#Slate x Gaylor swift

[jennyboom21]

Last week, the New York Times ran a nearly 5,000-word piece about Taylor Swift in its opinion section. The thoughtful essay, by editor Anna Marks, specifically considers the superstar’s creative output by asking the question: What if, as so many of the references in them suggest, some of Swift’s songs are about being in love with women?

Marks is only about the millionth person to suggest that Swift might be dropping clues that she is gay in her work, a theory known as “Gaylor”: Here’s a 2022 feature about the fan theory that ran in Jezebel; here’s an explainer from later that year in Vox that gets into it, which, oh, also references a Vox deep dive from the height of the COVID-19 pandemic on “the queering of Taylor Swift”; here’s a Rolling Stone piece pegged to the release of Midnights; here’s a piece that ran in Slate after the re-release of Red that explored similar theories. I could go on and on. You get it. The Times is not exactly breaking new ground here.

Marks’ piece does stand out in a few ways: It’s very long. It’s in the New York Times, the “paper of record,” and that apparently confers some vague special responsibility to every word it publishes. It does not report on what the fans are saying but instead identifies Marks herself as the fan with the corkboard and red string. If it’s even a conspiracy theory at all, the piece openly muses about its subject: “There are some queer people who would say that … she has already come out, at least to us.”

The opinion piece has “prompted a fair amount of outrage online,” writes Danielle Cohen in the Cut, “where even those of us who enjoy the occasional Gaylor theories found these assertions—and the fact that they were made in an esteemed national newspaper—a few steps too far.” Among the outraged are Swift’s “associates”: “Because of her massive success, in this moment there is a Taylor-shaped hole in people’s ethics,” a “person close to the situation” told a CNN reporter, noting that, were Swift a man, this article “wouldn’t have been allowed to be written.”

Leaving aside that this very same author wrote a piece about Harry Styles’ potential queerness, it’s true enough that Swift isn’t a man. But she’s a cultural phenomenon. Her songs were streamed over 26 billion times last year on Spotify alone. Her celebrity is everywhere you look right now. It has made her a billionaire, and boosted the economy to boot.

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