) Nonetheless, most critics read it as a grenade lobbed in the general direction of Calabasas.

One longtime Nashville critic, Brian Mansfield, had a more plausible take: She was writing sarcastically as the “Taylor Swift” portrayed in the media in a bid for privacy. “Yeah, this is the character you created for me, let me just hide behind it,” she says now of the persona she created. “I always used this metaphor when I was younger. I’d say that with every reinvention, I never wanted to tear down my house. ’Cause I built this house. This house being, metaphorically, my body of work, my songwriting, my music, my catalog, my library. I just wanted to redecorate. I think a lot of people, with Reputation, would have perceived that I had torn down the house. Actually, I just built a bunker around it.”

IN MARCH, the snakes started to morph into butterflies, the vampire color palette into Easter pastels. When a superbloom of wildflowers lured a mesmerizing deluge of Painted Lady butterflies to Los Angeles, Swift marked it with an Instagram post. She attended the iHeartRadio Music Awards that night in a sequin romper and stilettos with shimmery wings attached.

Swift announced the single “ME!” a month later, with a large butterfly mural in Nashville. In the music video for the (conspicuously) bubblegum song, a hissing pastel-pink snake explodes into a kaleidoscope of butterflies. One flutters by the window of an apartment, where Swift is arguing in French with Urie. A record player is playing in the background. “It’s an old-timey, 1940s-sounding instrumental version of ‘You Need to Calm Down,’ ’’ Swift says. Later, in the “Calm Down” video, Swift wears a (fake) back tattoo of a snake swarmed by butterflies.

We are only two songs in, people. Lover, to be released on August 23, will have a total of 18 songs. “I was compiling ideas for a very long time,” Swift says. “When I started writing, I couldn’t stop.” (We can assume the British actor Joe Alwyn, with whom Swift has been in a relationship for nearly three years, provided some of the inspiration.)

Swift thinks Lover might be her favorite album yet. “There are so many ways in which this album feels like a new beginning,” she says. “This album is really a love letter to love, in all of its maddening, passionate, exciting, enchanting, horrific, tragic, wonderful glory.”

In Focus Swift’s new 18-track album, Lover, will be released August 23. Hermès shirt. Chanel pants. Maximum Henry belt. Photographed by Inez & Vinoodh, Vogue, September 2019

I have to ask Swift, given how genuinely at peace she seems, if part of her isn’t thankful, if not for the Great Cancellation of 2016, then for the person she now is—knowing who her friends are, knowing what’s what. “When you’re going through loss or embarrassment or shame, it’s a grieving process with so many micro emotions in a day. One of the reasons why I didn’t do interviews for Reputationwas that I couldn’t figure out how I felt hour to hour. Sometimes I felt like: All these things taught me something that I never could have learned in a way that didn’t hurt as much. Five minutes later, I’d feel like: That was horrible. Why did that have to happen? What am I supposed to take from this other than mass amounts of humiliation? And then five minutes later I’d think: I think I might be happier than I’ve ever been.”

She goes on: “It’s so strange trying to be self-aware when you’ve been cast as this always smiling, always happy ‘America’s sweetheart’ thing, and then having that taken away and realizing that it’s actually a great thing that it was taken away, because that’s extremely limiting.” Swift leans back in the cocoon and smiles: “We’re not going to go straight to gratitude with it. Ever. But we’re going to find positive aspects to it. We’re never going to write a thank-you note.”

Though people will take the Perry-Swift burger-and-fries embrace in the “You Need to Calm Down” video as a press release that the two have mended fences, Swift says it’s actually a comment on how the media pits female pop stars against one another. After Perry sent Swift an (actual) olive branch last year, Swift asked her to be in the video: “She wrote back, This makes me so emotional. I’m so up for this. I want us to be that example. But let’s spend some time together. Because I want it to be real. So she came over and we talked for hours.

“We decided the metaphor for what happens in the media,” Swift explains, “is they pick two people and it’s like they’re pouring gasoline all over the floor. All that needs to happen is one false move, one false word, one misunderstanding, and a match is lit and dropped. That’s what happened with us. It was: Who’s better? Katy or Taylor? Katy or Taylor? Katy or Taylor? Katy or Taylor? The tension is so high that it becomes impossible for you to not think that the other person has something against you."

Meanwhile, the protesters in the video reference a real-life religious group that pickets outside Swift’s concerts, not the white working class in general, as some have assumed. “So many artists have them at their shows, and it’s such a confounding, confusing, infuriating thing to have outside of joyful concerts,” she tells me. “Obviously I don’t want to mention the actual entity, because they would get excited about that. Giving them press is not on my list of priorities.”

At one point, Swift asks if I would like to hear two other songs off the new album. (Duh.) First she plays “Lover,” the title track, coproduced by Jack Antonoff. “This has one of my favorite bridges,” she says. “I love a bridge, and I was really able to go to Bridge City.” It’s a romantic, haunting, waltzy, singer-songwritery nugget: classic Swift. “My heart’s been borrowed and yours has been blue,” she sings. “All’s well that ends well to end up with you.”

Next, Swift cues up a track that “plays with the idea of perception.” She has often wondered how she would be written and spoken about if she were a man, “so I wrote a song called ‘The Man.’ ” It’s a thought experiment of sorts: “If I had made all the same choices, all the same mistakes, all the same accomplishments, how would it read?” Seconds later, Swift’s earpods are pumping a synth-pop earworm into my head: “I’d be a fearless leader. I’d be an alpha type. When everyone believes ya: What’s that like?”

Swift wrote the first two singles with Joel Little, best known as one of Lorde’s go-to producers. (“From a pop-songwriting point of view, she’s the pinnacle,” Little says of Swift.) The album is likely to include more marquee names. A portrait of the Dixie Chicks in the background of the “ME!” video almost certainly portends a collaboration. If fans are correctly reading a button affixed to her denim jacket in a recent magazine cover, we can expect one with Drake, too.

Eyes On Her Designer Stella McCartney on her friendship with Swift: “In London we’ll go on walks and talk about everything—life and love.” Stella McCartney coat. In this story: hair, Christiaan; makeup, Fulvia Farolfi. Photographed by Inez & Vinoodh, Vogue, September 2019

She recently announced a fashion collection with Stella McCartney to coincide with Lover. “We met at one of her shows,” says McCartney, “and then we had a girls’ night and kind of jumped straight in. In London we’ll go on walks and talk about everything—life and love.” (Swift has no further fashion ambitions at the moment. “I really love my job right now,” she tells me. “My focus is on music.”) Oh, and that “5” on the bullseye? Track five is called “The Archer.”

Yet something tells me the most illuminating clue for reading both Lover and Reputation may be Loie Fuller, the dancer to whom Swift paid homage on tour. As Swift noted on a Jumbotron, Fuller “fought for artists to own their work.” Fuller also used swirling fabric and colored lights to metamorphose onstage, playing a “hide-and-seek illusionist game” with her audience, as one writer has put it. She became a muse to the Symbolists in Paris, where Jean Cocteau wrote that she created “the phantom of an era.” The effect, said the poet Stéphane Mallarmé, was a “dizziness of soul made visible by an artifice.” Fuller’s most famous piece was “Serpentine Dance.” Another was “Butterfly Dance.”

SWIFT HAS HAD almost no downtime since late 2017, but what little she does have is divided among New York, Nashville, Los Angeles, and Rhode Island, where she keeps homes—plus London. In an essay earlier this year, she revealed that her mother, Andrea Swift, is fighting cancer for a second time. “There was a relapse that happened,” Swift says, declining to go into detail. “It’s something that my family is going through.”

Later this year, she will star in a film adaptation of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Catsas Bombalurina, the flirtatious red cat. “They made us the size of cats by making the furniture bigger,” she says. “You’d be standing there and you could barely reach the seat of a chair. It was phenomenal. It made you feel like a little kid.”

But first, she will spend much of the summer holding “secret sessions”—a tradition wherein Swift invites hundreds of fans to her various homes to preview her new music. “They’ve never given me a reason to stop doing it,” she says. “Not a single one.”

Speaking of: Inquiring fans will want to know if Swift dropped any more clues about how to decode Lover during this interview. For you I reviewed the audio again, and there were a few things that made my newly acquired Swifty sense tingle.

At one point she compared superstardom in the digital age to life in a dollhouse, one where voyeurs “can ‘ship’ you with who they want to ‘ship’ you with, and they can ‘favorite’ friends that you have, and they can know where you are all the time.” The metaphor was precise and vivid and, well, a little too intricately rendered to be off the cuff. (Also, the “ME!” lyric: “Baby doll, when it comes to a lover. I promise that you’ll never find another like me.”)

Then there was the balloon—a giant gold balloon in the shape of a numeral seven that happened to float by while we were on her roof, on this, the occasion of her seventh album. “Is it an L’?” I say. “No, because look, the string is hanging from the bottom,” she says.

It might seem an obvious symbolic gesture, deployed for this interview, except for how impossible that seems. Swift let me control the timing of nearly everything. Moreover, the gold seven wasn’t floating up from the sidewalk below. It was already high in the sky, drifting slowly toward us from down the street. She would have had to control the wind, or at least to have studied it. Would Taylor Swift really go to such elaborate lengths for her fans? This much I know: Yes, she would.

Taylor Swift Talks Googling Herself, Which Celebrity's Closet She'd Raid, and the Bravest Thing She's Ever Done:

Vogue

[hearyourheart]

Taylor Swift on Sexism, Scrutiny, and Standing Up for Herself

IT’S A SUNDAY AFTERNOON in Tribeca, and I’m in Taylor Swift’s loft, inside a former printing house that she has restored and fortified into a sanctuary of brick, velvet, and mahogany. The space is warm and cozy and vaguely literary—later, when we pass through her bedroom en route to her garden, 10 percent of my brain will believe her wardrobe might open up to Narnia. Barefoot in a wine-colored floral top and matching flowy pants, Swift is typing passwords into a laptop to show me the video for “You Need to Calm Down,” eight days before she unleashes it on the world.

I have a sliver of an idea what to expect. A few weeks earlier, I spent a day at the video shoot, in a dusty field-slash-junkyard north of Los Angeles. Swift had made it a sort of Big Gay Candy Mountain trailer park, a Technicolor happy place. The cast and crew wore heart-shaped sunglasses—living, breathing lovey-eyes emoji—and a mailbox warned, LOVE LETTERS ONLY.

Swift and a stream of costars filmed six scenes over about a dozen hours. The singer-songwriter Hayley Kiyoko, known to her fans as “Lesbian Jesus,” shot arrows at a bull’s-eye. The YouTube comedian-chef Hannah Hart danced alongside Dexter Mayfield, the plus-size male model and self-described “big boy in heels.” The Olympic figure skater Adam Rippon served up icy red snow cones. Swift and her close friend Todrick Hall, of Kinky Boots and RuPaul’s Drag Race, sipped tea with the cast of Queer Eye.

The mood was joyous and laid-back. But by the end of the day, I wasn’t sure what the vignettes would add up to. There were shoot days and cameos I wouldn’t observe. For security reasons, the song was never played aloud. (The cast wore ear buds.) Even the hero shot, in which Swift and Hall sauntered arm in arm through the dreamscape at golden hour, was filmed in near-total silence.

For weeks afterward, I tried to sleuth out a theory. I started casually. There was a “5” on the bull’s-eye, so I did a quick search to figure out what that number might mean. Immediately I was in over my head.

Swift has a thing for symbols. I knew she had been embedding secret messages in liner notes and deploying metaphors as refrains since her self-titled debut in 2006—long before her megafame made her into a symbol of pop supremacy. But I hadn’t understood how coded and byzantine her body of work has become; I hadn’t learned, as Swift’s fans have, to see hidden meanings everywhere. For instance: In the 2017 video for “Look What You Made Me Do,” a headstone in a graveyard scene reads NILS SJOBERG, the pseudonym Swift used as her writing credit on Rihanna’s hit “This Is What You Came For,” a Swedish-sounding nod to that country’s pop wizards.

After an excessive amount of ad hoc scholarship—a friend joked that I could have learned Mandarin in the time I spent trying to unpack Swift’s oeuvre—I was no closer to a theory. Pop music has become so layered and meta, but the Taylor Swift Universe stands apart. Apprehending it is like grasping quantum physics.

My first indication of what her new album, Lover, would be about came just after midnight on June 1, the beginning of Pride Month, when Swift introduced a petition in support of the federal Equality Act. This legislation would amend the Civil Rights Act to outlaw discrimination based on gender identity and sexual orientation. (It has passed the House, but prospects in Mitch McConnell’s Senate are unclear.) Swift also posted a letter to Senator Lamar Alexander, Republican of Tennessee, asking him to vote yes. The request, on her personal letterhead (born in 1989. LOVES CATS.), denounced President Trump for not supporting the Equality Act. “I personally reject the president’s stance,” Swift wrote.

Back in the kitchen, Swift hits play. “The first verse is about trolls and cancel culture,” she says. “The second verse is about homophobes and the people picketing outside our concerts. The third verse is about successful women being pitted against each other.”

The video is, for erudite Swifties, a rich text. I had followed enough clues to correctly guess some of the other cameos—Ellen DeGeneres, RuPaul, Katy Perry. I felt the satisfaction of a gamer who successfully levels up—achievement unlocked!The video’s final frame sends viewers to Swift’s change.org petition in support of the Equality Act, which has acquired more than 400,000 signatures—including those of Cory Booker, Elizabeth Warren, Beto O’Rourke, and Kirsten Gillibrand—or four times the number required to elicit an official response from the White House.

