#my beard is my only gay cred

[onlyhams]

fake gaymer lmao

#I play like 3 games only #are u a gamer if u play only fantasy rpgs #gay #im actually gay for real tho #selfie #me #gpoy #beard #my face #gayboy #my bf likes to watch me game its nice #gay otter #my beard is my only gay cred #without it i am but a lowly peasant in the eyes of the community

[colehasapen]

(ONE SHOT) cabur STAR WARS

Jango doesn't know how long he’s been caged.

It could have been days, it could have been months - hells, it could have been years. Jango can’t tell with his mind fogged by spice and agony. His body aches, and Jango is pretty sure his hands have permanently curled into claws from the never ending physical labour, and his back has been flayed by the beatings. He’s spent his days since - since Galidraan - wallowing in a drug-filled haze of never-ending monotony interspersed with violent whippings, and any moment the drugs fade enough for Jango to think, to remember, he almost chokes on his own burning hatred when it claws its way back up to the surface.

It makes him want the haze of drugs. He welcomes it, because it drowns out the grief, the guilt, the memories, and his overwhelming hatred of everything and everyone - including himself.

He’s a failure, a coward - if he had been a better Mand’alor, his people wouldn’t have died, or he would have done them the honour of dying with them. He’s no longer Mando’ad. He has no armour, it had been stolen from him and was probably being used as some shiny trophy for that aruetyc shabuir of a Governor. He has no defense, it’s been taken from him by the collar around his neck and the brand burned into his chest - he’s a slave now, and slaves can’t defend themselves. His tribe is gone, slaughtered on Galidraan and dismembered by those skanah jetiise , their bodies probably left to rot with no one to complete their final rites and thus no way to join the manda. He has no reason to speak the language, because slaves aren’t permitted to speak, and he’d have no one to share it with anyways. And as for his leader?

Well, Jango had failed spectacularly as Mand’alor. He had gotten his people - Jaster’s people - killed, his failure had destroyed the Haat Mando’ade. He had destroyed Jaster’s legacy.

He had failed his people, he had failed himself, and he had failed his Buir. He should have died that day with his parents, he should have burned with their farmhouse. Maybe if he had, Jaster would have saved Arla as soon as he heard her screaming if he hadn’t been weighed down by Jango - he has no doubt Jaster could have pulled her out of the flames if he hadn’t been honour-bound to protect Jango.

None of this would have happened if Jango had died then. But he hadn’t, and now everything and had known and loved was gone - and it was his fault.

Jango doesn’t bother looking up from his huddle in the corner of his too-small cage when he hears the masters walking down the rows. He barely acknowledges their voices. Instead, he stays where he is, considering whether or not to let the fog drag him under again.

A yelp has him jerking.

It was the pained cry of a child - an ad - and it has Jango beating back the numbness of the spice and lifting his head.

The large Twi’lek overseer had stopped in front of Jango’s cage, his meaty hand curled solidly around a chain leading to the collar around the small, pale throat of a Human or Near-Human child with fluffy ginger hair and glazed blue eyes.

“You sure about that, Tol?” The Zeltron at the overseer’s side asks, red eyes lingering on Jango’s huddled form. “Y’know what they say about Mandos-”

The Twi’lek snorts, moving to unclasp the gate to Jango’s cage. “Good thing we ain’t got no Mandos here then. Only slaves . This one was good and broken before we got it.” The overseer sneers, and with a jerk of the Twi’lek’s hand, the scared ad stumbles toward him.

Jango twitches as those cruel fingers lock around the child’s delicate neck, and the adiik flinches. He must not be as far under the thrall of the spice if he could still react like that, and Jango twitches again against the desire to throw himself forward to defend the tiny adiik.

“Be good now, slave.” The overseer coos mockingly, unhooking the chain from the explosive rigged to the small child’s neck. “We paid some good creds for you - I’d hate to be the one telling Lord du Crion that we had to blow you up.”

The child stares back, fire sparking in those foggy eyes, then they make a pained noise when the overseer gives them a violent shake. The adiik’s head ducks submissively as the Twi’lek sneers at them.

“There’s a good lad.” The Zeltron says in a parody of motherly concern, voice sickly sweet as she toys with the ends of the ad ’s red hair. “That brother of yours wanted us to keep you in one piece until you learned your lesson.”

“He’s not my brother -” The adiik’s retort is cut off by a cry of pain that has Jango gritting his teeth in fury, carefully uncoiling himself from the tight ball he had been curled into before. The kid hits the floor of his cage with a bone-jarring thud, and Jango rolls stiffly to his knees as the slave masters laugh.

“That’s your final warning, slave.” The Twi’lek sneers, looking down his nose at the two slaves as he shuts the cage once more. “You talk back to me again and I’ll whip you ‘til you bleed.”

Jango glowers at the two slavers thunderously from under his shaggy hair as the march away, and the ad barely stirs from his sprawl. He grits his teeth, holding his tongue until the overseers are out of sight, before he’s shuffling forwards, towards the limp child that had unexpectedly become his companion.

“Me’vaar ti gar?” He calls softly to the adiik, who flinches, scrambling clumsily onto his hands and knees to stare up at Jango with a wide-eyed glare. He’s scared, Jango can tell immediately, but there’s still a fire burning inside of him that almost has Jango smiling.

He’s definitely Mandokarla , and just looking at him makes Jango ache for home. If they weren’t in this cage - if they were back on Manda’yaim - Jango has no doubt that someone would be snatching this adiik up and adopting him into their aliit . It makes him think of Myles, of the last thing his cyare had said to him before they had rushed into battle - about how he wanted to raise warriors with him - and Ka’ra does it hurt. He tries not to think about the way Myles’ body had been split in half. They would have said their vows after Galidraan had this been a kinder galaxy.

Carefully, Jango sits back on his heels, lifting his hands to show the kid that he means no harm. He probably looks frightening to the already scared adiik , with his unwashed hair and ungroomed beard - not to mention the thick layer of dirt, spice, and blood that covered his face. “Udesii, ad’ika.” He soothes, and the little Lothcat just bares his teeth at him, as threatening as a kitten - and the thought almost makes Jango snort.

Well, if there was any way to calm a feral kitten.

He glances around, then carefully choreography his movements as he pulls his half-eaten gruel towards them, then pushes it at the adiik. “Haili cetare, verd’ika.” He offers, and the kid eyes him suspiciously for a long moment before he reaches forward to tug the bowl closer. The kid hesitates, eyes darting from the bowl, to Jango, then skittering around the cage, and Jango raises his eyebrows in a silent question.

“Is -” The adiik’s voice is rough from spice-inhalation, but Jango can just pick up the refined High Core accent he spoke with - not surprising if was was apparently the brother of a Lord, and doesn’t that knowledge piss Jango off further.

What kind of dar’vod hut’uun sell their own vod’ika into slavery?

The ad flinches, ducking his head, and Jango curses himself, carefully schooling his face into the political mask Jaster had drilled into his thick head.

“Udesii.” Jango says again, and the child steadily relaxes again. “Copaani gaan?” He probes, a little teasingly and hoping to put the kid more at ease.

