There are many heterosexual explanations for this.

Many.

Ongoing reminder that I am trying to transition off of Substack. I’m currently in the process of building up the whole archive on my own little website — remember personal websites? — but for now, if you feel icky about supporting Substack, all posts that appear here also appear on my Patreon. They are available for free, but I wouldn’t be mad if you gave me $1 (or more!) a month.

I’m also brainstorming some new patron rewards (Early access to posts? Monthly Zooms with me? Access to relationship advice from me?) that might make people more excited about support the Patreon, so please feel free to tell me if there’s something that would make you open your wallet!

When I have a critical mass of people on Patreon I will likely wind down operations here, FYI.

Okay. Let’s talk about this New York Times Taylor Swift queerness piece.

I feel like I should start by admitting that I zoned out maybe 75% of the way through the piece (it is so long) and thus cannot claim to have given it a close read or anything, but I also feel like I read enough to get the gist. Taylor Swift has released pro-queer statements. She has videos and music with iconography that could, if you were so inspired, be read as queer coding. She has gone through periods where she publicly hung out with female friends and was physically affectionate with them. In front of cameras!

To some people, it would seem that there is no heterosexual explanation for that.

I am not one of those people. And more than that — I just feel very, very uncomfortable with the line of thinking that leads someone to write, that leads the New York Times to publish, a piece along these lines.

Let me try to unpack all the things that weird me out, because… there are quite a few.

First and foremost: if you don’t know the deep lore of Lux Alptraum, you may not be aware that in my teens and early twenties I had a significantly different online presence, one that was vastly more focused on sharing my personal life (and I did get very personal) with strangers. As a result of that era, I know in a deeply intimate way what it is to have people who don’t know you think they know you, to have people come up with theories about your personal life and psychoanalyze you and treat you like a character in a movie rather than a person with a complex and perhaps confusing inner life and network of relationships.

To be blunt, it is wildly uncomfortable to experience that, and I say that only having experienced it on the smallest of scales. When I see people doing their little conspiracy theory corkboards about celebrity relationships, deciding that this one must be dating that one because they’re hugging in a photo, or that these three must be having group sex because of how they are looking at each other on the red carpet — it makes me feel very, very weird. I imagine what it must be like for the celebrities who are talked about this way, for the celebrities who watch a random, inconsequential moment of their life be held up as the decoder ring that explains everything about who they really are behind the scenes.

I don’t think it feels good. Public figures aren’t paper dolls to be dropped into whatever fan fit scenarios get you hot and bothered. They’re people. Please remember that.

Secondly: Let’s imagine, for a second, that Taylor truly is queer. Let’s imagine that this NYT piece is part of a coordinated campaign to get her to come out.

I am old enough that I remember when celebrities coming out — or being nonconsensually outed — had tremendous political weight. I know that it might feel like that is still the case, like right now, when LGBTQ+ rights (and especially trans rights) are under attack from hostile state governments; I understand why people might feel like if only Taylor just came out, the ship might be righted and put back on course.

And yet I can promise you that this is not the 1990s, and it is certainly not the 1980s. The social impact of a Gaylor (or Bilor) coming out would simply not be as massive as many people imagine it would. Would it cause controversy? Probably. Would it make some queers feel less alone? Undoubtedly. But in the grand scheme of things, it would not change much — and so even if she is queer, this insistence that she owes it to the world to say that publicly feels off to me. I think it is good when queer celebs come out because it means they feel comfortable publicly being themselves, and I think it helps make other queer celebs feel safer being public as well. But I don’t think any one individual is obligated to do it.

Thirdly — and this is what really gets to the heart of the matter — I think so many of the things that get held up as “proof” that Taylor is queer, as things that straight girls simply do not do, serve less to free Taylor (or anyone else) to step out of the prison of heterosexuality and more to make the world feel more rigid, more boxed in, less free.

Taylor has made it clear, in interviews and statements through her publicist, that she sees herself as straight. I don’t think that saying that her relationships with female friends (who she is on record as saying she started hanging out with because of the toxic public obsession with her romantic relationships with men) must be queer because they are affectionate, or that her support for the LGBTQ+ community, or, I dunno, putting rainbows her in videos, must be secret signs that she is actually queer gives her a pathway towards publicly acknowledging some queerness that she has been suppressing.

To the contrary: I think it sends a loud and clear message that if she’s straight, she’s not allowed to be physically affectionate with female friends, not allowed to support the LGBTQ+ community, not allowed to put rainbows in her videos. It’s this perverse reinforcement of heteronormativity, but from queers instead of straights. It’s this insistence that if straight people made their sexuality a prison, that the queers are going to volunteer as part time guards.

Why would we do that???

I do not particularly care if Taylor Swift — honestly, if anyone I’m not directly romantically or sexually pursuing — is straight or gay or bi. But I do care a lot that she has — that everyone has — the space to feel like they’re able to do what feels right for them, without worrying about being boxed in to some predetermined role or label. This obsessive insistence that Taylor must secretly be queer? It’s not paving a way to that freedom. It’s just doing a weird, creepy form of sexuality policing — one that comes, bizarrely, from the people who claim to want sexual freedom the most.