“Maybe a year or two ago, Todrick and I are in the car, and he asked me, What would you do if your son was gay?”

We are upstairs in Swift’s secret garden, comfortably ensconced in a human-scale basket that is sort of shaped like a cocoon. Swift has brought up an ornate charcuterie board and is happily slathering triple-cream Brie onto sea-salt crackers. “The fact that he had to ask me . . . shocked me and made me realize that I had not made my position clear enough or loud enough,” she says. “If my son was gay, he’d be gay. I don’t understand the question.”

I have pressed Swift on this topic, and her answers have been direct, not performative or scripted. I do sense that she enjoys talking to me about as much as she’d enjoy a root canal—but she’s unfailingly polite, and when we turn to music, her face will light up and she will add little melodic phrases to her speech, clearly her preferred language.

“If he was thinking that, I can’t imagine what my fans in the LGBTQ community might be thinking,” she goes on. “It was kind of devastating to realize that I hadn’t been publicly clear about that.”

I understand why she was surprised; she has been sending pro-LGBTQ signals since at least 2011. Many have been subtle, but none insignificant—especially for a young country star coming out of Nashville.

In the video for her single “Mean” (from 2010’s Speak Now), we see a boy in a school locker room wearing a lavender sweater and bow tie, surrounded by football players. In “Welcome to New York,” the first track on 1989, she sings, “And you can want who you want. Boys and boys and girls and girls.” Two years later, she donated to a fund for the newly created Stonewall National Monument and presented Ruby Rose with a GLAAD Media Award. Every night of last year’s Reputation tour, she dedicated the song “Dress” to Loie Fuller, the openly gay pioneer of modern dance and theatrical lighting who captured the imagination of fin-de-siècle Paris.

Swift, who has been criticized for keeping her politics to herself, first took an explicit stance a month before the 2018 midterms. On Instagram, she endorsed Democrats for the Tennessee Legislature and called out the Republican running for Senate, Marsha Blackburn. “She believes businesses have a right to refuse service to gay couples,” Swift wrote. “She also believes they should not have the right to marry. These are not MY Tennessee values.”

Swift says the post was partly to help young fans understand that if they wanted to vote, they had to register. To tell them, as she puts it, “Hey, just so you know, you can’t just roll up.” Some 65,000 new voters registered in the first 24 hours after her post, according to Vote.org.

Trump came to Blackburn’s defense the following day. “She’s a tremendous woman,” he told reporters. “I’m sure Taylor Swift doesn’t know anything about her. Let’s say I like Taylor’s music about 25 percent less now, OK?”

In April, spurred by a raft of anti-LGBTQ bills in Tennessee, Swift donated $113,000 to the Tennessee Equality Project, which advocates for LGBTQ rights. “Horrendous,” she says of the legislation. “They don’t call it ‘Slate of Hate’ for nothing.” Swift especially liked that the Tennessee Equality Project had organized a petition of faith leaders in opposition. “I loved how smart it was to come at it from a religious perspective.”

Meanwhile, the “Calm Down” video provoked a Colorado pastor to call Swift “a sinner in desperate need of a savior” and warn that “God will cut her down.” It also revived heated debate within LGBTQ communities about the politics of allyship and corporatization of Pride. Some critics argued Swift’s pro-LGBTQ imagery and lyrics were overdue and out of the blue—a reaction the new Swift scholar in me found bewildering. Had they not been paying attention?

Nor did it strike me as out of character for Swift to leverage her power for a cause. She pulled her catalog from Spotify in 2014 over questions of artist compensation. She stared down Apple in 2015, when the company said it would not pay artists during the launch of its music service. (Apple reversed itself immediately.) As a condition of her record deal with Universal Music Group last year, the company promised that it would distribute proceeds from any sale of its Spotify shares to all of its artists. And this summer, Swift furiously called out Scott Borchetta, founder of Big Machine Label Group, for selling her master recordings to the music manager Scooter Braun. (When I ask Swift if she tried to get her masters from Big Machine, her whole body slumps with a palpable heaviness. “It was either investing in my past or my and other artists’ future, and I chose the future,” she says of the deal she struck with Universal.)

Swift’s blunt testimony during her 2017 sexual-assault case against a radio DJ—months before the #MeToo reckoning blew open—felt deeply political to me and, I imagine, many other women. Swift accused the DJ, David Mueller, of groping her under her skirt at a photo session in 2013. Her camp reported the incident to his employer, who fired him. Mueller denied the allegation, sued Swift for $3 million, and his case was thrown out. Swift countersued for a symbolic $1 and won.

In a Colorado courtroom, Swift described the incident: “He stayed latched onto my bare ass cheek” as photos were being snapped. Asked why photos of the front of her skirt didn’t show this, she said, “Because my ass is located at the back of my body.” Asked if she felt bad about the DJ’s losing his job, she said, “I’m not going to let you or your client make me feel in any way that this is my fault. Here we are years later, and I’m being blamed for the unfortunate events of his life that are the product of his decisions—not mine.”

When Time included Swift on the cover of its “Silence Breakers” issue that year, the magazine asked how she felt during the testimony. “I was angry,” she said. “In that moment, I decided to forgo any courtroom formalities and just answer the questions the way it happened...I’m told it was the most amount of times the word ass has ever been said in Colorado Federal Court.”

Mueller has since paid Swift the dollar—with a Sacagawea coin. “He was trolling me, implying that I was self-righteous and hell-bent on angry, vengeful feminism. That’s what I’m inferring from him giving me a Sacagawea coin,” Swift says. “Hey, maybe he was trying to do it in honor of a powerful Native American woman. I didn’t ask.” Where is the coin now? “My lawyer has it.”

I ask her, why get louder about LGBTQ rights now? “Rights are being stripped from basically everyone who isn’t a straight white cisgender male,” she says. “I didn’t realize until recently that I could advocate for a community that I’m not a part of. It’s hard to know how to do that without being so fearful of making a mistake that you just freeze. Because my mistakes are very loud. When I make a mistake, it echoes through the canyons of the world. It’s clickbait, and it’s a part of my life story, and it’s a part of my career arc.”

I’d argue that no heterosexual woman can listen to “You Need to Calm Down” and hear only a gay anthem. “Calm down” is what controlling men tell women who are angry, contrary, or “hysterical,” or, let’s say, fearing for their physical safety. It is what Panic! at the Disco singer Brendon Urie says to Swift in the beginning of the “ME!” music video, prompting her to scream, “Je suis calme!”

I cannot believe it is a coincidence that Swift, a numbers geek with an affinity for dates, dropped the single—whose slow, incessant bass is likely to be bumping in stadiums across the world in 2020 if she goes on tour—on June 14, a certain president’s birthday.

It’s enlightening to read 13 years of Taylor Swift coverage—all the big reviews, all the big profiles—in one sitting. You notice things.

How quickly Swift went from a “prodigy” (The New Yorker) and a “songwriting savant” (Rolling Stone) to a tabloid fixture, for instance. Or how suspect her ambition is made to seem once she acquires real power.

Other plot points simply look different in the light of #MeToo. It is hard to imagine that Swift’s songs about her exes would be reviewed as sensationally today. I wonder if, in 2019, any man would dare grab the microphone out of a young woman’s hands at an awards show. I stared into space for a good long while when I was reminded that Pitchfork did not review Taylor Swift’s 1989 but did review Ryan Adams’s cover album of Taylor Swift’s 1989.

I ask Swift if she had always been aware of sexism. “I think about this a lot,” she says. “When I was a teenager, I would hear people talk about sexism in the music industry, and I’d be like, I don’t see it. I don’t understand. Then I realized that was because I was a kid. Men in the industry saw me as a kid. I was a lanky, scrawny, overexcited young girl who reminded them more of their little niece or their daughter than a successful woman in business or a colleague. The second I became a woman, in people’s perception, was when I started seeing it.

“It’s fine to infantilize a girl’s success and say, How cute that she’s having some hit songs,” she goes on. “How cute that she’s writing songs. But the second it becomes formidable? As soon as I started playing stadiums—when I started to look like a woman—that wasn’t as cool anymore. It was when I started to have songs from Red come out and cross over, like ‘I Knew You Were Trouble’ and ‘We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together.’ ”

Those songs are also more assertive than the ones that came before, I say. “Yeah, the angle was different when I started saying, I knew you were trouble when you walked in. Basically, you emotionally manipulated me and I didn’t love it. That wasn’t fun for me.”

I have to wonder if having her songwriting overlooked as her hits were picked apart and scrutinized wasn’t the biggest bummer of all. Swift: “I wanted to say to people, You realize writing songs is an art and a craft and not, like, an easy thing to do? Or to do well? People would act like it was a weapon I was using. Like a cheap dirty trick. Be careful, bro, she’ll write a song about you. Don’t stand near her. First of all, that’s not how it works. Second of all, find me a time when they say that about a male artist: Be careful, girl, he’ll use his experience with you to get—God forbid—inspiration to make art.”

Without question the tenor of the Taylor Swift Narrative changed most dramatically in July 2016, when Kim Kardashian West called her a “snake” on Twitter, and released video clips of Swift and Kanye West discussing the lyrics to his song “Famous.” (No need to rehash the details here. Suffice it to say that Swift’s version of events hasn’t changed: She knew about some of the lyrics but not others; specifically, the words that bitch.) The posts sparked several hashtags, including #TaylorSwiftIsASnake and #TaylorSwiftIsCanceled, which quickly escalated into a months-long campaign to “cancel” Swift.

To this day Swift doesn’t think people grasp the repercussions of that term. “A mass public shaming, with millions of people saying you are quote-unquote canceled, is a very isolating experience,” she says. “I don’t think there are that many people who can actually understand what it’s like to have millions of people hate you very loudly.” She adds: “When you say someone is canceled, it’s not a TV show. It’s a human being. You’re sending mass amounts of messaging to this person to either shut up, disappear, or it could also be perceived as, Kill yourself.”

An overhaul was in order. “I realized I needed to restructure my life because it felt completely out of control,” Swift says. “I knew immediately I needed to make music about it because I knew it was the only way I could survive it. It was the only way I could preserve my mental health and also tell the story of what it’s like to go through something so humiliating.”

I get a sense of the whiplash Swift experienced when I notice that, a few months into this ordeal, while she was writing the songs that an interpolation of a ’90s camp classic, Right Said Fred’s “I’m Too Sexy.”) Nonetheless, most critics read it as a grenade lobbed in the general direction of Calabasas.

One longtime Nashville critic, Brian Mansfield, had a more plausible take: She was writing sarcastically as the “Taylor Swift” portrayed in the media in a bid for privacy. “Yeah, this is the character you created for me, let me just hide behind it,” she says now of the persona she created. “I always used this metaphor when I was younger. I’d say that with every reinvention, I never wanted to tear down my house. ’Cause I built this house. This house being, metaphorically, my body of work, my songwriting, my music, my catalog, my library. I just wanted to redecorate. I think a lot of people, with Reputation, would have perceived that I had torn down the house. Actually, I just built a bunker around it.”

In March, the snakes started to morph into butterflies, the vampire color palette into Easter pastels. When a superbloom of wildflowers lured a mesmerizing deluge of Painted Lady butterflies to Los Angeles, Swift marked it with an Instagram post. She attended the iHeartRadio Music Awards that night in a sequin romper and stilettos with shimmery wings attached.

Swift announced the single “ME!” a month later, with a large butterfly mural in Nashville. In the music video for the (conspicuously) bubblegum song, a hissing pastel-pink snake explodes into a kaleidoscope of butterflies. One flutters by the window of an apartment, where Swift is arguing in French with Urie. A record player is playing in the background. “It’s an old-timey, 1940s-sounding instrumental version of ‘You Need to Calm Down,’ ’’ Swift says. Later, in the “Calm Down” video, Swift wears a (fake) back tattoo of a snake swarmed by butterflies.

We are only two songs in, people. Lover, to be released on August 23, will have a total of 18 songs. “I was compiling ideas for a very long time,” Swift says. “When I started writing, I couldn’t stop.” (We can assume the British actor Joe Alwyn, with whom Swift has been in a relationship for nearly three years, provided some of the inspiration.)

Swift thinks Lover might be her favorite album yet. “There are so many ways in which this album feels like a new beginning,” she says. “This album is really a love letter to love, in all of its maddening, passionate, exciting, enchanting, horrific, tragic, wonderful glory.”

Swift’s new 18-track album, Lover, will be released August 23.

I have to ask Swift, given how genuinely at peace she seems, if part of her isn’t thankful, if not for the Great Cancellation of 2016, then for the person she now is—knowing who her friends are, knowing what’s what. “When you’re going through loss or embarrassment or shame, it’s a grieving process with so many micro emotions in a day. One of the reasons why I didn’t do interviews for Reputationwas that I couldn’t figure out how I felt hour to hour. Sometimes I felt like: All these things taught me something that I never could have learned in a way that didn’t hurt as much. Five minutes later, I’d feel like: That was horrible. Why did that have to happen? What am I supposed to take from this other than mass amounts of humiliation? And then five minutes later I’d think: I think I might be happier than I’ve ever been.”