The adiik bites his lip, looking up at Jango from under dark lashes. “Are there utensils?” He asks in a rush, before he blushes and ducks his head shyly.

Utensils - Jango snorts. The kid really was some fancy Core lordling.

“Nayc, ad’ika.” He shakes his head, and the kid deflates, looking at the bowl in his dirty hands in dismay. The adiik hesitates a moment longer, before sighing quietly and beginning to use his fingers to scoop the unappetizing mush into his mouth. Jango only watches fondly for a moment, studying the kid; he had obviously been well-fed and well-cared for before his dar’vod had sold him. He’s lanky in the way kids get on the cusp of puberty, and his hair is a rare red-gold that actually makes Jango glad that the adiik had been sold to a spice rig instead of to someone with a taste for the exotic. He might even have some biological resistance to toxins, from the way the adiik grows sharper and more alert with every moment that passes.

He wonders if anyone would be missing this kid.

Well, they should have kept a better eye on him, obviously.

“Tion’ad hukaat’kama, adiik?” Jango asks, watching the kid lick the bowl clean, and big doe eyes blink back at him, confused. “Tion gar gai?”

The adiik blinks again, carefully rubbing his mouth with the filthy sleeve of his stained tunic as his brows furrow. “I’m sorry -” he says slowly, “- do you speak Basic? I don’t understand you.”

Jango blinks right back, a little taken aback - it had been so long since he had spoken to anyone . He hadn’t even realized that his mouth was forming the vowels of his mother tongue. “I -” Basic feels odd on his tongue, but the kid brightens, so Jango will put up with it until he can teach him Mando’a, “- yeah. I speak Basic.”

The kid beams at him and - haar’chak - he has dimples. He would have definitely been adopted in a heartbeat.

“Was wondering your name.” Jango grunts, and the verd’ika ’s smile turns shy.

“I’m Obi-Wan.” The kid introduces himself with a little bow that wouldn’t be out of place in a High Core court. “And yourself?” He asks, eyes curious.

“Jango.” He offers gruffly, “Jango Fett.”

Obi-Wan beams at him again, and - kriff, how could anyone sell this kid into slavery. He was too trusting, too innocent - this life would ruin him. “It’s nice to meet you, Master Fett!”

Jango jerks, scowls, and the kid flinches faintly, looking alarmed and confused, so Jango lets out an explosive sigh and forces himself to relax. “Not your master, Ob’ika.” Jango mutters, gesturing for the kid to come closer. Space gets cold, and the adiik would no doubt be feeling it soon. “Just Jango.”

“Okay.” Obi-Wan agrees quietly, shuffling over to the man’s side, and Jango slowly loops an arm around the ad ’s thin shoulders and pulling him even closer, tucking him against his ribs. “How long have you been here, Jango?” The kid asks, curling his fingers into Jango’s ruined kute, and Jango just shrugs awkwardly. There’s a small sniffle in response, as it fully begins to sink in that his dar’vod really had sold him into slavery no doubt.

Jango tightens his hold on the adiik, and in that moment he swears to himself, to the manda, that he’d get out. He’d get them both out.

#cole writes #fanfiction #star wars #whumptober 2020 #no.4 running out of time #caged #jango fett #obi wan kenobi #slavery #mandobi-verse

[faggghaggg]

(1/?)Bicurious DT anon - I read everything available, and theres no doubt that before DW he used to hang out and be seen out and about with some high powered very out gays like Matt Lucas and Mark Gattiss and his partner, among others. They were thick as thieves. If nothing else he knew how to network. It was Russ Davies the creator of Queer as Folk who gave him is big break in Casanova, then Doctor Who. Its also interesting that DT remains Greg Doran's darling on the stage.

(2/?) Bicurious DT Anon - theres no doubt he is supremely comfortable in those circles and in my opinion there is no smoke without fire. His current wife’s presence in his life seems to be the only perplexing thing, as is the talk about the true state of their relationship. Why would he have so many kids with a glorified beard and then not be there to help raise them? One thing doesn’t go with the other. you’re either gay bearding but happy to take care of your kids or straight and a jerk. 

(3/3) Bicurious DT Anon - I think its a bit of both, hence the bi stuff. Sometimes you cant go by what you read or hear but by what you see, and what I see is that it’s more complicated than just bearding and being perpetually on the DL for leading man cred. I dont doubt hes been with other men. To what extent? Dunno. But his current situation is way more dicey than the people involved make it out to be, and furthermore, he lets it happen coz he thrives on the power he has in it.

You make my heart sing, Bicurious!  I didn’t know he hung out with Gatiss & co., but I’ve been wondering about the Davies association.  Also didn’t know Doran was gay, but knew Richard Wilson was, and he was DT’s close older friend who brought him onto Duck Patrol, his first series in England.  Those gay patrons of young good-looking actors always raise suspicions, don’t they?  Still, one must take the four kids into account, so I never though DT was gay.  But this circumstantial evidence for the bi theory is worth considering, and your not doubting he’s been with other men is music to my ears. 🥰😍😛 What kind of power does it give him, though?  Surely he’s not sleeping with any of the patrons now - he’s way too old for their tastes.  If he still has men, it could only be for fun, I imagine.

#dt #dt tea #dtea #bi tea #faggghaggg is a happy puppy

[that-curly-haired-lesbian]

Could you do a queer analysis of Getaway Car? I'm curious about your opinion. For me it's the most difficult to interpret from reputation. Some think it's swiftgron, other that it's about CH/TS. I think it's about bearding in general. The 1st part about CH/TS "worst of crimes" = the longest beard. But then it sounds like 2014 kaylor (not bearding) and kissgate "It was the great escape, the prison break The light of freedom on my face But you weren’t thinkin’ And I was just drinkin'" Thank you!

Hi everyone and happySunday!

Out of all the songson Reputation Getaway Car is one ofthe most popular, but as anon says it seems to be the one we as a fandom havethe most difficulty agreeing on what or who it’s actually about.

Some are thinking Dianna andSwiftgron, while others, like anon here are thinking bearding (andoften specifically CH or TH)

Personally I tend tofall into the Swiftgron camp, I think the song is about the ending of Taylorand Dianna’s relationship and how close they came to actually picking eachother over their careers (aka escaping the industry, with its systematichomophobia and bearding practices.) Here’s a Swiftgron master post for ahelpful timeline that brings up/explains stuff about the relationship I maymention in the analysis below.

Since it is one ofthe most complex and narratively interesting songs on the newest album it hasbeen heavily analyzed already (the analyses linked above are both excellent andprovided a lot of inspiration for this analysis) but I decided to put it on mylist anyway. I hope I can give you a satisfying and while perhaps not all thatrefreshing, at the very least interesting take on the lyrics.

Before we actuallystart looking at them I’d like to share some of my general thoughts on the song.

We all know Taylor isa brilliant singer and a wonderful songwriter, but what first drew me, a loverof stories to her music was the fact that first and foremost Taylor is astoryteller. From start to finish GetawayCar is a story and a complex one in ways that we’ll get into as thisanalysis progresses.

