#gaylorgate

[batmanisagatewaydrug]

with all due respect WHAT is going on with the swifties

okay so sincere answer: a lot of people who have spent YEARS convincing themselves that Taylor Swift is a closeted queer woman who's been sending coded messages through her lyrics, Instagram posts, imagery in her concerts, and pretty much everything else. this *is* conspiracy thought, complete with a thought terminating cliche: when pressed, Gaylors fall back on the insistence that Taylor CAN'T come out. their offered reasons seldom make much sense or hold up to scrutiny, but as long as they've been able to hold onto the refrain that Swift simply can't come out, it's possible to maintain the belief that she is signaling queerness but may never be able to confirm it. every boyfriend can be excused as a beard, every denial that she's dating a female friend can be understood as a lie, every insta post can be analyzed qanon-style for clues that only you and your in-group understand.

Gaylors have, obviously, been certain that these clues were being deliberately planted and thus that Swift was encouraging them and WANTED to be understood as queer in some kind of transparent closet situation; the fact that Swift has embraced the aesthetics of allyship with things like her unbelievably tacky video for You Need to Calm Down has been read as approval. receiving even a very mild admonishment - in this case, Swift expressing disappointment that rabid speculation about her romantic life didn't end when she decided to prioritize friendships with other women over dating men - is thus seen as a betrayal, as Swift breaking a contract that, in reality, she never knew about or agrees to. the ensuing social media tantrums we're seeing are what happens when someone has dedicated considerable time and energy to justifying a conspiracy, including building significant social networks around it, only to have that belief challenged by a source that they never thought would contradict them even a little.

in fairness I also never thought she'd do it; I really thought she'd play both sides and keep collecting that Gaylor money forever.

[batmanisagatewaydrug]

cannot begin to tell you the number of people who have sent this to me

[laurajameskinney]

told my dad about gaylorgate and also misha collins coming out as bi and then straight

[whatiwillsay]

i was a casual swiftie wayyyy back from debut - speak now. i fell off for red - rep, fell in love with lover and started working my way back through her discog in 2019 and became a huge fan again. never ever thought about sapphic subtext. i didnt know or care about anything to do with her personal life. thennnn folklore comes out and i stumble upon a viral gaylor tweet..... needless to say i jumped in head first and six months later here i am. and also folklore (and the gaylor aftermath) ultimately made me realize i was a lesbian lol

⬆️taylor swift is turning your kids gay ⬆️

[namegoesup]

gosh. april, may, and june of 2019 were truly a magical time to be a gaylor.

taylor was so loud that even locals thought she was coming out....i would not want to be on the receiving end of whatever taylor has planned for the people who stood in the way of that

[tittyinfinity]

This post is a lot funnier now that GaylorGate or whatever the fuck is happening

[batmanisagatewaydrug]

Your Gaylor hateposting is indistinguishable from straightforward homophobia. It's not that deep.

funniest anon I have ever received 0 contest

[batmanisagatewaydrug]

Hey, I just wanted to thank you for talking about the whole Taylor Swift "queerbaiting" thing. I am not a Swiftie by a long shot, and only learned about "gaylors" a few months ago. But I grew up with people insisting that I had to have crushes/find people hot. Regardless of what I said. It's really nice to see someone push back against that rhetoric that was so harmful to me and many others. It may seem small or not that big a deal, but it's genuinely huge to me to see those posts.

I'm glad it's meaningful to you but in the name of not taking credit where credit isn't due I want to specify that my objection isn't really to the idea of people shipping Taylor with her friends; I think it's very cringe, don't get me wrong, and extremely misguided given the sheer levels of heterosexuality that Taylor exudes, but I mind my business about people writing RPF every day because it doesn't affect me literally at all.

my issue is more with pretty extreme conspiracy thought being normalized among young queer people as just a fun silly little harmless thing to do, when the tactics used by Gaylors - thought terminating cliches, inventing significance and symbolism in meaningless imagery, encouraging people to doubt and disregard direct statements in favor of a "real" truth that only they can understand - is indistinguishable from qanon and other cult shit. which isn't to say that I think Gaylor as a idea is equally as bad as qanon, obviously, but conspiracy thought begets more conspiracy thought - there's a reason for the rather short pipeline from "spiritual healing" woowoo shit to antivaxxers to the far right. that's my beef here.