She goes on: “It’s so strange trying to be self-aware when you’ve been cast as this always smiling, always happy ‘America’s sweetheart’ thing, and then having that taken away and realizing that it’s actually a great thing that it was taken away, because that’s extremely limiting.” Swift leans back in the cocoon and smiles: “We’re not going to go straight to gratitude with it. Ever. But we’re going to find positive aspects to it. We’re never going to write a thank-you note.”

Though people will take the Perry-Swift burger-and-fries embrace in the “You Need to Calm Down” video as a press release that the two have mended fences, Swift says it’s actually a comment on how the media pits female pop stars against one another. After Perry sent Swift an (actual) olive branch last year, Swift asked her to be in the video: “She wrote back, This makes me so emotional. I’m so up for this. I want us to be that example. But let’s spend some time together. Because I want it to be real. So she came over and we talked for hours.

“We decided the metaphor for what happens in the media,” Swift explains, “is they pick two people and it’s like they’re pouring gasoline all over the floor. All that needs to happen is one false move, one false word, one misunderstanding, and a match is lit and dropped. That’s what happened with us. It was: Who’s better? Katy or Taylor? Katy or Taylor? Katy or Taylor? Katy or Taylor? The tension is so high that it becomes impossible for you to not think that the other person has something against you."

Meanwhile, the protesters in the video reference a real-life religious group that pickets outside Swift’s concerts, not the white working class in general, as some have assumed. “So many artists have them at their shows, and it’s such a confounding, confusing, infuriating thing to have outside of joyful concerts,” she tells me. “Obviously I don’t want to mention the actual entity, because they would get excited about that. Giving them press is not on my list of priorities.”

At one point, Swift asks if I would like to hear two other songs off the new album. (Duh.) First she plays “Lover,” the title track, coproduced by Jack Antonoff. “This has one of my favorite bridges,” she says. “I love a bridge, and I was really able to go to Bridge City.” It’s a romantic, haunting, waltzy, singer-songwritery nugget: classic Swift. “My heart’s been borrowed and yours has been blue,” she sings. “All’s well that ends well to end up with you.”

Next, Swift cues up a track that “plays with the idea of perception.” She has often wondered how she would be written and spoken about if she were a man, “so I wrote a song called ‘The Man.’ ” It’s a thought experiment of sorts: “If I had made all the same choices, all the same mistakes, all the same accomplishments, how would it read?” Seconds later, Swift’s earpods are pumping a synth-pop earworm into my head: “I’d be a fearless leader. I’d be an alpha type. When everyone believes ya: What’s that like?”

Swift wrote the first two singles with Joel Little, best known as one of Lorde’s go-to producers. (“From a pop-songwriting point of view, she’s the pinnacle,” Little says of Swift.) The album is likely to include more marquee names. A portrait of the Dixie Chicks in the background of the “ME!” video almost certainly portends a collaboration. If fans are correctly reading a button affixed to her denim jacket in a recent magazine cover, we can expect one with Drake, too.

She recently announced a fashion collection with Stella McCartney to coincide with Lover. “We met at one of her shows,” says McCartney, “and then we had a girls’ night and kind of jumped straight in. In London we’ll go on walks and talk about everything—life and love.” (Swift has no further fashion ambitions at the moment. “I really love my job right now,” she tells me. “My focus is on music.”) Oh, and that “5” on the bullseye? Track five is called “The Archer.”

Yet something tells me the most illuminating clue for reading both Lover and Reputation may be Loie Fuller, the dancer to whom Swift paid homage on tour. As Swift noted on a Jumbotron, Fuller “fought for artists to own their work.” Fuller also used swirling fabric and colored lights to metamorphose onstage, playing a “hide-and-seek illusionist game” with her audience, as one writer has put it. She became a muse to the Symbolists in Paris, where Jean Cocteau wrote that she created “the phantom of an era.” The effect, said the poet Stéphane Mallarmé, was a “dizziness of soul made visible by an artifice.” Fuller’s most famous piece was “Serpentine Dance.” Another was “Butterfly Dance.”

Swift has had almost no downtime since late 2017, but what little she does have is divided among New York, Nashville, Los Angeles, and Rhode Island, where she keeps homes—plus London. In an essay earlier this year, she revealed that her mother, Andrea Swift, is fighting cancer for a second time. “There was a relapse that happened,” Swift says, declining to go into detail. “It’s something that my family is going through.”

Later this year, she will star in a film adaptation of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Catsas Bombalurina, the flirtatious red cat. “They made us the size of cats by making the furniture bigger,” she says. “You’d be standing there and you could barely reach the seat of a chair. It was phenomenal. It made you feel like a little kid.”

But first, she will spend much of the summer holding “secret sessions”—a tradition wherein Swift invites hundreds of fans to her various homes to preview her new music. “They’ve never given me a reason to stop doing it,” she says. “Not a single one.”

Speaking of: Inquiring fans will want to know if Swift dropped any more clues about how to decode Lover during this interview. For you I reviewed the audio again, and there were a few things that made my newly acquired Swifty sense tingle.

At one point she compared superstardom in the digital age to life in a dollhouse, one where voyeurs “can ‘ship’ you with who they want to ‘ship’ you with, and they can ‘favorite’ friends that you have, and they can know where you are all the time.” The metaphor was precise and vivid and, well, a little too intricately rendered to be off the cuff. (Also, the “ME!” lyric: “Baby doll, when it comes to a lover. I promise that you’ll never find another like me.”)

Then there was the balloon—a giant gold balloon in the shape of a numeral seven that happened to float by while we were on her roof, on this, the occasion of her seventh album. “Is it an L’?” I say. “No, because look, the string is hanging from the bottom,” she says.

It might seem an obvious symbolic gesture, deployed for this interview, except for how impossible that seems. Swift let me control the timing of nearly everything. Moreover, the gold seven wasn’t floating up from the sidewalk below. It was already high in the sky, drifting slowly toward us from down the street. She would have had to control the wind, or at least to have studied it. Would Taylor Swift really go to such elaborate lengths for her fans? This much I know: Yes, she would.

[theloverera]