Taylor has picked (apossibly crime-fueled) road trip sort of theme (no, not THAT road trip) for thestory she wants to tell.

On the surface thesong chronicles the fate of two lovers on some sort of crime spree, or at leaston a road trip escaping their everyday lives in order to be together far awayfrom it all…Sounds familiar as far as lesbian fiction goes, wouldn’t you say?Someone knows their queer pop culture, nice one, Tay!

Unlike the semi-happyending of Carol or the sad andupsetting one of lesbian Bonnie and Clyde(or you know, straight Bonnie and Clyde too, actually) though, it doesn’tend with one of them dying.

Instead it all endswith one of them betraying the other and escaping with their stolen goodsleaving their partner to take the fall and presumably be arrested.

It is fairly easy toconclude that this plot is not to be taken as autobiographical, obviouslyTaylor didn’t rob a bank with a past lover, but she might’ve done somethingthat betrayed said lover’s trust and when writing a song about the incident sheused this escaping-the-law-thing as a metaphor for what actually happened inher own relationship. I think you’re all with me so far, but how do we connectthe story being told here to Swiftgron? Well, let’s look at it and see.

Oh, but also, beforeI forget, my usual disclaimers:

This is just mespeculating, I could be extremely wrong and everyone is free to speculate asmuch as they want on what this lyrical masterpiece is about.

Lyrics cred goes toAZLyrics yet again.

Now let’s start theactual analysis!

–

No, nothing good starts in a getaway car…

–

It’s been reported that Dianna actually proposed toTaylor as a sort of last, desperate attempt to save their relationship. After gettingback together yet again and enduring months and months of back and forth Diannasupposedly threw the idea of marriage out there and Taylor, forced to berealistic about her career and her life in general had to say no, thus endingthe relationship. I assume though, that Taylor didn’t say no immediately, atfirst she considered what would happen if she said yes.

Well, for starters it’d be the end of all the bearding,she could escape that part of her life if she actually came out, but it alsomost likely meant that she’d have to give up her career (at least mainstream,big-time success…cuz ew, homophobia.)

She considered it however, for a moment she consideredgetting into that getaway car Dianna was providing and just drive away from itall, all the fame and the fake PR games (LuckyOne vibes, anyone?) in order to be with her girlfriend, but then sheactually truly started thinking about it and realized that for this to workthey’d have to pull off something akin to a freaking heist.

Their coming out process would be complicated andwould most likely hurt both of their images considerably + both of theirmanagements at the time seems to have been pretty pro-closet, so coming outwould be challenge and a risky one at that.

If they’d actually be able to pull that off their marriage(and by association the rest of their lives together) would start in the dustof their public come out and all the drama that’d come with that.

Taylor fearedtheir (already rocky) relationship wasn’t strong enough to survive the public’sreaction to them coming out and getting married. In addition to that theirmarriage would’ve been born out of frustration, they’d both just about had itwith the closeting process and the PR games in their respective industries and+ they wanted to save their relationship which was rapidly falling apart,perhaps not only due to both of thembeing forcibly closeted, but I’m sure that didn’t…you know, help.

A marriage built from a combination of thosecircumstances doesn’t strike me as one that will last and Taylor seems to havecome to the same conclusion. (A reoccurring theme in her songs for Dianna is agut feeling or a knowledge that no matter how much they want to, they won’tlast forever) so she decides that they shouldn’t get married, shouldn’t try toescape their miserable, straight-passing PR lives this way because the marriagethat would come from that wouldn’t be a strong and enduring one.

After all nothing good starts in a getaway car, orfrom a need escape something (bearding) while holding onto something else (afailing relationship) that very clearly won’t last.

Criminals trying to escape the law will get caughtsooner or later and two closeted women won’t be able to be together without PRdrama if they don’t come out. In both cases it is pointless to try and escapethe inevitable (capture by police, or putting the crime metaphor aside,eventual outing) and if they do manage to put these things off it’s onlytemporary and not the foundation for something lasting or good.

–

It was the best of times, the worst of crimes

–

Generally Taylor seemed quite happy in herrelationship with Dianna, but their relationship was also torrid and prettydramatic and in Wonderland shedescribes it as “Never worse, but neverbetter” and what’s happening here seems to be similar. Taylor is happy andin love, having the best time, but just being happy and in love with another woman is basicallyconsidered a crime in her line of work. Homosexuality is insanely taboo in theentertainment industry, as a celebrity it seems to be just about the worstthing you can do (unless you’re already out at the start of your career andthus marketed as a gaysinger/actor/performer.)

So while Taylor was happy and in love she was alsoaware that the general public would judge her harshly if they found out she’sgay, in their eyes that’d be a betrayal of trust since she’d “lied” to themabout being straight, she might as well have murdered a man (aka committed acrime) as far as the hets are concerned.

Also as we knowin many parts of the world being gay IS in fact a literal crime, it’s evenconsidered so bad you could get death penalty for it in multiple countries.While that’s (thankfully) not the case in the U.S “the worst of crimes” seems afitting way to describe that atrocity that’s a reality for many LGBT+ peopleelsewhere. I hate this world with a burning passion!

…Okaaaaay,let’s not talk about that anymore… 🤮🤮🤮

–

I struck a match and blew your mind

But I didn’t mean it

And you didn’t see it

–

Matches are a recurring motif in many Taylor songs (atthe top of my head I can think of PictureTo Burn and Dear John) and mostoften they seem to signify ending a relationship or getting over someone.

Here they seem to allude to Taylor trying and failingto convince a proposing Dianna (and herself) that she couldn’t say yes and thatthey’d have to break up.

Dianna had been so desperate to save theirrelationship and so convinced Taylor felt the same desperation and thereforewould say yes that she wasn’t ready to get any other answer. When Taylorstarted explaining why saying yes wasn’t realistic (or “struck the match” aka essentially broke up) it blew Dianna’s mind,it wasn’t at all the response she’d expected as she’d convinced herself thatgetting married was the logical next step since they didn’t want to lose eachother.

Taylor wanted to be able to say yes, she wanted tobelieve their dysfunctional relationship could still be saved. So when sheresponded to the proposal she didn’t want to believe what she heard herself say,it’s not what she wanted to say (“I didn’t mean it”) and Dianna refusedto admit Tay was right. (“You didn’t seeit” “it” being the truth of their doomed love.) They were both clinging to an already lost hope, much like twodelusional criminals thinking they will be able to escape police forever.

–

The ties were black, the lies were white

In shades of gray and candlelight

–

Black ties makes one think of formal events orcorporate business dealings, kind of like how Taylor’s hetero relationships arenothing but business and how they  tellwhite little lies in order to sell the hetero story like the business deal itis. (“they” in this context being Team Taylor, but also Dianna’s team sincethey seem to employ much of the same techniques to keep the girls closeted, orat least they did before Taylor got rid of her old publicist and hired Tree.)