[batmanisagatewaydrug]

The thing about Gaylors is that it isn't like a bunch of people connected with a song about longing and secrecy or something, and thought "this relates to my experience as a queer person, I wonder if she's felt something similar. Maybe she's bi or something." (She isn't, she has made it very clear, but I could see listening to a song as a young, queer teenager and wondering.) Or even listening to a song like Betty and interpreting it as queer, which my 62 het mother did. No, for Gaylor, Taylor Swift is a lesbian, she's never been romantically or sexually attracted to a man. She's been married to Karlie Kloss since 2016. The kids Karlie Kloss supposedly has with Josh Kushner are fake (then they insert an antisemitic comment about Josh Kushner). All the men Taylor has 'dated' are fake beards who she hates (no word on why she pretended to date a man she hated for 6 years when she could have presumably picked a guy she like. And shout out to Calvin Harris for being so mad when they broke up he broke his car and went on a tirad on twitter but didn't out her. Queer Ally there.) And if you count the buttons on her coat you'd know that she is trying to tell us that. It isn't unlike how instead of looking at her new relationship and going "They are cute, I hope they are having a good time," people are going "they are soulmates, he's her 13th boyfriend [i've heard of] and so its fate. They are going to get married and have children within the next year. If they break up, I'll die." Or people watching a music video saying "there are 5 blue squares, that means 1989 TV is coming next, because its blue and the fifth album" when it also just...had 1989 TV as text on a sign at the end of the video. I know people are weird about celebrities. I am occasionally weird about celebrities. I have watched interviews where famous people seem funny and charming and though "I really hope they are actually as nice as they seem on TV." But that line between the mild parasocial relationships many celebrities invite because of their brand and the "this persons mine" mentality is not ok.

okay I've been sitting on this one for a long time because I thought sharing it seemed like kind of mean but. as long as we're delving the depths of gaylor conspiracy hell I want you all to see this 158 slide presentation "proving" Taylor was planning to come out when Lover was released, discovered by my dear friend @dykeschemicalromance via tiktok. it is, and I do not say this lightly, one of the most unsettling depictions of conspiracy thought in action I've ever seen

[batmanisagatewaydrug]

Catching glimpses of the bonkers Gaylor breakdowns from your blog gives me the same vibes as when the Folding Ideas guy suddenly dropped a feature-film length video on how the r/gamestock memers had spiralled into a financial conspiracy cult and were bothering actual store workers over "Bed, Bath and Beyond mergers". Just, out there living in a whole parallel universe. The pandemic sure Did Things to people.

(Also, christ, the leaps in logic to get from "Taylor saying she deliberately focussed on female friendships because she knew the heteronormative tabloid media was less likely to do weird, stress-inducing invasive nonsense toward them" to "I guess Tay is a homophobe who personally hates us" certainly is a process to behold.)

I mean listen the pandemic wasn't great for anybody's brain to be sure but we can't pretend that Gaylor started in 2020 that shit's been going on since 2014 AT LEAST

[batmanisagatewaydrug]

So like, I saw your posts about the gaylor meltdown in response to 1989 TV and while it's kinda old-ish news, I just really want to share this response:

https://www.reddit.com/r/popheadscirclejerk/comments/17h231l/gaylors_discovering_their_queen_may_just_be_mid/

(sorry, i can't send images through anon)

I think there's just somethting fascinating how some of them think that her music is good and and only good if she's queer and therefore explicitly putting queer subtext. Which is... wild to me.