IT’S A SUNDAY AFTERNOON in Tribeca, and I’m in Taylor Swift’s loft, inside a former printing house that she has restored and fortified into a sanctuary of brick, velvet, and mahogany. The space is warm and cozy and vaguely literary—later, when we pass through her bedroom en route to her garden, 10 percent of my brain will believe her wardrobe might open up to Narnia. Barefoot in a wine-colored floral top and matching flowy pants, Swift is typing passwords into a laptop to show me the video for “You Need to Calm Down,” eight days before she unleashes it on the world. I have a sliver of an idea what to expect. A few weeks earlier, I spent a day at the video shoot, in a dusty field-slash-junkyard north of Los Angeles. Swift had made it a sort of Big Gay Candy Mountain trailer park, a Technicolor happy place. The cast and crew wore heart-shaped sunglasses—living, breathing lovey-eyes emoji—and a mailbox warned, LOVE LETTERS ONLY. Swift and a stream of costars filmed six scenes over about a dozen hours. The singer-songwriter Hayley Kiyoko, known to her fans as “Lesbian Jesus,” shot arrows at a bull’s-eye. The YouTube comedian-chef Hannah Hart danced alongside Dexter Mayfield, the plus-size male model and self-described “big boy in heels.” The Olympic figure skater Adam Rippon served up icy red snow cones. Swift and her close friend Todrick Hall, of Kinky Boots and RuPaul’s Drag Race, sipped tea with the cast of Queer Eye. The mood was joyous and laid-back. But by the end of the day, I wasn’t sure what the vignettes would add up to. There were shoot days and cameos I wouldn’t observe. For security reasons, the song was never played aloud. (The cast wore ear buds.) Even the hero shot, in which Swift and Hall sauntered arm in arm through the dreamscape at golden hour, was filmed in near-total silence. For weeks afterward, I tried to sleuth out a theory. I started casually. There was a “5” on the bull’s-eye, so I did a quick search to figure out what that number might mean. Immediately I was in over my head. Swift has a thing for symbols. I knew she had been embedding secret messages in liner notes and deploying metaphors as refrains since her self-titled debut in 2006—long before her megafame made her into a symbol of pop supremacy. But I hadn’t understood how coded and byzantine her body of work has become; I hadn’t learned, as Swift’s fans have, to see hidden meanings everywhere. For instance: In the 2017 video for “Look What You Made Me Do,” a headstone in a graveyard scene reads NILS SJOBERG, the pseudonym Swift used as her writing credit on Rihanna’s hit “This Is What You Came For,” a Swedish-sounding nod to that country’s pop wizards. After an excessive amount of ad hoc scholarship—a friend joked that I could have learned Mandarin in the time I spent trying to unpack Swift’s oeuvre—I was no closer to a theory. Pop music has become so layered and meta, but the Taylor Swift Universe stands apart. Apprehending it is like grasping quantum physics. My first indication of what her new album, Lover, would be about came just after midnight on June 1, the beginning of Pride Month, when Swift introduced a petition in support of the federal Equality Act. This legislation would amend the Civil Rights Act to outlaw discrimination based on gender identity and sexual orientation. (It has passed the House, but prospects in Mitch McConnell’s Senate are unclear.) Swift also posted a letter to Senator Lamar Alexander, Republican of Tennessee, asking him to vote yes. The request, on her personal letterhead (born in 1989. LOVES CATS.), denounced President Trump for not supporting the Equality Act. “I personally reject the president’s stance,” Swift wrote. Back in the kitchen, Swift hits play. “The first verse is about trolls and cancel culture,” she says. “The second verse is about homophobes and the people picketing outside our concerts. The third verse is about successful women being pitted against each other.” The video is, for erudite Swifties, a rich text. I had followed enough clues to correctly guess some of the other cameos—Ellen DeGeneres, RuPaul, Katy Perry. I felt the satisfaction of a gamer who successfully levels up—achievement unlocked! The video’s final frame sends viewers to Swift’s change.org petition in support of the Equality Act, which has acquired more than 400,000 signatures—including those of Cory Booker, Elizabeth Warren, Beto O’Rourke, and Kirsten Gillibrand—or four times the number required to elicit an official response from the White House. “Maybe a year or two ago, Todrick and I are in the car, and he asked me, What would you do if your son was gay?” We are upstairs in Swift’s secret garden, comfortably ensconced in a human-scale basket that is sort of shaped like a cocoon. Swift has brought up an ornate charcuterie board and is happily slathering triple-cream Brie onto sea-salt crackers. “The fact that he had to ask me … shocked me and made me realize that I had not made my position clear enough or loud enough,” she says. “If my son was gay, he’d be gay. I don’t understand the question.” I have pressed Swift on this topic, and her answers have been direct, not performative or scripted. I do sense that she enjoys talking to me about as much as she’d enjoy a root canal—but she’s unfailingly polite, and when we turn to music, her face will light up and she will add little melodic phrases to her speech, clearly her preferred language. “If he was thinking that, I can’t imagine what my fans in the LGBTQ community might be thinking,” she goes on. “It was kind of devastating to realize that I hadn’t been publicly clear about that.” I understand why she was surprised; she has been sending pro-LGBTQ signals since at least 2011. Many have been subtle, but none insignificant—especially for a young country star coming out of Nashville. In the video for her single “Mean” (from 2010’s Speak Now), we see a boy in a school locker room wearing a lavender sweater and bow tie, surrounded by football players. In “Welcome to New York,” the first track on 1989, she sings, “And you can want who you want. Boys and boys and girls and girls.” Two years later, she donated to a fund for the newly created Stonewall National Monument and presented Ruby Rose with a GLAAD Media Award. Every night of last year’s Reputation tour, she dedicated the song “Dress” to Loie Fuller, the openly gay pioneer of modern dance and theatrical lighting who captured the imagination of fin-de-siècle Paris. Swift, who has been criticized for keeping her politics to herself, first took an explicit stance a month before the 2018 midterms. On Instagram, she endorsed Democrats for the Tennessee Legislature and called out the Republican running for Senate, Marsha Blackburn. “She believes businesses have a right to refuse service to gay couples,” Swift wrote. “She also believes they should not have the right to marry. These are not MY Tennessee values.” Swift says the post was partly to help young fans understand that if they wanted to vote, they had to register. To tell them, as she puts it, “Hey, just so you know, you can’t just roll up.” Some 65,000 new voters registered in the first 24 hours after her post, according to Vote.org. Trump came to Blackburn’s defense the following day. “She’s a tremendous woman,” he told reporters. “I’m sure Taylor Swift doesn’t know anything about her. Let’s say I like Taylor’s music about 25 percent less now, OK?” In April, spurred by a raft of anti-LGBTQ bills in Tennessee, Swift donated $113,000 to the Tennessee Equality Project, which advocates for LGBTQ rights. “Horrendous,” she says of the legislation. “They don’t call it ‘Slate of Hate’ for nothing.” Swift especially liked that the Tennessee Equality Project had organized a petition of faith leaders in opposition. “I loved how smart it was to come at it from a religious perspective.” Meanwhile, the “Calm Down” video provoked a Colorado pastor to call Swift “a sinner in desperate need of a savior” and warn that “God will cut her down.” It also revived heated debate within LGBTQ communities about the politics of allyship and corporatization of Pride. Some critics argued Swift’s pro-LGBTQ imagery and lyrics were overdue and out of the blue—a reaction the new Swift scholar in me found bewildering. Had they not been paying attention? Nor did it strike me as out of character for Swift to leverage her power for a cause. She pulled her catalog from Spotify in 2014 over questions of artist compensation. She stared down Apple in 2015, when the company said it would not pay artists during the launch of its music service. (Apple reversed itself immediately.) As a condition of her record deal with Universal Music Group last year, the company promised that it would distribute proceeds from any sale of its Spotify shares to all of its artists. And this summer, Swift furiously called out Scott Borchetta, founder of Big Machine Label Group, for selling her master recordings to the music manager Scooter Braun. (When I ask Swift if she tried to get her masters from Big Machine, her whole body slumps with a palpable heaviness. “It was either investing in my past or my and other artists’ future, and I chose the future,” she says of the deal she struck with Universal.) Swift’s blunt testimony during her 2017 sexual-assault case against a radio DJ—months before the #MeToo reckoning blew open—felt deeply political to me and, I imagine, many other women. Swift accused the DJ, David Mueller, of groping her under her skirt at a photo session in 2013. Her camp reported the incident to his employer, who fired him. Mueller denied the allegation, sued Swift for $3 million, and his case was thrown out. Swift countersued for a symbolic $1 and won. In a Colorado courtroom, Swift described the incident: “He stayed latched onto my bare ass cheek” as photos were being snapped. Asked why photos of the front of her skirt didn’t show this, she said, “Because my ass is located at the back of my body.” Asked if she felt bad about the DJ’s losing his job, she said, “I’m not going to let you or your client make me feel in any way that this is my fault. Here we are years later, and I’m being blamed for the unfortunate events of his life that are the product of his decisions—not mine.” When Time included Swift on the cover of its “Silence Breakers” issue that year, the magazine asked how she felt during the testimony. “I was angry,” she said. “In that moment, I decided to forgo any courtroom formalities and just answer the questions the way it happened…I’m told it was the most amount of times the word ass has ever been said in Colorado Federal Court.” Mueller has since paid Swift the dollar—with a Sacagawea coin. “He was trolling me, implying that I was self-righteous and hell-bent on angry, vengeful feminism. That’s what I’m inferring from him giving me a Sacagawea coin,” Swift says. “Hey, maybe he was trying to do it in honor of a powerful Native American woman. I didn’t ask.” Where is the coin now? “My lawyer has it.” I ask her, why get louder about LGBTQ rights now? “Rights are being stripped from basically everyone who isn’t a straight white cisgender male,” she says. “I didn’t realize until recently that I could advocate for a community that I’m not a part of. It’s hard to know how to do that without being so fearful of making a mistake that you just freeze. Because my mistakes are very loud. When I make a mistake, it echoes through the canyons of the world. It’s clickbait, and it’s a part of my life story, and it’s a part of my career arc.” I’d argue that no heterosexual woman can listen to “You Need to Calm Down” and hear only a gay anthem. “Calm down” is what controlling men tell women who are angry, contrary, or “hysterical,” or, let’s say, fearing for their physical safety. It is what Panic! at the Disco singer Brendon Urie says to Swift in the beginning of the “ME!” music video, prompting her to scream, “Je suis calme!” I cannot believe it is a coincidence that Swift, a numbers geek with an affinity for dates, dropped the single—whose slow, incessant bass is likely to be bumping in stadiums across the world in 2020 if she goes on tour—on June 14, a certain president’s birthday. It’s enlightening to read 13 years of Taylor Swift coverage—all the big reviews, all the big profiles—in one sitting. You notice things. How quickly Swift went from a “prodigy” (The New Yorker) and a “songwriting savant” (Rolling Stone) to a tabloid fixture, for instance. Or how suspect her ambition is made to seem once she acquires real power. Other plot points simply look different in the light of #MeToo. It is hard to imagine that Swift’s songs about her exes would be reviewed as sensationally today. I wonder if, in 2019, any man would dare grab the microphone out of a young woman’s hands at an awards show. I stared into space for a good long while when I was reminded that Pitchfork did not review Taylor Swift’s 1989 but did review Ryan Adams’s cover album of Taylor Swift’s 1989. I ask Swift if she had always been aware of sexism. “I think about this a lot,” she says. “When I was a teenager, I would hear people talk about sexism in the music industry, and I’d be like, I don’t see it. I don’t understand. Then I realized that was because I was a kid. Men in the industry saw me as a kid. I was a lanky, scrawny, overexcited young girl who reminded them more of their little niece or their daughter than a successful woman in business or a colleague. The second I became a woman, in people’s perception, was when I started seeing it. “It’s fine to infantilize a girl’s success and say, How cute that she’s having some hit songs,” she goes on. “How cute that she’s writing songs. But the second it becomes formidable? As soon as I started playing stadiums—when I started to look like a woman—that wasn’t as cool anymore. It was when I started to have songs from Red come out and cross over, like ‘I Knew You Were Trouble’ and ‘We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together.’ ” Those songs are also more assertive than the ones that came before, I say. “Yeah, the angle was different when I started saying, I knew you were trouble when you walked in. Basically, you emotionally manipulated me and I didn’t love it. That wasn’t fun for me.” I have to wonder if having her songwriting overlooked as her hits were picked apart and scrutinized wasn’t the biggest bummer of all. Swift: “I wanted to say to people, You realize writing songs is an art and a craft and not, like, an easy thing to do? Or to do well? People would act like it was a weapon I was using. Like a cheap dirty trick. Be careful, bro, she’ll write a song about you. Don’t stand near her. First of all, that’s not how it works. Second of all, find me a time when they say that about a male artist: Be careful, girl, he’ll use his experience with you to get—God forbid—inspiration to make art.” Without question the tenor of the Taylor Swift Narrative changed most dramatically in July 2016, when Kim Kardashian West called her a “snake” on Twitter, and released video clips of Swift and Kanye West discussing the lyrics to his song “Famous.” (No need to rehash the details here. Suffice it to say that Swift’s version of events hasn’t changed: She knew about some of the lyrics but not others; specifically, the words that bitch.) The posts sparked several hashtags, including #TaylorSwiftIsASnake and #TaylorSwiftIsCanceled, which quickly escalated into a months-long campaign to “cancel” Swift. To this day Swift doesn’t think people grasp the repercussions of that term. “A mass public shaming, with millions of people saying you are quote-unquote canceled, is a very isolating experience,” she says. “I don’t think there are that many people who can actually understand what it’s like to have millions of people hate you very loudly.” She adds: “When you say someone is canceled, it’s not a TV show. It’s a human being. You’re sending mass amounts of messaging to this person to either shut up, disappear, or it could also be perceived as, Kill yourself.” I get a sense of the whiplash Swift experienced when I notice that, a few months into this ordeal, while she was writing the songs that an interpolation of a ’90s camp classic, Right Said Fred’s “I’m Too Sexy.”) Nonetheless, most critics read it as a grenade lobbed in the general direction of Calabasas. One longtime Nashville critic, Brian Mansfield, had a more plausible take: She was writing sarcastically as the “Taylor Swift” portrayed in the media in a bid for privacy. “Yeah, this is the character you created for me, let me just hide behind it,” she says now of the persona she created. “I always used this metaphor when I was younger. I’d say that with every reinvention, I never wanted to tear down my house. ’Cause I built this house. This house being, metaphorically, my body of work, my songwriting, my music, my catalog, my library. I just wanted to redecorate. I think a lot of people, with Reputation, would have perceived that I had torn down the house. Actually, I just built a bunker around it.” In March, the snakes started to morph into butterflies, the vampire color palette into Easter pastels. When a superbloom of wildflowers lured a mesmerizing deluge of Painted Lady butterflies to Los Angeles, Swift marked it with an Instagram post. She attended the iHeartRadio Music Awards that night in a sequin romper and stilettos with shimmery wings attached. Swift announced the single “ME!” a month later, with a large butterfly mural in Nashville. In the music video for the (conspicuously) bubblegum song, a hissing pastel-pink snake explodes into a kaleidoscope of butterflies. One flutters by the window of an apartment, where Swift is arguing in French with Urie. A record player is playing in the background. “It’s an old-timey, 1940s-sounding instrumental version of ‘You Need to Calm Down,’ ’’ Swift says. Later, in the “Calm Down” video, Swift wears a (fake) back tattoo of a snake swarmed by butterflies. We are only two songs in, people. Lover, to be released on August 23, will have a total of 18 songs. “I was compiling ideas for a very long time,” Swift says. “When I started writing, I couldn’t stop.” (We can assume the British actor Joe Alwyn, with whom Swift has been in a relationship for nearly three years, provided some of the inspiration.) Swift thinks Lover might be her favorite album yet. “There are so many ways in which this album feels like a new beginning,” she says. “This album is really a love letter to love, in all of its maddening, passionate, exciting, enchanting, horrific, tragic, wonderful glory.” I have to ask Swift, given how genuinely at peace she seems, if part of her isn’t thankful, if not for the Great Cancellation of 2016, then for the person she now is—knowing who her friends are, knowing what’s what. “When you’re going through loss or embarrassment or shame, it’s a grieving process with so many micro emotions in a day. One of the reasons why I didn’t do interviews for Reputation was that I couldn’t figure out how I felt hour to hour. Sometimes I felt like: All these things taught me something that I never could have learned in a way that didn’t hurt as much. Five minutes later, I’d feel like: That was horrible. Why did that have to happen? What am I supposed to take from this other than mass amounts of humiliation? And then five minutes later I’d think: I think I might be happier than I’ve ever been.” She goes on: “It’s so strange trying to be self-aware when you’ve been cast as this always smiling, always happy ‘America’s sweetheart’ thing, and then having that taken away and realizing that it’s actually a great thing that it was taken away, because that’s extremely limiting.” Swift leans back in the cocoon and smiles: “We’re not going to go straight to gratitude with it. Ever. But we’re going to find positive aspects to it. We’re never going to write a thank-you note.” Though people will take the Perry-Swift burger-and-fries embrace in the “You Need to Calm Down” video as a press release that the two have mended fences, Swift says it’s actually a comment on how the media pits female pop stars against one another. After Perry sent Swift an (actual) olive branch last year, Swift asked her to be in the video: “She wrote back, This makes me so emotional. I’m so up for this. I want us to be that example. But let’s spend some time together. Because I want it to be real. So she came over and we talked for hours. “We decided the metaphor for what happens in the media,” Swift explains, “is they pick two people and it’s like they’re pouring gasoline all over the floor. All that needs to happen is one false move, one false word, one misunderstanding, and a match is lit and dropped. That’s what happened with us. It was: Who’s better? Katy or Taylor? Katy or Taylor? Katy or Taylor? Katy or Taylor? The tension is so high that it becomes impossible for you to not think that the other person has something against you.“ Meanwhile, the protesters in the video reference a real-life religious group that pickets outside Swift’s concerts, not the white working class in general, as some have assumed. “So many artists have them at their shows, and it’s such a confounding, confusing, infuriating thing to have outside of joyful concerts,” she tells me. “Obviously I don’t want to mention the actual entity, because they would get excited about that. Giving them press is not on my list of priorities.” REDACTED lol Swift wrote the first two singles with Joel Little, best known as one of Lorde’s go-to producers. (“From a pop-songwriting point of view, she’s the pinnacle,” Little says of Swift.) The album is likely to include more marquee names. A portrait of the Dixie Chicks in the background of the “ME!” video almost certainly portends a collaboration. If fans are correctly reading a button affixed to her denim jacket in a recent magazine cover, we can expect one with Drake, too. Lover. “We met at one of her shows,” says McCartney, “and then we had a girls’ night and kind of jumped straight in. In London we’ll go on walks and talk about everything—life and love.” (Swift has no further fashion ambitions at the moment. “I really love my job right now,” she tells me. “My focus is on music.”) Oh, and that “5” on the bullseye? Track five is called “The Archer.” Yet something tells me the most illuminating clue for reading both Lover and Reputationmay be Loie Fuller, the dancer to whom Swift paid homage on tour. As Swift noted on a Jumbotron, Fuller “fought for artists to own their work.” Fuller also used swirling fabric and colored lights to metamorphose onstage, playing a “hide-and-seek illusionist game” with her audience, as one writer has put it. She became a muse to the Symbolists in Paris, where Jean Cocteau wrote that she created “the phantom of an era.” The effect, said the poet Stéphane Mallarmé, was a “dizziness of soul made visible by an artifice.” Fuller’s most famous piece was “Serpentine Dance.” Another was “Butterfly Dance.” Swift has had almost no downtime since late 2017, but what little she does have is divided among New York, Nashville, Los Angeles, and Rhode Island, where she keeps homes—plus London. In an essay earlier this year, she revealed that her mother, Andrea Swift, is fighting cancer for a second time. “There was a relapse that happened,” Swift says, declining to go into detail. “It’s something that my family is going through.” Later this year, she will star in a film adaptation of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Cats as Bombalurina, the flirtatious red cat. “They made us the size of cats by making the furniture bigger,” she says. “You’d be standing there and you could barely reach the seat of a chair. It was phenomenal. It made you feel like a little kid.” But first, she will spend much of the summer holding “secret sessions”—a tradition wherein Swift invites hundreds of fans to her various homes to preview her new music. “They’ve never given me a reason to stop doing it,” she says. “Not a single one.” Speaking of: Inquiring fans will want to know if Swift dropped any more clues about how to decode Lover during this interview. For you I reviewed the audio again, and there were a few things that made my newly acquired Swifty sense tingle. At one point she compared superstardom in the digital age to life in a dollhouse, one where voyeurs “can ‘ship’ you with who they want to ‘ship’ you with, and they can ‘favorite’ friends that you have, and they can know where you are all the time.” The metaphor was precise and vivid and, well, a little too intricately rendered to be off the cuff. (Also, the “ME!” lyric: “Baby doll, when it comes to a lover. I promise that you’ll never find another like me.”) Then there was the balloon—a giant gold balloon in the shape of a numeral seven that happened to float by while we were on her roof, on this, the occasion of her seventh album. “Is it an L’?” I say. “No, because look, the string is hanging from the bottom,” she says. It might seem an obvious symbolic gesture, deployed for this interview, except for how impossible that seems. Swift let me control the timing of nearly everything. Moreover, the gold seven wasn’t floating up from the sidewalk below. It was already high in the sky, drifting slowly toward us from down the street. She would have had to control the wind, or at least to have studied it. Would Taylor Swift really go to such elaborate lengths for her fans? This much I know: Yes, she would.