The mentions of black and white also makes me think ofhow all Taylor’s bearding relationships seem almost painfully simplistic, theyare either in love or they aren’t, it’s all the tired fairy-tale view of lovewith the prince and princess (code word for “straight woman” in much of Taylor’smusic, remember?) It’s all very black and white, much like black ties and whitelies. This PR-version of love is put in opposition to Taylor’s actual (gay)love life where everything is more complicated and realistic. For example twopeople who still love each other might have to break up, because their lovesimply isn’t enough to keep them together anymore. In other words, in this realversion of Taylor Swift’s love life everything doesn’t always work out so Disney-like, it’s often more complicated(and less straight) than the black and white narrative of her public lovelife.  (“Shades of grey”) but stillromantic most of the time (“candle light.”)

“Shades of grey” could of course also be a referenceto the Fifty Shades Of Grey series ofbooks/movies, a primary example of something that a vast majority of peopleseem to consider romantic when it actually is quite abusive and gross (x)rather like the structures keeping someone in a straight PR-relationship thatfronts a false sense of perfect and desirable romance while the reality of thatrelationship is something else entirely. 🤔

Yes, I do know Taylor wrote a song for one of the 50 Shades movies so maybe she likes themand does consider them romantic (or it was just an attempt to make her publicpersona edgier in preparation for Reputationand the “death of the old Taylor”) but as a self-proclaimed feminist (and avery smart woman) I have a hard time believing the abusive, patriarchal andheteronormative implications of those books/films got past Taylor.

In my opinion she might’ve drawn a pretty cleverparallel between the romanticized but clearly problematic relationship depictedin Fifty Shades   and the romanticizing of her own publicrelationships that are as shallow and void of any deeper substance as thewriting and story in those novels. This is very clearly a reach and I don’t pretend toknow anything of Taylor’s taste in literature, but I thought it was kind offunny to be honest. 😂

–

Iwanted to leave him

I needed a reason

–

Who is this “him”? Well, it could either be her beard(most likely Harry Styles if this was back in the Swiftgron days) or thebearding/entertainment industry as a whole. It seems that by the time she metDianna Taylor was tired of hiding and bearding and by now it seems she mostcertainly is. In previous analyses we’ve touched on the idea that many gaycelebrities are forced to choose between a fulfilling personal life and asuccessful career and this song isn’t the first time Taylor’s flirted with theidea of picking the former. (Lucky One)However, at that point in her career she felt she couldn’t just up and leavewithout giving her fans and explanation and coming out and getting married to awoman seemed reason enough. She wants out of the bearding system, so thereforeit’s tempting to say yes to the proposal even though she knows it most likelywon’t work out.

–

X marks the spot, where we fell apart

–

This is probably just a reference to one of Taylor’sfavorite songs by Hilary Duff, BreatheIn, Breathe out (x) but it could alsobe a reference to bearding being what made Swiftgron fall apart.

Often in bearding and PR relationship contracts areinvolved (See: Blank Space) and mostoften legal documents such as contracts are signed with a person’s signature,but sometimes they are signed with simple x’s.Admittedly that’s most often when a party is unable to provide their written signaturefor one reason or another, but this may be the safest way to hint atcontract-signing in the song without flat-out saying it. With this in mind Taylorcould be saying that putting an x on(or signing) all of those contracts and agreeing to “play straight” as much asboth women were doing put a strain on their relationship and led to its demise.

–

He poisoned the well, I was lying to myself

–

To “poison the well” means to discredit someone’sargument or point. Once again “he” makes an appearance and like I said I think“he” represents the bearding practice as a whole, or possibly the girls’publicists or PR teams. Their previous history with bearding andstraight-passing had poisoned the well in the sense that they’d make coming outa challenge. Everyone assumes both girls to be straight so were they tosuddenly claim to be gay everyone would try to disprove this with references totheir previous history with dating and they’d have no way to dismiss thiswithout admitting to bearding which would frankly probably be a PR disaster.Taylor’s saying that if she tried to convince herself that they could getmarried and then come out without major complications she was lying to herself,she wouldn’t be able to leave “him” as easily as Dianna was trying to convinceher and deep down Taylor knew this even if she didn’t want to believe it.Simply put, Taylor was lying to herself by thinking coming out would bepossible, let alone easy.  

–

I knew it from the first old fashioned, we were cursed

–

So, an old fashioned is a kind of drink and maybe thatdrink holds a special meaning in relation to Taylor and Dianna’s relationship?Obviously I wouldn’t know, instead I’m thinking that it might be yet anotherreference to bearding.

After all that’s pretty much a tale as old as time,it’s been going on in Hollywood since day one, quite old fashioned if you askme. Perhaps Taylor is saying she knew as soon as she started bearding that herreal relationships would be hard to make work while pretending to be hetero. Iimagine her and Dianna’s relationship were no different given that both womenare quite famous for bearding.

This could’ve been a factor in Taylor’s aforementionedgut feeling that they wouldn’t last, if we’re to trust I Knew You Were Trouble she had that feeling of eventual doom even inthe early days of their relationship and the fact that they both bearded a lotmight have been a contributing factor to this.

–

We never had a shotgun shot in the dark

–

This is clearly a reference to the wedding they neverhad. A “shotgun wedding” is a hasty and rushed one. A wedding that’s takingplace as a last effort to save a failing relationship through one lastdesperate, but still grand, romantic gesture seems pretty rushed and hasty tome, rather like the wedding Swiftgron would’ve had if Taylor had agreed to theproposal. *heartbreak*

–

You were driving the getaway car

We were flying, but we’d never get far

–

Through proposing Dianna provided a escape frombearding for both herself and Taylor, a getaway car if you will. Whileconsidering this possible plan of escape both girls could taste the freedomthey’d been denied for so long by being forced to stay in the closet. They werehappy and excited (“flying”)  that they’dfound a way to both save their relationship AND get out of tedious glass closetroutines, but pretty soon they (or at least Taylor) realized the plan wouldn’twork, their getaway car (or marriage) wouldn’t get far.

–

Don’t pretend it’s such a mystery

Think about the place where you first met me

–

Dianna shouldn’t be shocked Taylor isn’t ready to comeout the singer reasons, after all they first met while they were both deeply inthe closet. I mean this line might hold a more obvious significance to Taylorand Dianna as they alone know the details of their meet-cute, but all I canthink about is that the place they first met technically was the closet.Neither of them should be surprised (or “act like it’s such a mystery”) thatthe other won’t come out, after all they knew what they were getting themselvesinto when they first met as they were aware the other was very closeted.