They could just, I don't know, interpret her art as queer and be satisfied even if it's not the authorial intent. (and if they want queer music then they could just idk, listen to openly queer artists)

PIC FOR ANYONE WHO DOESN'T WANT TO CLICK

YEAH I'm seeing so much of this now re: Gaylors getting like. THIS close to connecting the dots and going "hang on if this isn't actually about being secretly gay then this music is like... kind of boring..." I found this one like last week in the middle of a MUCH longer rant posted by someone having a meltdown re: Taylor and that footballman being seen together in public

it's genuinely wild to see them like... just fully acknowledge that the only version of Taylor Swift they're actually interested in is basically one that they collectively hallucinated?

you're so close besties you can make that final cognitive leap I know you can!!! be free and go listen to Janelle Monáe

[batmanisagatewaydrug]

man i personally dont like tswift, but that statement makes it sound like she was a celebrity trying to get away from like the tabloid dating rumors and shit which, even if i dont like her, is still shitty to deal with for anyone. so like, do the gaylors not realize that they're the problem here???

Lilly I'm gonna be just so straight up with you, I have plenty of things I don't like about Taylor (CEO of carbon emissions, applauded for the most bare minimum allyship like its groundbreaking activism, has released the same album three or maybe four times now) but as someone who has experienced like. one BILLIONTH of the parasocial weirdness she's subjected to I genuinely do feel for her on that front. like I don't have to enjoy someone personally to the kind of deep discomfort that comes from people scrutinizing your entire life and getting vitriolic when your actions don't align with the person that they made up in their heads. having to live with the knowledge that there are people who are playing with a fictional version of you and treating like a barbie is nauseating, and I can't imagine how shitty it feels to have so many people who claim to love you throwing public tantrums because you tried to talk about your own life. like every celebrity must know the support they receive is conditional on xyz, but it's so galling to see that made so obvious in this case.

anyway check your parasocial bonds, kids. when they get too intense they're bad for both parties.

[batmanisagatewaydrug]

God that whole "all conspiracy theories go back to antisemitism" even hits gaylors wtf...

genuinely in all seriousness one of the biggest reasons I'm so opposed to Gaylors as a whole doesn't have anything to do with Taylor Swift or gay rep or anything else, it's because it's an insidiously harmless-looking thing to believe on the surface that is, nonetheless, still teaching people to engage in conspiracy thought. once you're primed to accept one conspiracy, no matter how benign, it becomes much easier to swallow other, much more harmful ones. so "I think Taylor Swift is secretly queer" turns into "and I think rich Jews are manipulating her into staying in the closet," a theory that very few Gaylors seem to want to interrogate the implications of despite many of them leaning generally to the left and being opposed to bigotry on paper.

[batmanisagatewaydrug]

Sorry to beat the gaylor dead horse but like most of these theories really read like those fucking illuminati confirmed posts that you used to see on here. Like you could apply these arguments to anything- it took me like two seconds to come up with a convincing (by gaylor standards) argument that Lana del rey is secretly gay and I dont even know shit about lana del rey

On a more serious note this level of conspiracy thinking does not seem healthy. I get that theorizing and analyzing thinngs can be fun but there's way healthier outlets for that- you can get into anything from like video game lore communities to high level math, the possibilities are endless

re: your second point like I hate being a killjoy but the entire reason I am so vocally against Gaylor specifically has nothing to do with Taylor Swift and everything to do with my opposition to the normalization of conspiracy thought as fun quirky little hobby for young gay people. obsessing over lore and theories and trying to make connections between seemingly disparate pieces of information is all fun and good - like you said, a lot of outlets for that in all kinds of different fandoms! - but applying that to real people to the extent that you think it's significant that two famous women have used the same emojis in instagram posts made YEARS apart is like. it's very easy to make fun of that kind of behavior and be dismissive of it but making a habit of that kind of paranoia is an extremely slippery slope and does really prime people to get taken in by much more insidious conspiracy theories - and the affiliated bigotries, such as the anti-semitism I've pointed out before.

[batmanisagatewaydrug]

I have no stake in this i dont really follow taylor swift but based on the reaches gaylors have made before im surprised i havent seen anyone spin this as taylor coming out as ace.

what did THIS lyric mean if she wasn't flagging asexual, hmmmm?

[batmanisagatewaydrug]

Me @ the gaylors

!!!