[hgfstreamchats]

But I’m a Cheerleader

Avatar image thenightetc User joined room 22:50 Avatar image thenightetc Hello! 22:50 thenightetc here 22:51 Avatar image Thebes User joined room 22:51 Excellent! 22:51 Avatar image thenightetc There we go 22:51 Avatar image Thebes Present! 22:51 Avatar image thenightetc Aw, you get a little crown on yours. 22:51 11 Shirts For Marbles' 11th Birthday 22:52 Avatar image Thebes I can't even judge, I spoil my dogs like all hell 22:52 How dare you accuse me of dressing Impact's pandas up in little clothes?

Back! Back! Hooray! Wait, let's wait for Zepha Oh, good idea. And what a short wait it was! I'm here!! Also, word on the street is that rabbit's out of money and a few weeks from closing down. Oh, good idea. And what a short wait it was! I'm here!! Also, word on the street is that rabbit's out of money and a few weeks from closing down. Ugh of course it is Oh, damn. OH. RIGHT. I forgot about this. Something about my extensions/ad-block won't show the video on my end, just the audio Awww, no. Try another browser? I can only watch rabbit in chrome I tried that last time too, it wouldn't work on Chrome OR Firefox Last time I just had two of me in the room, one on the laptop and one on my tablet but my tablet's been dead for months Oh, damn... Oh, damn... Can you open the movie itself in another window and have both on at the same time? Lemme try Firefox again That's what I would do when livestream was so persistently bad NOPE. SAME DELIO Audio, no video UGH Do you want the timestamp? nah I'll figure it out. I'm gonna see if it'll work on my phone If you're sure! don't wait for me, I'll be fine! oh! subtitles! ALRIGHT I GOT IT Woo! Wonderful! Tiny screen but at least I can watch!! What a charmer. Honestly I come to these streams more for the company, commentary, and the lot of us joined in solidarity of our mockery/horror of the movie to begin with Could you turn the subtitles back on? Gladly. Sometimes it's a little hard to hear Thanks! Aaaand they're not synced. Yyyeah, never mind, then. Because Unicron forbid anything work tonight. ugh drives me NUTS when they do that I hope that's not how they announce that somebody's dead I am going to rip off my array and throw it at the wall. wait why are they doing this already I thought she was still in the closet at this point how would anyone know? I don't even think she realizes it. Is that her boyfriend there? wait... wow ... they brought in a conversion therapist based ENTIRELY on stereotypes??> Is that her boyfriend there? wait... wow ... they brought in a conversion therapist based ENTIRELY on stereotypes??> Apparently! Thread-THIN stereotypes??? wtf the irony of their logo having a rainbow in it Kelly looks fun. right? Gah. How do humans live like this? Wait is that Melanie Lynskey? HAH We don't yeah, even the state that created this kinda camp shut down all theirs after a few (horrible) decades 'Alright that's too much affection tone it back a bit' poor kid. Graham has absolutely no intention of giving into this life I mean, give into this life and it's a slippery slope to your life resembling 'Saving Christmas' ... gender identity and sexual orientation ARE NOT THE SAME THING MAN .... This was all so inevitable. of course actual conversion therapy is a legit dystopian torture-chamber nightmare Oh, no. Pants. A true nightmare NO PLEASE ANYTHING BUT THAT Yeah, why would they want to watch a bunch of sweaty, muscular men grappling with each other The time I watched my uncle watched UFC I commented after a few minutes 'wow this looks super gay' and my uncle FREAKED OUT AT ME FOR IT y'know the FIRST mistake was pairing these kids with a same-sex friend obviously feelings are going to develop in this atmosphere I mean, obviously They're the world's best matchmakers. LOLOLOLOL awwww ah ah ah a REAL lady does not CROSS her legs she only keeps her knees together, sometimes hooking her ankles together if she needs it awwwww awwwww TEMPTATION ohoho fake IDs! This is adorable. 'and then I realized dancing with that OTHER girl didn't make me happy and watching graham dance with a girl made me ANGRY so maybe there's hope for me!!' 'Oh wait no n/m' It's hard to resist sweet as pie. I certainly couldn't. Oh wow the actresses actually looked into it there's way too many actresses playing lesbians/wlw that look like they're obviously forcing it for the job jesus. god this movie is a nightmare It really is. honey no don't bring out th eblacklight *blacklight Ohhh dear psh he can't even say it Field trip to the Cocksucker, class! ...Wow 'YOU'RE choosing to cut US off' uGH Hah! 'Look how heterosexual we are' gah, creepy GAH yes let's put these underage teenages in sexual situations not creepy at all you girls gonna get snitched on d'aww this is the sincerest thing I've seen in this movie sofar :< :< uGH *SHUDDER* UGH. I can't get over this, adults forcing kids into this is so skeevy it really is Wait... That's Dante Basco!! HAH Nice And Mike is RuPaul. Wait WHAT Oh my god I didn't even recognize him at all Wild Isn't it? How did she not see THAT 'I can't lose daddy's money AWWWW HER PARENTS ACCEPTED HER AFTER ALL Awww! Well, good Even if the mom needs some more time She made it there, she'll come around. Progress is progress Well that was a thoroughly uncomfortable ride Humanity's hang-ups are a trip, aren't they Knock Out? A thoroughly uncomfortable trip! Let me dig up our light note. Yes Oh gosh yes please Yes, let's! I need a palette cleanser Wait this movie came out in 2000?! I mean judging by how young some of the actors I KNEW are I knew it had to be slightly oldre *older but I first saw the internet going crazy over this movie like, 2015 or so So I assumed it came out in 2010 or around that area at the EARLIEST noooope. but to be fair, you have to cast back to 1991 to find depictions of conversion therapy that... well. That. hashtag YIKES wooooooooow Ha! I like this girl Her sense of humour feels trustworthy god Jesus. (slowly looks at camera at that conclusion ) 'If you're unhappy about the quality of the video you just watched, complain to metro they'll write about it' AMAZING And one more quick one to really kick off pride month... I'M CRY ooh yes AHHHH YES what the fuck AHAHAHAHA ... ooh that's one thing that's nice about rabbit too I can CUSS I used to have to sensor my own cussing on Livestream Appalling. if I typed 'fuck' I'd have to type 'f*ck' or it would come up '****' Censorship just fucks everything up. Yes. Rabbit may be a butt that's about to die but at least we can say fuck Cling to that spar and don't let go. ALWAYS Yeah, the row of ****s just like... draws extra attention to it It makes it look worse! That's why I got into the habit of censoring myself Everyone knew EXACTLY what I was saying THAT way Well--as always, thank you for the stream. And thank you for coming, as always! It was certainly... a thing that's for sure! thanks for the stream! It's always wonderful when you can make it, zephra human. I'm glad I could today, my work schedule's a butt but say high to Breakdown and Impact for me! *hi Of course! Good night, everyone! Goodnight! 'Night guys!

[danielcooperrp]

They Fuck You Up

A drabble for @msppctts

When Daniel’s parents ask him to come into the living room, he thinks that they are finally, finally letting him get a puppy. He’s been begging since he was six, but he’s ten now, practically an adult. He’s clearly responsible enough for a dog, so when he enters the room, he can barely contain his grin.

The grin turns slack when he learns the truth. We love you more than anything in the world, his mother tells him, gripping one of his hands in both of hers with tears in her eyes. We chose you because we love you. You complete our family.

His father is more stoic about it, not that Daniel is surprised; his dad favors logic over emotion. Still, his voice quakes when he tells Daniel, You may not havve come from us, but you are ours. We want you to know because you deserve the truth, but don’t think for a second that you are not our son.

It’s a shock, at first. He may be the first ten-year-old high school freshman in his school’s history, but he’s still only ten. He doesn’t cry about it—what’s there to cry about? Lots of kids are adopted—but it still follows him around, a tiny, constant reminder that he is never going to run out of ways to be different than everyone else. 

And then, of course, being adopted is the least of Daniel’s concerns. Just a year later, he stands beside his father, ironed into a too-stiff black suit, watching a shiny mahogany box be lowered into a hole in the ground. He doesn’t cry about it—crying can come later, when he’s safely locked in his room, when his dad doesn’t need him to be strong—but he does make a silent promise to the mom who will never playfully tug on his curls again: You and Dad are the only family I will ever need.

So he works harder, longer, reads every piece of scientific literature his dad leaves lying around the house, and he graduates high school at just fourteen, with straight As and a mouthful of braces, his father and grandmother, who pats his cheek proudly and calls him Bumblebee, are the only family at the ceremony. Brilliant, he’s been called, a prodigy, and yes, he’s about to be shipped off to England, because Oxford is the only university that seems to know what to do with him, but even as the plane is rolling down the tarmac, all he can think about is the offer his father made after graduation. It was a closed adoption, he had said over dinner at Daniel’s favorite hole-in-the-wall Italian place, but if you want, we can start looking.

He spends a few weeks thinking about it as he settles into the room in his boardinghouse. He doesn’t know what legal hurdles they’ll have to jump through to find out the names of the person or people who gave him up, and he doesn’t know if the jumping will be worth it. What can learn that he doesn’t already know? Someone was pregnant, and he was an unwelcome presence in their life. His parents, the people who raised him, the people who knew exactly what combination of soup and ice cream he wanted when he was sick, the mother whose gravestone now sits an ocean away from him, the father who tried his best to pick up the pieces after her death, they wanted him, chose him, carved out a space in their life specifically for him. 

He tells his father no. He doesn’t cry about it. 

University is a whirlwind, too many classes, too many hours in a lab, too many eyes watching the American whizkid breeze his way through undergrad, through the Master’s program, through his doctorate. By twenty, he has his Ph.D., biochemistry, and he’s back on a plane, flying home to the father who now feels like something of a stranger to him. Now more than ever, Daniel is determined to show his dad exactly the kind of man he’s become, one who is just as dedicated to the pursuit of knowledge as he is, one who wants to make his mother proud. 

Almost as soon as he touches American soil, he’s shaking hands with everyone at his father’s lab. Lernaean Laboratories, the logo at the top of his offer letter reads. How many hours did he spend here as a child, not even tall enough to see atop the lab benches, so close in his father’s shadow that if he stopped too fast Daniel would bounce off of the back of his knees? His father’s career in this lab, for Hydra, has been the blueprint for Daniel to follow, the legacy for him to inherit. He falls into the work as easily as stepping off the T in the morning, quickly assimilating into his research team and getting to work. His efforts don’t go unnoticed; soon, he’s leading a team of his own, doing the kinds of experimental research he’d only dreamed of back in England. 

And then, as it is wont to do, everything falls apart. Hydra is no longer the vague parent company of the lab to which he and his father have dedicated their careers; it is a fascist shadow organization, a parasite lurking in legitimate government organizations with the almost cartoonish goal of reshaping the world into their authoritarian vision. Daniel’s entire worldview is flipped upside-down on a dime, and as the truth of his research, of his father’s research, of his life spills out for the entire world to see like some messy tabloid drama, all he can think is, Did Dad know?

Of course he did. He was naive to think otherwise. For as brilliant as Daniel is, he has never had the cognizance his father has had, has never been able to navigate the world as deftly. Of course his father knew exactly what he was doing, what he was contributing to, and of course he has an answer to every question Daniel hurls at him as they fight in the same living room where all those years ago his life was upended for the very first time. 

You’re a monster, Daniel croaks, the ache in his chest so profound it’s a wonder his ribs don’t crack. And you’ve turned me into a monster, too. 

When he stumbles back into his own apartment, bone-weary and limp, he collapses onto his bed, and he cries about it. 

The next few weeks pass in a haze. He has no job, no prospects, no relationship with his father. His roommates, best friends made across the pond, two other too-smart Americans too good at finding trouble where they least expect it, do their best to cheer him up, but all of the RuPaul’s Drag Race in the world isn’t going to make him suddenly able to face himself in the mirror.

He doesn’t know what sparks the interest, what first gets the question rolling in his head. One night, he googles the phrase closed adoption, and then immediately closes out of the window. A few nights later, he tries again. How to open a closed adoption. 

So the search begins. Two searches, really. The first for his birth parents, the second for a lab that will hire someone with a stain on their résumé like his. Much to his surprise, the latter is easier to find; within a year of his life falling apart, Daniel is hired on to work at the organization that he once viewed as the enemy: S.H.I.E.L.D. It’s rough there, of course, because no one trusts him, and why should they? These days he feels like he can barely trust himself to keep his shit together. 