–

We’re riding in a getaway car

There were sirens in the beat of your heart

–

If we’re going with the story of the outlaws on therun the sirens are quite obviously the police chasing them, the cops are closingin on them, threatening to end their little crime-spree fantasy. In the contextof the song’s queer meaning however it might mean something entirely different.In Greek mythology a siren is a sea creature, a beautiful woman who luressailors to their deaths in the ocean by seducing the men with their beauty. Sothe sirens beauty and grace tricked the men into doing something unwise ordangerous, huh? Sounds like a beautiful woman luring Taylor Swift away from hercareer with promises of happily ever after and beautiful words she wants tohear…Of course Taylor couldn’t be like “you’re a siren, luring me into yourgetaway car” so she had to use the Bonnie and Clyde narrative so that we’dthink about a police siren, not like, a freaking mermaid seducing our singerinto their getaway vehicle. 😂

–

Should’ve known I’d be the first to leave

Think about the place where you first met me

In a getaway car

No, they never get far

No, nothing good starts in a getaway car

–

Yet again Taylor’s saying Dianna shouldn’t besurprised Taylor won’t come out and at the first sign of breaking the glasscloset Taylor would leave.  Why? Well,before I suggested the getaway car might be a metaphor for Swiftgron’spotential marriage and how it “wouldn’t get far” the use of that metaphor herethough suggests to me that the getaway car is in fact their entirerelationship. They got into this relationship because they wanted to live theirtruths, at least privately, they wanted to have someone to come home to whenthe bearding was over for the day, they wanted true love, not just thefabricated bearding kind. Their relationship was a way to escape from theirhetero narrative, a getaway car. Keeping a relationship working while havingfake relationship with third-parties must be hard though and that’s why gayrelationships seldom work out for closeted celebs (at least in Taylor’sexperience it would seem) the attempt to escape their straight narratives neverget far. Furthermore having to live and love in secrecy doesn’t give therelationship a stable foundation, nothing good starts with an attempt to fleefrom something else.

Wow, Getaway Caris quite the bleak look at the price of fame for someone in the closet,isn’t it? 💔

–

It was the great escape, the prison break

The light of freedom on my face

But you weren’t thinking

And I was just drinking

–

Their marriage was supposed to be the great escape,their chance to break out of the prison that bearding, straight-passing andpublicity had kept them in for so long. Damn, in even considering the mere possibilityof saying yes to such a ludicrous plan Taylor could see the light of thefreedom she hadn’t had in so many years, she could see the life outside of thecloset. Then she’s forced to admit Dianna is not looking at their situationrealistically (she’s “not thinking”.)

While the next line seems to suggest Taylor has somesort of drinking problem I think what it’s really saying is that she’s actingas if she was drunk. For a second while considering saying yes to Dianna’sproposal Taylor isn’t thinking logically, instead she wants to believe in theidea that love conquers everything and that they’ll be able to work out thedetails of their coming out as they go along. This isn’t realistic either andshe’s acting like someone who’s drunk by not caring about the fact that heractions will have consequences.

Another interesting interpretation is to consider thepreviously mentioned old fashioned, like I said before it’s a kind of drink sowe can assume that maybe that’s what Taylor’s drinking here. If we go with whatwe concluded before though the old fashioned isn’t a drink here at all, but thevery practice of bearding, so can we then assume Taylor “drinking” symbolizes herbearding?

Maybe. As Dianna was increasingly losing her grip on realitywhen it came to her relationship with Taylor (by starting to actually think adrama-free come out to be possible) the latter went through a quite intensestunting period to try and combat increasing gay rumors. (Most likely on ordersfrom the spiraling pre-Tree Team Taylor.)

In other words Taylor and Dianna were  on completely opposite sides of the comingout process and thus the freedom they were dreaming about just wasn’t realisticat that point which is what caused the relationship to end.

–

Well he was running after us, I was screaming ‘Go gogo!’

But with three of us, honey, it’s a side show

And a circus ain’t a love story

And now we’re both sorry (we’re both sorry)

–

As the girls try to escape the closet their historywith bearding haunts them and they both soon realize it’s impossible to deletetheir collective bearding history from the public consciousness. If they comeout as gay their male exes are gonna be questioned about their sexuality,Taylor and Dianna coming out in the way the want to will unravel so much withinthe industry that it’s frankly not possible. They can’t outrun their pastbearding no matter how fast they go.

Even if they do get married or continue theirrelationship they will have to keep bearding as they can’t come out publicly. Therewill never be just the two of them in the relationship, it will all always be aPR circus and that isn’t a worthy love story.

They both realize this is the truth of the matter andas sorry as they both are (note theoverlapping female vocals on that line) the relationship will simply have toend.

–

 X marks the spot, where we fell apart

He poisoned the well, every man for himself

I knew it from the first old fashioned, we were cursed

It hit you like a shotgun shot to the heart.

–

Two lines are new here and therefore they are primarilythe interesting ones.

He poisoned the well, every manfor himself

Taylor has realized she’ll have to be the one to leaveas Dianna is still in denial about the fact that they can’t come out. Taylorknows they won’t be able to escape their “straight” past, any claim they canmake regarding their own sexuality has been ruined by past associations withmen, she knows she’ll have to leave Dianna to realize this on her own (“everyman for himself”) as trying to talk to her only leads back to neither wantingthe relationship to be over and thus concocting unrealistic dreams on how theycould make it work against all odds.

It hit you like a shotgun shot tothe heart.

When the truth finally hit Dianna Taylor had alreadyleft and her ex was alone to deal with the pain of the realization that gettingout from the bearding shadow is going to be harder than she wanted to think. Thisundoubtedly felt like a shot to the heart for both Taylor upon having to leaveand Dianna upon finally realizing exactly whyTaylor left.

–

(Chorus)

–

 We were jet set Bonnie and Clyde

Until I switched to the other side

It’s no surprise, I turned you in

‘Cause us traitors never win

–

The duo who seem to have inspired the song areactually mentioned by name, quite a long shot from Romeo and Juliet, wouldn’t yousay?

Anyway, Taylor’s saying that her and Dianna were ateam until Taylor decided to pick her career over her girlfriend, this shouldbe unsurprising she muses, as she has (presumably) done so at least oncebefore.

Taylor callsherself a traitor here, interesting.

I recentlywatched HBO’s The Handmaid’s Tale wheregay women are referred to as “gender traitors” this also happens in the book (oneof my favorites) from 1985 by Margaret Atwood on which that show is based. Inaddition to that the term comes up as referring to people (most often women)who act in a way that is atypical or “unbeneficial” to their gender (aka feministsand lesbians) in my course lit for my gender and sexuality in literaturecourse.

 I don’t think that’s what Taylor is saying here (unless she likes thatbook too *fingers crossed*) I just thought that was an interesting sidenote asthe “never win” line following that could thus be interpreted as a reference tohow minorities (lesbians for example) are often screwed over by society and “never win”.

What she says I think is that people who pick theircareer over their love life won’t end up being happy, or “winning” at life inthe long-run.

–

I’m in a getaway car

I left you in the motel bar

I put the money in a bag and stole the keys

That was the last time you ever saw me

–

By using imagery that invoke the outlaws storylineTaylor is acknowledging her own betrayal she’s saying “sorry, but you should’veguessed this is what I’m like” she wouldn’t risk her career and they both should’verealized sooner.

–

(Chorus)

–

 I was riding in a getaway car

I was crying in a getaway car

I was dying in a getaway car

Said 'goodbye’ in a getaway car

–

Taylor may have fronted with “you should’ve seen thiscoming, Di” but really she was upset with herself, she didn’t wanna do this,but she saw no other way out. She was afraid of losing everything she’s workedfor by coming out so instead she took the safe route and broke the relationshipoff. 💔💔

–

Hope you all enjoyed thatread and feel free to tell me what you think the song is saying, it’s solyrically complex and interesting 😊

If you guys want meto anlyze more Taylor songs or if you have any questions for me, feel free toshoot me an ask 😊

The next song on thelist is Enchanted 🌈🌈🌈

#gaylor swift #swiftgron #kaylor #songs #queer analysis #asks

[warholiana]

Lovely review of my Warhol bio in the Los Angeles Times, including the following:

"Warhol lived one of the great lives of the 20th century, and he now has a biography worthy of that life. For ‘Warhol,’ Blake Gopnik interviewed hundreds of eyewitnesses and scrutinized every paper trail, down to the artist’s ticket stub for ‘Cats.’ Even at 976 pages, the book rarely leaves you wanting less. It turns out this life, so often discussed in grandiose or mythic terms, is quite intricate, even beautiful, in extreme close-up.”

https://www.latimes.com/…/review-blake-gopnik-andy-warhol-b…

Here’s the review in full:

Review: Was Andy Warhol a saint or scourge, genius or dolt? A new biography befits a great life

By STEPHEN METCALF

APRIL 22, 2020 | 7 AM

 Andy Warhol, circa 1960, had a problem. Thanks to his success as a commercial artist, he had built up an extravagant lifestyle. He owned an angel-blue Upper East Side townhouse and the tastes to match, but he was no longer winning the big contracts.

Imagine a semi-closeted gay man in New York City logging hours for The Man during the day while working quietly, steadily, at night, trying to create the next vanguard of American painting. You’re actually imagining Jasper Johns or Robert Rauschenberg. Warhol wanted to be that person, desperately, but

in his off hours he’d been making negligible drawings.

Art, circa 1960, also had a problem. How do you move painting away from abstraction while also moving it forward? Pop artists — Johns, Lichtenstein, Rosenquist — solved this problem by becoming landscape painters. The American landscape, however, was no longer made up of trees and cows lowing plangently at dusk. It was Dick Tracy, roadside billboards and packaged goods.

With his Campbell’s Soup can paintings, exhibited in Los Angeles in 1962, Warhol was not pioneering anything new. He was merely upping the ante. More than Johns or Lichtenstein, Warhol concealed his own expressive capacity, burying it so deep that any evidence of the sensibility of the artist all but disappeared. You can look at a soup can and wonder at how familiarity, intimacy, warmth, even feelings of love might attach to an inert object, just as you can look at a painting of Marilyn, Liz or Elvis and wonder at how cold, inert, even alien the human form had become. One can say all kinds of things about the work but its power lies, finally, in its horrible silence. And what lies behind that?

Was this man a scourge, capitalism’s most joyous co-conspirator? A satyr, a saint, a sage? Was he a conniving strategist? Or a dim bulb?

Warhol lived one of the great lives of the 20th century, and he now has a biography worthy of that life. For “Warhol,” Blake Gopnik interviewed hundreds of eyewitnesses and scrutinized every paper trail, down to the artist’s ticket stub for “Cats.” Even at 976 pages, the book rarely leaves you wanting less. It turns out this life, so often discussed in grandiose or mythic terms, is quite intricate, even beautiful, in extreme close-up.

There is Julia Warhola, Andy’s mother, crafting peach tins into the shape of flowers and selling them door to door; actor Dennis Hopper, among the first to “get” Warhol, jumping up and down upon seeing his first soup can; Andy himself, older, mellowed, in a Santa beard, ringing the bell for the Salvation Army. (He lasted 45 minutes.) In this textured portrait of an artist of annihilating smoothness, Gopnik has finely rendered many of Warhol’s milieus. Perhaps most endearing is the intricate social geography of gay New York in the 1940s and ’50s.

The Warhol of this period has been romanticized as the quintessential urban loner. In fact, Gopnik makes clear, he was a gregarious, well-liked man, surrounded by a fairly ordinary roster of friends and lovers. He was excluded, however, from the art world, which must have cut him deeply. Warhol graduated from the Carnegie Institute expecting to be a fine as well as a commercial artist, but even after he’d abandoned his homoerotic drawings, the major New York gallerists continued to shun him. Leo Castelli found Warhol the person too weird for his tastes, and worried his comic strip imagery was too close to Lichtenstein, whom he already represented.

So Warhol did the unthinkable. He debuted the soup cans in L.A. The show earned his first round of press coverage. Castelli did eventually sign Warhol, but almost none of his best work showed under the dealer’s auspices. The biggest revelation in “Warhol” is how minor a role the art establishment played in forming his reputation. As late as the early ’80s, Warhol could still bemoan how his prices lagged those of Johns and Rauschenberg, and how MOMA had acquired only one of his paintings. (“The little Marilyn. I hate that.”) So — how did he do it?

The quick and very Warholian answer is that he used the power of celebrity. A slower, more careful one is that Warhol shrewdly pitted the Scene against the Institution. And by 1962, modern art was an Institution. In America this meant MOMA, the Jewish Museum, the Met, Castelli. The Scene, meanwhile, was the Factory. The Factory was not just a space where Warhol made art and freeloaders cavorted. It became one of the super-symbolic youthquake It Places of the 1960s.

The Factory was a porous, chaotic arena for scene-making, drawing in exhibitionists, druggies, socialites, rock stars, movie stars, Ivy Leaguers and, most critically, journalists. By the mid-’60s, Time magazine, et al., were hypnotized by this beguiling apostle of desublimation, the Pan figure holding the keys to a secret kingdom called “the underground.”

As his art was being turned into a succès de scandale by the gullible press, Warhol began cultivating a public image, one that had little to do with the manner and style of “Raggedy Andy,” the whimsical oddball he’d been since his student days. This new Warhol was leather-clad and hard and, in his way, as horribly silent as the canvases. When he wasn’t merely blank, he was a master of the evasive put-on, the non-answer, the deadpan stammer. (Or simple lie.) He was withdrawing from his manner exactly what was missing in his paintings: affect.

Affect lies in the cadence of our speech, the arrangement of our features, the quality of our laughter. The absence in Warhol is startling; it’s what gives everything he did and touched its radical aura. With his new personal style, Warhol was breaking down any distinction between affect and affectation. The sphinx act drove onlookers wild, until they asked of Warhol the same question they’d asked of the Factory: What is going on inside there?

Warhol exiled people when they bored him; he weaponized his lack of affect as beautifully and efficiently in his relations as he had in his art. He became a genius at making the elect feel caught up in a daring enterprise while provoking in others the special torment he himself knew so well — the feeling of being left out.

Warhol was attached to spaces whose fascination lay in their powers of exclusion: the back room of Max’s Kansas City; Studio 54; the Limelight. Maybe it’s just blunt-force human nature, that the more something excludes you, the more you want in. This is Groucho Marx, inverted and intensified, and the formula applies not only to the Factory but to its buttoned-up sequel. When Warhol pivoted, on a dime, away from the madness, and moved his headquarters to Union Square, he dropped the Factory name and instituted a dress code but nonetheless kept a spatial arrangement designed to highlight degrees of insiderism.