When it comes to his birth parents, however, it’s not so simple. The lawyers can only do so much, and there’s only so much he can afford. He briefly considers a private investigator, but feels too icky about it; he doesn’t want his birth parents to think that he is more interested in his own curious self-interest than their privacy, even though he definitely is. He still isn’t on speaking terms with his father, but somehow he finds out what Daniel is up to, and the rift between them only widens. So what, I’m not good enough for you anymore? he snaps over the phone to his son. You have to go find your real parents? 

It would have been less painful if he had just slapped Daniel across the face. 

It’s his roommate Connor’s suggestion that solves the puzzle. So many people are doing those online ancestry kits these days, and even though Daniel is extremely skeptical of them—what exactly are they doing with his DNA once they’re done with it?—he sends of a vial of his spit and waits. A few weeks later, he logs into an online profile to see a list of distant blood relatives who are also curious about where they come from. The closest relative, he is pleased to learn, is a second cousin: the cousin of one of his birth parents. 

A few phone calls later, and he’s driving out to Long Island, where his second cousin lives, along with most of his extended family. Over lunch at a sub place, Daniel learns that his second cousin has a cousin who was in college in New York in 1989, the year Daniel was conceived, and who, according to the family grapevine, may have gotten knocked up by some trust-fund kid from Uptown Manhattan. Everyone is pretty certain that there was a baby, but no one knows what happened to it.  

Just to twist the knife, this guy Daniel has connected with via the Internet then lays on the bad news: his cousin died three years ago. Ovarian cancer. If she really was his mother, he’ll never get to know her. 

Her name was Chaya.

So he gives up. He goes back to Boston, back to his life, and tries to forget about his quest. He redoubles his efforts into his research, convinced that if he works hard enough, maybe, maybe his new coworkers will stop hating him for being Hydra scum.

And then one day, just a month or so after his twenty-eighth birthday, he receives an alert email from the DNA company. A new relative wants to connected with you! Even as he reminds himself not to get too excited, Daniel eagerly opens up the website, where he starts chatting with some guy in New York. Another second cousin, it looks like, but on his father’s side this time. There is less mystery around this one; this new relative only has one cousin, only one person who could be Daniel’s biological father. 

You’re never gonna believe this, kid, he writes. Daniel waits with bated breath for the next message to come in. My cousin? Tony fucking Stark.

There’s a buzzing in Daniel’s ears. He stares at the screen, seeing nothing. More messages come in—You know, Iron man? Hello? Kid, you still there?—but Daniel is long gone, sinking into a feeling unlike any he’s ever had before.

Holy fuck. His father is Tony Stark.

He sits with this. For a long time, he sits on the information, not breathing a word even to his best friends. He wakes up, he goes for runs, he showers, he heads into work, he talks to no one, he comes home, he sleeps. Day after day, he lives his life, but for weeks, there is only one thought preoccupying his every waking moment: My father is Tony Stark.

He doesn’t google him. He doesn’t have to. Everyone knows Tony Stark, billionaire tech genius, war profiteer-turned-superhero, the guy who flew through a wormhole to save all of Manhattan. He’s in the news enough that even the most casually engaged citizen can’t help but keep up-to-date on all of his escapades. To think that he came from that...if this isn’t evidence for nurture over nature, he doesn’t know what is.

Eventually, though, the processing has to stop and the decision-making has to start. He has this information now, and he needs to figure out what to do with it. Going to him seems laughable; how many people must have tried to claim that Tony Stark was the father of their child over the years? Everyone knows what kind of guy he was when he was younger, why couldn’t it be true? Does he try to get a lawyer? That seems hostile right off the bat, but how else would anyone believe him unless he’s willing to put his money where his mouth is?

He doesn’t get to make up his mind. He’s on his lunch break, up on the roof of the S.H.I.E.L.D. facility in Boston—technically speaking he’s not supposed to be up here, but the idea of going into the giant cafeteria full of S.H.I.E.L.D. employees who hate him is far worse than any reprimand for being in a restricted area—looking down at the bustling city below, when suddenly, he doesn’t feel very good. He sets his ham and Swiss sandwich down and clutches at his head. What is happening? Slowly, he lowers a hand in front of his face, and with a mixture of confusion and awe, he watches as the tips of his fingers start to dissolve into dust before his very eyes.

And then the world goes black.

When he wakes up, he is immediately overcome with the certain sense that something is wrong. He sits up, and his lunch is gone—didn’t he just put his sandwich down fifteen seconds ago? He stands, and when he peers out over the edge of the roof, he is stunned to see his beloved city in ruins. Garbage lines the streets, and buildings are falling into disrepair. When he looks down onto the sidewalk below, it’s filled with people who are looking around, just as confused as he is. They touch themselves, and each other, and even though he can’t hear them, he knows they’re asking the question, What just happened?

Life after the Hulk snapped everyone back into existence is messy. Half of the world has lived five years of their lives that people like Daniel just...weren’t there for. Of the people in his life, only his roommate Connor and his grandmother survived, which casts an icy grip around his heart; he lost five years with his grandmother, his mother’s mother, five years that he will never get back. His English bulldog, appropriately named Hulk, because Daniel has had a crush on Bruce Banner long before he was saving the world from apocalyptic destruction, also died in the snap, so at least Daniel didn’t lose any time with him.

His father is shaken by his own death and by his son’s. He wants to reconnect, to put the past behind them, to put right what once went wrong, but Daniel just isn’t ready for it. Yes, the world kept spinning for five years, but for him, the wound between him and his father his still raw, tender. 

But his biological father is a whole other story. Now that he’s died and been brought back to life, Daniel is more ready than ever to reach out to him. He doesn’t care if he’s laughed at, or doubted, or called a liar. He has to shoot his shot. 

Once again, he finds out, he is too late. His father, Tony Stark, sacrificed himself to save the entire universe. A hero, they’re calling him, the truest hero we’ve ever had. Memorials spring up everywhere, with Iron Man instantly immortalized as the most important hero in the universe. 

And Daniel will never get to tell him that he’s his son.

But Tony Stark isn’t the only one dominating much of the cultural conversation. Most of the world is only now learning that in the five years between the Snaps, he and Stark Industries CEO Pepper Potts had a daughter.

Daniel has a sister. 

Which is how he ends up here, driving down this winding gravel road alongside a lake, fingers tapping nervously atop the steering wheel. This is dumb, far dumber than just reaching out to Tony Stark. Pepper Potts is a grieving widow, a single mother with a four-year-old child, a woman with a company to run and a life to live. The last thing she needs is one of Tony Stark’s youthful indiscretions showing up on the front porch of her supposedly classified lake house (though he’s not ready to repair things with his father, Daniel is more than willing to let him try to curry favor by calling on an old friend to do some digging for him). When he gets out of his rental car, he approaches the front door and retreats over and over again, balling and unballing his fists, trying to work up the nerve to knock. All of the starter sentences he practiced on his drive from Boston to upstate New York are entirely gone now, and he thinks if he opens his mouth, he might just vomit. 

He has to do it. He lost his chance to know both of his biological parents. He simply cannot risk losing the chance to know his sister. He steps carefully up to the front door, takes a deep breath, and knocks. 

[ekatheshallowbird]

Kayaknya berapa kali pun nonton series ini nggak akan pernah bosan. Always like everything’s going on in their lives. Instead of watching the newest season, I put it off only to rewatch the previous seasons. And it’s gonna take a loooong time. It depends on my mood, though. Everything’s negotiable. 

MY FINE LINE

      “Oh, it is really good. It’s the best coffee in town.”

(Lorelai Gilmore)

      “You’re a regular Jack Kerouac.”

(Lorelai Gilmore)

      “I’m just screwing with your mind.”

(Lorelai Gilmore)

      Dialogue

  Rory: Hey. It’s freezing. Lorelai: Oh, what do you need? Hot tea, coffee? Rory: Lip gloss. Lorelai: Aha. I have vanilla, chocolate, strawberry, and toasted marshmallow. Rory: Anything in there not resembling a breakfast cereal? Lorelai: Yes. It has no smell but it changes colors with your mood. Rory: God. RuPaul doesn’t need this much makeup.

      “Wow. You do not look old enough to have a daughter. No, I mean it. And you do not look like a daughter.”

(Joey)

      “Korean never joke about future doctors.”

(Lane Kim)

      Dialogue

  Sookie: I want to put it on the waffles for breakfast. Lorelai: I want to take a bath in that sauce. Sookie: I will make more. Lorelai: Someday, when we open our own inn, diabetics will line up to eat this sauce. Sookie: Won’t that be great? Lorelai: Yeah. But the key to someday achieving that dream is for you to stay alive long enough, so we actually can open an inn. Do you understand? Sookie: Yes, I understand.

      “It sucks that after all these years your mom still hates me.”

(Rory Gilmore)

      “Boys don’t like funny girls.”

(Mrs. Kim)

      “Protestants love oatmeal.”

(Sookie St. James)

      “People are particularly stupid today. I can’t talk anymore with them.”

(Michel Gerard)

      “There’s something I haven’t thought of. I know there is something staring at me right in the face. I just… I haven’t seen it.”

(Lorelai Gilmore)

      “Since we are now financially involved in your life. I want to be actively involved in your life.”

(Emily Gilmore)

      ”God! You’re like Ruth Gordon just standing there with a tannis root. Make a noise.”

(Rory Gilmore)

       Dialogue

  Rory: Hey, how did you know I was reading Moby Dick? Dean: I’ve been watching you. Rory: Watching me? Dean: I mean, not in a creepy, like “I’m watching you” sort of way. I just, I’ve noticed you. Rory: Me? Dean: Yeah. Rory: When? Dean: Every day. After school you come out and you sit under that tree there and you read. Last week it was Madame Bovary. This week it’s Moby Dick. Rory: But why would you— Dean: Because you’re nice to look at. And because you’ve got unbelievable concentration. Rory: What? Dean: Last Friday these two guys were tossing around a ball and one guy was nailed other right in the face. I mean, it was a mess, blood everywhere, the nurse came out. The place was in chaos, his girlfriend was all freaking out and you just sat there and read. You never even looked up. I thought, I have never seen anyone read so intensely before in my entire life. I have to meet that girl. Rory: Maybe I just didn’t look up because I’m unbelievably self-centered. Dean: Maybe, but I doubt it.

      Dialogue

  Lorelai: I forgot to tell we’re having dinner with your grandparents tomorrow night. Rory: We are? Lorelai: Mm-hmm. Rory: But it’s September. Lorelai: So? Rory: So, what holiday’s in September? Lorelai: Look, it’s not a holiday thing. It’s just dinner, okay? Rory: Fine, sorry.

      “Red meat can kill you. Enjoy.”

(Luke Danes)

      “I don’t tell you everything. I have my own things.”

(Rory Gilmore)

      Dialogue

  Lorelai: This is about a boy. Of course. I can’t believe I didn’t see it. All those talk about money and bus rides, you got a thing going with a guy you don’t wanna leave school. Rory: I’m going to bed. Lorelai: God, I’m so dense. That should’ve been my first thought. After all, you’re me. Rory: I’m not you. Lorelai: Really? Someone willing to throw important life experiences outta the window to be with a guy. It sounds like me to me. Rory: Whatever. Lorelai: So, who is he? Rory: There’s no guy. Lorelai: Dark hair, romantic guy, looks a little dangerous. Rory: This conversation is over. Lorelai: Tattoos are good too. Rory: I don’t wanna change schools because of all the reasons I’ve already told you a thousand times. If you don’t wanna believe me, that’s fine. Goodnight. Lorelai: Does he have a motorcycle? ‘Cause if you’re gonna throw your life away, he better have a motorcycle!

      Dialogue

  Lorelai: Listen. Can we just start all over, okay? You tell me about the guy and I promised not to let my head explode, huh? Rory, please talk to me. Okay, I’ll talk. Don’t get me wrong. Guys are great. I am a huge fan of guys. You don’t get knocked up at sixteen being indifferent to guys. Babe, guys are always gonna be there. This school isn’t. It’s more important. It has to be more important. Rory: I’m going to sleep. Lorelai: Rory. You’ve always been the sensible one in this house, huh? I need you to remember that feeling now. You will kick your own butt later if you blow this. Rory: Well, it’s my butt. Lorelai: Good comeback. Rory: Thank you. Lorelai: You’re welcome. Rory, come on. Rory: I don’t wanna talk about this. Could you please, please just leave me alone? Lorelai: Okay, fine. We always had a democracy in this house. We never did anything unless we both agreed. But now I guess I’m gonna have to play the mom card. You’re going to Chilton whether you want to or not. Monday morning, you will be there, end of story. Rory: We’ll see. Lorelai: Yeah, we will.

      Dialogue

  Rory: So, do we go in and do we just stand here reenacting ‘The Little Match Girl’? Lorelai: Okay, look, I know you and me are having a thing here and I know you hate me but I need you to be civil. At least through dinner, on the way home you can pull Menendez. Rory: Fine.

      “Is that a collector’s cup or can I throw it away for you?”

(Emily Gilmore)

      “Well, it’s not every day that I have my girls here for dinner on a day the banks are open.”

(Emily Gilmore)

      “An education is the most important thing in the world, next to family.”

(Emily Gilmore)

      Dialogue

  Emily: Lorelai, come back to the table. Lorelai: Is this what it’s gonna be like every Friday night? I come over and let you attack me? Emily: You’re being very dramatic. Lorelai: Dramatic? Were you at that table just now? Emily: Yes, I was. And I think you took what your father said the wrong way. Lorelai: The wrong way? How could I’ve taken it the wrong way? What was open to interpretation?