The target wasn’t the press anymore but high-paying clients for his new line of business, society portraiture. Warhol was not the first serious artist to care about money, but he was the first to make a shameless love of it central to his vocation. By rendering up his underground cred to the principles of entrepreneurship, he was not only prophesying the future; he was modeling behavior. The new “studio” was a small, nimble, eat-what-you-kill workplace, organized around the highly branded talents of a single visionary individual.

Was the change so shocking? The single consistent thing about Warhol, from 1960 until the day he died, was his utter refusal to conceive of human beings in the usual way — which is to say as interior, subjective, reflective, self-fashioning, suffering and ethical creatures. This refusal often felt like a lark but, from the evidence gathered by Gopnik, his shallowness lay deeper than that; it went all the way down. Into the era of the yuppie, the fundamental Warholian project was kept intact: to maximize creative autonomy while minimizing human subjectivity, until the former can be said to describe anything you do and the latter all but disappears.

 In “Portrait of Andy Warhol,” a painting by Julian Schnabel, Warhol stands against a black-velvet void, naked and exposed but for a pink girdle, which is pulled excruciatingly tight. He looks like an El Greco saint, with hints of a Francis Bacon messiah. The girdle was a medical necessity, thanks to Valerie Solanas’ botched assassination attempt in 1968. In spite of what you made of yourself, I see you as you are, the canvas seems to say, by way of reconnecting Warhol to a tradition of expressivity and suffering — to art history, as it existed before Warhol did his level best to obliterate it.

Warhol won that one, didn’t he? Gopnik promotes a Great Man theory of the case: Warhol was an epochal genius who deserves his place on the “top peak of Parnassus, beside Michelangelo and Rembrandt.” In effect, Gopnik has written two books. The first is an exhaustively researched and definitive account of the life. The second is a series of apologies and excuses for a tax cheat, voyeur-sadist, bad son, skinflint, publicity hound, social climber, shopaholic. Some small-bore skepticism along the way might have helped make the canonical judgment more credible.

We inherit Warhol, circa 2020, not just as an artist but as a climate of feeling — a climate that can easily be confused with reality itself. Paradigms never shift back, precisely, but they do shift again, and fickly. As we come to see Warholism as part of a second Gilded Age, one the pandemic may finally kill off, his reputation will change, and in unexpected ways. Maybe, in the most Warholian gesture of all, the work contains within it the seeds of its own destruction. Rendering Warholism unfashionable, by its own logic, is the same thing as killing it. At that point the artist, once an unrivaled colossus, would fade into an absolute silence, which was, after all, his real medium all along.

Metcalf is the cohost of Slate’s “Culture Gabfest” podcast and is writing a book about the 1980s.

#art #Andy Warhol

[lih67]

I have to admit I’m a little confused. Again. For those who don’t know me I’m a J2 fencesitter and I follow the hat comm on LJ.  This post then will be about what I’ve learned from a hat perspective that doesn’t make sense given their OTT reactions over there.  Since it’s a long post I put it under the cut.

I want to stop here and stress that this is what I’ve gleaned from the regular posters at the hat comm so what I’ve written below applies to them only.  It does not apply to the less hardcore J2 hats who usually lurk but not post there and are not bothered by the bearding.

I’ve posted before how that comm seems to have an anti-Jared bias and how they’re always ready to bash him especially over anything Gen-related he may do or say.  Yet when Jensen does any bearding (and per a hat perspective he has upped the bearding for a while now) the comm is relatively calm, quiet, respectful, and most importantly RATIONAL.  When asked why that is some anons responded by saying one of two things or sometimes both:

It’s not really Jared it’s Gen that provokes such a virulent response and since Jared is connected to Gen he gets the bashing by association.

they don’t like how in their eyes Jared is so OTT with his bearding antics

Or at least that’s how I understood it and the above is important to remember.

Now before I can get into my confusion I need to list some things about the bearding J2 are allegedly doing (remember this is what I’ve learned from the hat comm as a J2 fencesitter):

Per the comm the Js had to beard in order to protect their careers and to keep their respective immediate families happy since they were not keen on the whole gay thing (more Jensen’s family than Jared’s).

This is where Gen and Danneel come in as the beards.  Though each woman was or still is troublesome, this will depend on which anon or supposed IHA is posting, each woman and now the growing number of kids provides a het cover for the Js.

So now both Js are bearding but per the comm Jared had always done the lion share of the bearding for different reasons.  He did it way more often then Jensen and he went completely and totally all in to the point of being irritatingly and embarrassingly OTT about it.  So to recap Jared did and still does more of the heavylifting when it comes to bearding than Jensen.

The bearding allows the Js to still be happily together under the radar and now that enough time has passed which has successfully established each man’s het cred through a het marriage with kids the continued bearding also allows the Js to be seen together more in public without the women (aka J2 goodness).  Sort of like hiding in plain sight.

So this is basically what the bearding is for and generally how its viewed by the comm.  Now, it’s been posted over and over ad nauseam that Jared was and continues to be OTT with his bearding antics.  He does it too much and its too dramatic.  Think Tom Cruise jumping on Oprah’s couch over Katie Holmes. Now comes my confusion because why isn’t the comm actually thanking Jared and Gen or at least saying “good job” instead of bitching about him/them so much?  Think about it:

Bearding was and still is necessary for the Js careers and to placate allegedly anti-gay family members.

Gen and Danneel as beards help them do that.

Jared and by marital extension Gen do a huge portion of the bearding when compared to Jensen and Danneel and they go all out when they do to ensure the bearding is seen, noticed, and het cred is established/maintained.  Ergo, J/G do most of the work and Jared does way more bearding than Jensen.

Since Jared does more bearding than Jensen then it’s only logical to say that Jared (and Gen with him) is the one paying the most for all the J2 goodness.  The fandom AND the Js wouldn’t have all this J2ness if Jared didn’t do so much OTT bearding to pay for it. Yet when he (and Gen) beards all he (they) get is trashed and dragged through the mud.  Why?  It’s all for J2 and apparently from a hat perspective it worked and continues to work.  So why the anger and hate? 

Yes, I know that a lot of hats just don’t like Gen and they have their preconceived unconfirmed notions about how she is (there is no PROOF whatsoever regarding the “drops” about her at the comm).  These hats don’t have to like her.  I’m not saying that at all but at least recognize that without Gen working with Jared, from a hat perspective, and willing to play the game and to play it hard there wouldn’t be the level of J2 that there is today.  So again, isn’t “good job” or “thanks for the bearding” more in order here instead of what happens over there?

#j2 fencesitter #spn-gossip

[pinelife3]

Montezuma 2EEE

This is MF DOOM on the Jake One track 'Get 'Er Done':

Make no mistake son, it's Jake One, he makes beats well like I likes my steaks done with sauteed onions and hella worcestershire, a gush of beer to wash it down.