      Dialogue

  Lorelai: Why do you pounce on every single thing I say? Emily: That’s absurd. You barely uttered a word all night. Lorelai: ‘That’s not true.’ Emily: You said pie. Lorelai: Oh, come on. Emily: You did. All I’ve heard you said was pie. Lorelai: Why would he bring up Christopher? Was that really necessary? Emily: He likes Christopher. Lorelai: Isn’t that interesting? Because, as I remember, when Christopher got me pregnant, Dad didn’t like him so much. Emily: Oh, well, please, you were sixteen. What were we supposed to do? Throw you a party? We were disappointed. The two of you had such bright futures. Lorelai: Yes. And by not getting married we got to keep those bright futures. Emily: When you get pregnant, you get married. A child needs a mother and a father. Lorelai: Oh, Mom. Do you think that Christopher would have his own company right now if we’d gotten married? Do you think he would be anything at all? Emily: Yes, I do. Your father would have put him in the insurance business and you’d be living a lovely life right now. Lorelai: He didn’t wanna be in the insurance business and I am living a lovely life right now. Emily: That’s right, far away from home. Lorelai: Oh, here we go. Emily: You took that girl, completely shut us out of your life. Lorelai: You wanted to control me. Emily: You were still a child. Lorelai: I stopped being a child the minute the strip turned pink, okay? I had to figure out how to live. I found a good job. Emily: As a maid. With all your brains and talent. Lorelai: I worked my way up. I run the place now. I built a life on my own with no help from anyone. Emily: Yes, and think where you would have been if you’d accepted a little help, hm? And where Rory would have been. But no, you always too proud to accept anything from anyone. Lorelai: Well, I wasn’t too proud to come here to you two begging for money for my kid’s school, was I? Emily: No, you certainly weren’t. But you’re too proud to tell her where you got it from, aren’t you? Well, fine. You have your precious pride and I have my weekly dinners. Isn’t that nice? We both win.

      “You know what’s really special about our relationship? The total understanding about the need for one’s privacy. I mean, you really understand boundaries.”

(Rory Gilmore)

    Mentioned:

Rosemary’s Baby 

Moby Dick

Madame Bovary

The Little Match Girl

Menendez

Nick at Nite

    MY BEST SHOT

    #gallery-0-4 { margin: auto; } #gallery-0-4 .gallery-item { float: left; margin-top: 10px; text-align: center; width: 50%; } #gallery-0-4 img { border: 2px solid #cfcfcf; } #gallery-0-4 .gallery-caption { margin-left: 0; } /* see gallery_shortcode() in wp-includes/media.php */

***

    Sutradara: Lesli Linka Glatter

Penulis Skenario: Amy Sherman-Palladino

Musik: Sam Phillips

Sinematografer: Teresa Medina & Hiro Narita

Desain Kostum: Vicki Graef & Caroline B. Marx

Tayang Perdana: 5 Oktober 2000

Durasi: 45 Menit

Nonton di: Netflix

Rating: 5 dari 5 Bintang

    Gilmore Girls S1 : E1 – Pilot Kayaknya berapa kali pun nonton series ini nggak akan pernah bosan. Always like everything's going on in their lives.

[artificialqueens]

The Fandom from Hell 1&2/2 (Trixie/Acid) - Spoky

A/N: First time trying to write Acid Betty and got some help with that from the wonderful Lucy. Her Thorcid is perfect, it’s beautiful, it reads like Linda Evangelista and I totally use her characterisation as a model. You can blame Dandee for chapter two being a thing and that I ended up posting this here.

Summary: RPDR fans have a problem with Acid Betty. Little do they know that it’s Trixie who has to deal with the aftermath.

The Fandom from Hell, ½

Trixie was sitting at the living room sofa, restringing her guitar, when a quiet click of the front door stirred her from her thoughts. The silence was suspicious.

“Jamin?” she called out and placed the guitar carefully on the coffee table.

There was no reply but she could hear someone moving in the apartment.

She’d gotten used to the different sounds of New York this week, and even learned to embrace Acid’s over enthusiastic greetings whenever the man got home from work. It wasn’t that Trixie didn’t like being cuddled, kissed and complimented. She just hadn’t expected Jamin to be that type of person and it had taken some days to get used to it. Before this week’s visit their relationship, if one could call it that, had consisted of quick blowjobs in different backstage toilets, dressing rooms and hotels - places and situations where Jamin’s character hadn’t necessarily been presented in the most positive or comprehensive ways.

“Jamin?” Trixie called again, now starting to wonder what to do if someone had actually broken into the apartment.

The bathroom door closed and Trixie could hear the tab being turned on. Either this thief had a complex case of OCD, or it really was Acid in the bathroom. She walked to the door and knocked gently.

“Hey, you okay?” she said and hoped that if there really was an OCD-thief in the apartment, they weren’t carrying a gun.

She could hear the thief clearing their throat before revealing their identity as Trixie’s… boyfriend? She wasn’t sure the label was appropriate but it would have to do.

“Hey! Yeah, I’m good. Just, just give me a minute alright?”

“Yeah, okay,” Trixie said and worried her lower lip. What had happened?

She listened the water running for what felt like hours but more likely was closer to a minute or two. When Jamin finally stepped out from the bathroom he was smiling widely, but the expression didn’t reach his eyes.

“There!” he said with a bright tone. “All done. Dinner?”

He walked straight into the kitchen, without giving Trixie the usual greeting hug or a kiss; both being gestures Trixie now realised she had grown accustomed to and wanted. She followed his steps with a suspicious frown.

“Yeah, I could eat,” she said and leaned to the kitchen counter, crossing her arms over her chest. “How was work?”

“Oh, it was great!”

Jamin launched into an explanation about their newest website client who seemed open for new, innovative solutions in regards to design.

“The possibilities are endless, there are so many different layers we can work with. We tried it with AJAX and it looks so good! Though, it makes more sense for it to be more of a CMS type of solution, but it was like stacking four pairs of 24 millimeter lashes and making sure it still works, you know?“

Trixie found it adorable how Jamin would move between makeup and coding lingo, when he talked about his work. Though she hoped that the man wasn’t doing it in his office with customers. The fact that Trixie was struggling to make sense of what Jamin was actually saying allowed her to pay more attention to the man himself and as he very discreetly wiped away a tear that had escaped, pretending just to scratch his nose, Trixie took notice.

“Hey’hey’hey,” she said gently, pushed Jamin against the stove and forced him to look at her. “What’s going on?”

Jamin swallowed and refused to meet her eyes.

“It’s nothing,” he said quietly.

“It’s clearly not nothing,” Trixie insisted and took Jamin’s face between her palms, stroking his stubble with her thumbs.

“I think I’m quitting,” Jamin said softly and closed his eyes.

“What?” Trixie asked, completely shocked. “You can’t quit. It’s your company. I mean I guess you could sell it, but…”

“No, I mean drag,” Jamin said, peeking at Trixie between his lashes.

“Why would you do that?” Trixie asked, but had already a list of possible answers in her mind.

Jamin was silent, clearly not wanting to elaborate on what had happened.

“Look, honey, you do drag for you, not for anyone else,” Trixie said and knew that the statement wasn’t entirely true. Drag was there to be looked at, there was no art without an audience. That didn’t mean the art needed to please everyone, or anyone for that matter. “It’s your art. It’s your way to express your feelings and your views, and if someone doesn’t like it, they are allowed that opinion, but their opinion doesn’t define you, or your art.”

Jamin pulled Trixie closer, wrapped his arms around her waist and leaned his chin against her shoulder.

“I know.”

“I know you know. You just forgot for a moment.”

They stayed in the hug for a while longer but eventually Trixie sighed.

“Look, I’m hungry. I want food, I want to finish restringing my guitar and I want your cock up my bum – preferably, but not necessarily, in that order. What do you say?”

Acid chuckled against Trixie’s neck and pressed an open mouthed kiss onto her collarbone.

“I’ll cook, you go string and I’ll see what we can do about the last part later,” he said, squeezing Trixie’s bum with both hands.

“What an excellent distribution of labour,” Trixie smirked and kissed Jamin hard before walking back to the living room.

Somedays RuPaul’s Drag Race fans really fucking sucked, but fortunately the damage they caused was often easily fixed with a brief reality check.

_____________

The Fandom from Hell, 2/2.  

[ Lyrics from Big Bang - Sober ]

Trixie stirred from her sleep and the digital alarm clock on the nightstand informed her it to be just over the witching hour. 4:15AM.

She turned on the bed, intending to reach for Jamin, but found only wrinkly sheets and a missing pillow. Brushing her hand across the empty space, she wondered whether to try to fall back asleep or to get up and find him. He was probably just in the bathroom.

Sighing, she fell on her back and kicked away the too hot duvet. Eyeing around in the dark and lying in the still a little unfamiliar bed felt absurd. Almost as absurd as giving it a go with someone like Acid Betty.

Trixie had been sleeping in Acid’s bed for a week now and would be sleeping another one if everything went well. Everything had been “going well” so to speak, but she didn’t really know what to think about the overall situation. Katya didn’t think the relationship could work on the long run, and neither did Kim. Truthfully, Trixie was a little doubtful herself. Jamin Ruhen was nothing alike with the ideal boyfriend Trixie had imagined she would catch feelings for. She probably wouldn’t have given the man a chance at all without Bob’s offhand comment:

“Can’t be weirder than the Zamo-Chachki dynamic, and what I’ve heard, the sex should be at least as good. Maybe less kinky, though.”

In Trixie’s books less weird than the Zamo-Chachki tryst was a good thing – fucking freaks – and so she had agreed to a date; one night in L.A. One night, which had been followed by breakfast and lunch, and eventually a second dinner, as Trixie had been introduced to the gentle and occasionally surprisingly insecure man behind the facade of Acid Betty.

Trixie had slowly learned that while Violet Chachki came across as a bitch because she was, and owned it; Acid Betty came across as one because attack truly was the best defence, and occasionally because the man spoke before thinking. What Violet and Acid had in common was that neither was incapable of apologising or admitting that they were wrong, if given the chance to do so.

Trixie glanced at the alarm. 4:19AM.

* *

Stop acting like you’re all that You’re actually the most pathetic Yeah, try to provoke me even more So I can have some fun for a moment

Acid stared at the Barbie doll across the room and took another sip of his PBR. Just in jeans and a red t-shirt Trixie Mattel didn’t look nearly as intimidating as in her usual pink glad rags and war paint. That didn’t equate that he now thought her approachable, quite the opposite. He would probably never think Trixie Mattel in terms of “approachable”, and could only blame himself for that. He’d totally fucked up with the stunt he’d pulled at Untucked. What an earth had he been thinking?

“I’m just going to assume that you have managed to flawlessly execute the “Begging for Barbie’s Pardon” -plan and rather than avoiding Trixie, are hiding in this corner because of a persistent race-chaser with an awful acne.”

Acid flipped Bob the finger, unamused.

“No?” Bob asked and laughed loudly. “Honestly, avoidance might be the best tactic. You could never keep up with her wit and would just make a fool out of yourself, again. Better not to risk it,” Bob continued and took a seat at the table.

“Why are you here?” Acid sneered, annoyed.

“To cheer you up! And to take the piss… But mostly to cheer you up!”

Acid snorted and took another sip of his beer.

When he had two weeks ago asked Bob’s opinion whether he should apologise Ms. Mattel in person, rather than just send a text, Bob had howled in laughter. Thorgy had been encouraging and Kim’s advice had been to send the text. Kim had even provided him with Trixie’s personal phone number to do so, but so far Acid had managed to do nothing with it. It wasn’t that he was scared, he just didn’t know what words to use.

“So, how’s the biz?”

Acid glanced at Bob and cocked his eyebrows in question.

“You want to talk about work?” he asked in disbelief.

“No, I don’t. But I don’t know what else to talk about when you’re being like this.”

Acid snorted.

“Look, I appreciate the concern but you don’t have to make dry small talk just to keep me company,” Acid said and stood up.

“I’ll catch you later.”

He left Bob alone and made his way to the smoking area. Some fresh air should clear his head right up.

He stepped outside and was once again reminded of why he rarely visited gay clubs out of drag. There really was nothing worse than feeling self-conscious because of a gaze of a total stranger.

He had just talked himself into going back to the hotel and getting an early night in, when someone called out his name in the crowd. As he turned, he spotted Naomi in the corner with Kim and took a step forward before noticing that the pair was also accompanied by none other than Katya Zamolodchikova. Fuck. His step faltered and while he wanted to, he couldn’t just turn on his heels and walk back inside. Suddenly Bob’s small talk sounded like a very enjoyable alternative.

“Hey girl,” Naomi giggled and Acid could smell the sweet organic scent of the source of Naomi’s happiness. Kim passed the join back to Katya, who offered it to Acid with a smile that revealed nothing.

“Ah, thanks, but I’m just about to head off,” Acid declined politely and watched Katya shrug indifferently.

“Oh, don’t go yet!” Naomi whined and pulled him into an awkward half hug. “Let’s have a drink at least, I haven’t talked to you in ages!”

Acid was about to accept the invitation, but his words died on his lips as he heard a lazy drawl just behind him.

“He’s really sorry, Smalls, but he needs to get going. There’s a senior queens’ reading class tomorrow and he really can’t afford to miss it.”

Acid would recognise the voice of Trixie Mattel anywhere and as he turned, he could watch her walk up to them and cuddle up to Kim with a confident smirk. It was a clear challenge and he wasn’t ready for it. At all. Why hadn’t he just stayed with Bob? He could’ve told him all about the new client who wanted a website in neon green! He knew he needed a witty comeback, but his brain refused to co-operate.

“Yeah, I-um. She’s right, I really should go. I’ll catch you later, Naomi,” he said, turned and started walking back to the club.

“See you later, honey! Call me if you need any help with the alphabet!”

Acid grimaced at the comment and stopped. He might not have been the best reader, especially not under pressure, and would probably never reach the same easy flow with the art as Trixie Mattel, but he did have his moments. He turned back to the group and pulled out his mobile as he walked up to Trixie.

“That’s so generous. So, what’s your number?”

Trixie shot him a completely confused look, but as Acid just kept waiting with his phone out, she eventually blurted out the digits.

“Thanks man, truly appreciate it,” Acid said, pretending to save the number. Then he paused, looked up to Trixie and asked as genuinely as he possibly could: “And what’s your name again?”

Katya and Naomi both shrieked out a laugh and Kim snorted some vodka-coke out of her nostrils. Trixie stared at Acid for a while before also chuckling.

“Not bad,” she said and smiled a smile so fucking beautiful Acid knew immediately that he was fucked. Fucking shit mother-fucker. He really should’ve just stayed inside with Bob.

They say love is good, friendship is good But be warned, the back of your head might be in pain

It was months later and the first time Acid Betty had been booked into the same venue as Trixie Mattel. Jamin was nervous. He hadn’t seen the Barbie since the season eight finale after party and while they had parted in good terms, he was still little unsure of his relationship with her. He hadn’t managed to send her any apologies, or asked for reading help for that matter, and they never interacted on social media like Trixie did with other RuGirls. He just simply didn’t know whether they were friends or not.

Jamin had just started to spray paint Acid onto himself when Trixie arrived to the dressing room with a heavy looking suitcase. He hurried to help her with the door and got a grateful smile as a thank you.

“I need a personal assistant,” Trixie sighed and took a seat at the dresser, next to Acid’s acrylic paint bottles. She glanced over the assemble of colours and then at Jamin who had orange stars running on his collarbone.

“How did you even start with this stuff?” Trixie asked and picked up one of the bottles, examining it carefully.

Jamin was little taken aback by the question. People usually just told him that air-brush guns did not belong into Drag Queen makeup assortment and left it at that. Trixie however showed genuine interest, which he assumed to be purely professional, the doll was a makeup artist after all.

“I saw someone do it and stole the idea,” Jamin said and shrugged. “Most people use makeup paint, but it’s just not bright enough for me, like, at least the brands I’ve tried.”

“Huh,” Trixie shrugged and eyed the gun on the dresser.

“Do you want to try?”

Jamin didn’t know what had possessed him to ask but the excited glow in Trixie’s eyes told him that he’d made the right choice.

“Yes GOD!” Trixie sing-songed and picked up the gun.

Jamin was a little impressed how quickly the Barbie learned the technique. A lot faster than what he himself had back at the day.

After the show, when Jamin was packing up his things, some of the local queens asked Trixie whether she’d like to join them for a night out. Trixie turned to Jamin and asked if he was going.

“I’m not really into the scene,” Jamin admitted. He wouldn’t have minded some trade but hooking up on Grindr was so much easier than hunting in a club. At least on the app you didn’t have to deal with the completely appalled looks when you offered to buy a drink for someone who considered themselves out of your league.

“No? A beer at my hotel bar then?” Trixie asked and took Jamin by surprise the second time that evening.

“Um, yeah. Why not,” he nodded and licked his lips. This was going to be interesting.

Hey doctor doctor, please save me Because I’m about to go insane Stop trying to awkwardly chance the subject It’s hard for me to be sober I can’t do anything

“So you just had a couple of drinks?”

Jamin nodded and watched Thorgy pace back and forth in the kitchen, spatula in one hand and a glass of wine in the other. He might’ve played down the amount of alcohol slightly, but as he didn’t want to admit the number of drinks he’d downed with Trixie even to himself, he certainly wasn’t going to tell the number to Thorgy.

“And then she invited you up.”

Jamin nodded again. The story really made even less sense if one reduced the alcohol variable so significantly.

“And despite that you had an invitation to her room, you ended up sucking her off in a public bathroom and walking off with a throbbing hard on?”

Yes, Jamin nodded in confirmation. That was exactly what had happened, and it had been so fucking hot.

“Why an earth would you not go up to her room?”

Jamin shrugged. He couldn’t explain it either. One moment Trixie had asked him to come up, the second she’d been excusing herself to the bathroom “real quick” and before Jamin had been able to make any sense of the situation, they’d been kissing in the toilet cubicle and Jamin had gotten onto his knees.

Afterwards he’d made multiple contradictory excuses to escape the scene, because in reality, unlike how he was telling the story now, he’d made a mess of himself inside of his boxer shorts. He wasn’t going to tell Thorgy that, or Trixie. Men in their late thirties did not cum just by sucking someone else’s cock, teenagers did.

“So, are you going to see her again?”

Jamin shrugged again. He had no idea and the mere possibility that he’d have to explain his previous behaviour to Trixie was simultaneously absolutely terrifying and mortifying. How did he end up being such a screw up?

I seem like an adult but I’m really a child that’s really tall My young dreams are just faded fantasies My mood is like a vast wilderness

The man moaned underneath Jamin as he pushed into him. So tight. He thrust couple of times before having to stop to readjust his position slightly. Dark, long limbs sprawled on the bed and as Jamin kept pounding into the man, a picture of a country cowboy rose to his mind. It was a little ridiculous how easily Brian Firkus’ smile made him distracted. He really needed to stop jerking off to the pictures he’d found online.

“Oh yeah, give it to me!”

The fantasy was shattered as the man spoke up and rather than finding his begging encouraging, Jamin got annoyed.

“Shut up,” he snapped and knew that he was being a dick.

It took him twice the time and effort to find release.

Get drunk, get drunk, go to heaven After I wake, I’m in hell, I don’t last long I’m like Popeye without spinach The laughter bomb tempts me

It was winter in New York and the only reason Jamin was in the backstage of the comedy club, his cock in between of a pair of lips that still supported a faint trace of pink lipstick, was Trixie’s earlier text message: “The offer still stands.”

It had taken Jamin some time to figure out what the Barbie meant by the cryptic message, but eventually he’d remembered that she had offered to teach him to read.

“Should I bring anything?”

“No. Just be on time.”

As soon as Jamin had arrived, Trixie had pulled him inside the dressing room, locked the door and gotten to work. Jamin appreciated the enthusiasm and as he came into the Barbie’s mouth, he hit the back of his head to the wall and hissed in pain.

“You okay?” Trixie asked whilst getting up from the floor and leaning in for a kiss.

“More than,” Jamin answered with a smile.

He could taste himself on her tongue.

It’s hard for me to be sober I can’t do anything I hate being sober I can’t fall asleep without you

Bob grabbed the bottle from Jamin’s hand and placed it on the floor. It was a tiny miracle that the man hadn’t injured himself on the stairs up to Bob’s apartment. Actually, it was a tiny miracle that the man had been able to walk up the stairs to begin with.

Looking at the passed out figure on the sofa, Bob couldn’t but to wonder if he’d ever fall for someone like that, so hard that he couldn’t handle it. Jamin’s rant about “a friend” who had caught very inconvenient feelings for a colleague hadn’t fooled Bob one bit. After all, he had just couple of months ago witnessed Trixie’s drunken confessions over how weird it was to daydream of a romantic relationship with a guy twelve years your senior and whom you had absolutely nothing in common with. By that point, of course, Bob had already known, amongst most other RuGirls, that Trixie Mattel and Acid Betty had been fucking for months in the broom closets and accessible toilets of every venue they’d been booked in together – and apparently also some they hadn’t.

“Can’t be weirder than the Zamo-Chachki dynamic, and what I’ve heard, the sex should be at least as good. Maybe less kinky, though,” Bob had told Trixie at the time, not thinking it his responsibility to play cupid.

It seemed, however, that the pair was incapable of taking any serious steps on their own, and so Bob decided to play mother hen. Blackmail, bribery and threats formed the holy trinity of parenting and he decided to start with threats, merely because it was the cheapest option. He grabbed a black marker pen, lifted Jamin’s shirt up and wrote to his chest with big block capitals:

“I will ask Tracy Martel out on a date or Bob will spank me.”

Bob later learned that the waterproof marker he had chosen only came off with specific cleaning products. Luckily for Acid, he was familiar with all kinds of tricky art stains.

Without you, I’m still left alone here I’m waiting for you, only believing in you But I’m a fool, no no no

Jamin: Would you like to go out sometime?

Brian: Like, as a date?

Jamin: Yeah.

Brian: Ok.

Jamin: You don’t sound very enthusiastic?

Brian: I’m not.

Jamin: Ok…

Brian: I mean… I think it’s a bad idea.

Jamin: Ok, well, we don’t have to.

Jamin wasn’t going to lie to himself, he was disappointed.

Jamin: You could’ve just said no.

Brian: I didn’t want to.

Jamin had nothing to say to that.

Brian: Can I think it over?

Jamin: Sure.

Jamin stared at the three dots that blinked on his phone screen but Brian didn’t reply him that evening, or even the following day. It took Brian Firkus three whole days to contact him again.

Brian: I’m a prick. Forgive me?

Jamin: No it’s alright.

Brian: You still up for it?

Jamin: The date? Yeah.

Brian: Great. L.A. as you’ll be here next week, right? Dinner?

Jamin: Sure.

It’s hard for me to be sober I can’t do anything I hate being sober I can’t fall asleep without you

* *

The digits on the alarm changed to 4:25 and Brian sighed. He knew he should go check on Jamin, but the bed was so incredibly comfortable and he was tired. He was just about to reach for the night light when the bedroom door opened and Jamin tiptoed in.

Brian watched him place his laptop on the desk before making his way to the bed.

“Whatever you do, don’t touch the duvet. It’s like a fucking sauna in here.”

Jamin startled at the words.

“Jesus, you scared me,” he chuckled and laid next to Brian, sliding his feet underneath the duvet.

“Where were you?” Brian asked, lifting his right arm to make space for Jamin who was inching closer.

“I got this idea for one of Betty’s looks and couldn’t sleep through it,” Jamin said as he snuggled to Brian’s side and wrapped an arm around his chest.

“And you were not reading any of the negativity on Reddit or on your Instagram?”

There was a heavy silence. Brian took a deep breath and placed his hand on Jamin’s shoulder, giving it a light squeeze.

“It would be really cool if you could stop lying to me,” Brian whispered and he could feel Jamin tense up. The man was barely breathing, most likely trying to stop existing through mere will power. “I know we haven’t been “a thing” for long, but you know, let’s try not to fuck it up immediately?”

Jamin nodded, but stayed silent for a while.

“I just…”

When he didn’t finish his sentence, Brian turned his head to drop a light kiss on his forehead.

“Didn’t want to reveal too soon that you’re a human being? Trust me, I get it, I’ve made a career out of being a doll from Toys R Us.”

There was another silence and Brian wondered whether he’d ever get used to them, having a tendency to usually surround himself with people that constantly had something to say.

“I’m really sorry about that one time, you know, I really didn’t get the Barbie reference before it was explained to me…”

Brian smiled. It was the first time Jamin clearly addressed the Untucked-fiasco between them. They had danced around the subject before, but never really discussed it. He had personally figured that it was just good television and moved on. He certainly had no issues with it, but apparently Jamin felt like he needed to apologise. It was kind of adorable.

“Oh, hooney! My drag could be based on Mr. Snuffleupagus and you still couldn’t read me!”

The comment made Jamin laugh and Brian pulled him closer. It definitely wasn’t any weirder than than the Zamo-Chachki -dynamic.

________________

[Useless A/N2 that no one asked for, feel free to ignore!! Thanks for reading the fic!!

This fic is a funny one.

I wrote the first chapter as a reply to anon-hate I received on my blog. Trash into treasure, girl.

What happened after, was that I got really intrigued by Acid’s character in the first chapter and when Primary Care won the ‘best multi-chapter’ -fic category on the AQficAwards, I really wanted to write a fic as a thank you for everyone who voted. By then I already had the chapter one written and published on my blog, but didn’t really know how to continue it. Fortunately Dandee sent me a word as a prompt: ‘Snuffleupagus’ – which I thought was stupid and ridiculous. But it actually gave me the idea that Trixie’s drag is based on a doll, a toy and there certainly is Mr. Snuffleupagus toys out there. So I ran with that and added in some Acid character study because that was what I was interested in exploring.

What I want to say by telling you all of this is, we all have reallt random and freaky and sometimes awful reasons and contexts why we write and how we come up with stuff. The most important thing is: Write to yourself. Do not try to please an audience when you offer your art for free, because the audience will move on and nothing will be popular forever. So as long as you love what you do, all is well ~

One author who always inspires me on AQ is Mistress. She doesn’t always get a lot of notes but clearly loves writing, submits a lot and has improved massively from her first ever published fic. So, in case you are a writer that doubts their skill, just remember that we all feel that way about our work sometimes and that writing is art, art where you get better and sometimes stumble, but it all contributes to the project of who you are as a writer.

Love and Glitter,

Spoky