First of all, whew that internal rhyme! Worcestershire//gush of beer. Yes! I feel like only MF DOOM can do this shit. I read a really interesting write up on MF DOOM from Ta-Nehisi Coates recently. Coates seems like the nicest guy ever - he's so smart but also completely unpretentious. He writes for Marvel and The New Yorker and seems to easily move between those worlds. (I was in a comic book shop today and feeling kind of out of place but the bald, bearded goth guy behind the counter was super nice, and declared the book I put on the counter an “awesome read” and then he recommended some other stuff to me as well. This is a wildly irrelevant anecdote - was just thinking about comics.) Anyway, Coates talks about DOOM, but also his own experience as a hip hop fan:

I kept the assembled works of Wu-Tang Clan on repeat and stewed, convinced that somewhere around 1998 hip-hop had run out of things to say. I was not alone. Disaffected music fans began to refer to the halcyon days of the eighties and nineties—when every rapper had a d.j., and label owners didn’t vamp in videos, confusing themselves with artists—as “the Golden Era.”

We were the kind of fundamentalists that haunt every genre of popular music. By the end of the nineties, we had started seeking a sound that offered something other than guns, girls, and drugs. Some of us found neo-soul. Others got lost in our parents’ jazz records. And still others were radicalized and turned to U2 and Björk.

Not to be picky, but I feel like Wu-Tang talks about guns, girls and drugs plenty. But they also talk about the Shaolin, martial arts and poverty and I guess that's the difference. Anyway, I never knew why DOOM wore the mask, but he says:

I wanted to get onstage and orate, without people thinking about the normal things people think about. Like girls being like, ‘Oh, he’s sexy,’ or ‘I don’t want him, he’s ugly,’ and then other dudes sizing you up. A visual always brings a first impression. But if there’s going to be a first impression I might as well use it to control the story. So why not do something like throw a mask on?

Huh. This other musician I like, Brock Berrigan (he makes really nice beats -you should check him out), always wears a chicken head mask - possibly for reasons similar to DOOM's. For me, that reasoning doesn't check out though, because aren't people obsessed with unmasking? I guess if nothing else it creates an iconic image around your act without that having to literally be your face the way it is with most other artists. ANYWAY, I guess lyrics don't need to be technically amazing like DOOM's to be entertaining - this dude Open Mike Eagle has some good lines. From his track "Ziggy Starfish (Anxiety Raps)":

I log into my Twitter page And start bending over like Gollum This dumb cred is like crack rock And I never seem to hit bottom

Sweet Gollum reference - I had to look this one up. The "bending over" kind of threw me: I thought he was maybe saying something about hoes on social media but then why would he be bending over? Then I thought maybe he was saying he was gay and hoeing on social media himself but it still seems weird to invoke Gollum in that context, right? I like Gollum as much as the next person (i.e. a lot), but I would not be super keen to draw comparisons between his appearance and my own (although we do share the same sickly pallor and blue eyes - plus, I too have spent many years living in a cave). According to Rap Genius (and the line's context - I am truly an idiot for not getting it sooner. Maybe I just wanted it to be something sexual to do with Gollum) he's just saying that he's addicted to Twitter and the praise/attention it affords him, similar to how Gollum is addicted to the ring (and crouching).

From age 18 - 21 I was super into Fleet Foxes (I think they hold up. They're pretty irresistible, right?). They have this song "Montezuma" which finishes like this:

Oh man what I used to be Montezuma to Tripoli Oh man oh my oh me

I guess I'm an idiot because when he sings "Montezuma to Tripoli" I always heard "Montezuma 2 Triple E" and imagined it stylised like this: Montezuma 2EEE. Tripoli obviously makes more sense but it never even occurred to me that he was saying that. I thought he was referring to something mysterious and abstract. (Writing it out like EEE makes it look like a bra cup size. I don't know if they do triple cup sizes (they do!). Even doubles make no sense to me. Okay, so I've quickly Googled it. If you're curious: it turns out that a double or triple letter cup size indicates that the boob being cupped sits somewhere between two cup sizes - so a DDD breast is bigger than a DD breast which is bigger than a D breast, and all of them are smaller than E. That's what this website says anyway. But this whole framework really falls down with the AA cup, because a AA is smaller than an A. It should at least be consistent. I've been wearing bras for years (big shot coming through) and am only now learning about all of this. To be honest, I am incredibly guesstimate-y with my bra shopping: band size is pretty consistent but cup size swings wildly across the alphabet. Should probably get fitted but I feel awkward being fondled by a shop assistant. Plus, it's not like I walk into a bra shop and immediately think that the shop attendants have great breasts - why should I take their advice?) 

Montezuma 2EEE: I imagined some weird website which was techy and totally opaque to me, but also somehow involved Aztec emperors. I kind of want to make a weird, pointless website ("isn't that what this blog is, Kath?") because I have pinelife.net and nothing is happening there - I post all my Pinelife blog posts there too (which I know is a real waste of effort - my time is worth nothing so I don't mind wasting that) but I kind of prefer Wordpress' text editor to Tumblr's so it has that advantage. I found this really weird website (please please check it out) a while ago via the House of Leaves subreddit and found it so intriguing and exciting. I don't know why, but I had this insane rush of adrenaline while I was exploring the website. It was cool. Maybe I should make a weird, labyrinthine, pointless website of my own: it'll have shitty navigation, the font and background will be the same colour, possibly other things will be wrong with it too. It'd be something to do anyway. Maybe instead of making a book object I could make a website object - is that a thing? This might be a good way to waste some (more) of my time anyway. I do kind of want to make something. I’ve been bored with blogging for a while. Or, I don’t know - I enjoy doing it and looking back on my old posts (out of the vault: remember this one about cynicism and church? I was so proud of that. Weirdly, my favourite post from last year is this stupid one about pizza which was really low effort) but I don’t know if there’s anything I’ve written in the last year that I’m that proud of. The year went really fast and I feel like I’ve change a bit (or maybe a lot, I’m not sure). 

Montezuma2eee.com is available. Hmmm. I already have pinelife.net. Is it greedy to want another domain? I doubt Montezuma2eee is going anywhere (but I’d feel like quite the fool if someone did take it from me - I can’t really be the first to think it’s 2EEE - it literally sounds exactly like it). Anyway, I should play around on pinelife.net for a bit before making the $0.99 commitment to a new domain. 

Urgh. I’m an idiot. I nuked pinelife.net and all of the images I’ve uploaded to Wordpress there are gone and I’m lazy and never bothered to upload them to stupid tumblr, I just copied them and now they’re gone. I hate myself. Why didn’t I think for like half a second before deleting everything? Plus, there must be a better way to delete Wordpress beyond FTPing in and trawling through all my folders and deleting anything with a wp prefix. What happens if I just delete everything, like all the folders, and just start from scratch? I’ve forgotten how all this works. (This blog post is a real, rambling steam of consciousness. If I had any editorial credibility I would not publish this thing.)

Hey, talking about me trying to be creative: I was just hunting around my writing folder (basically untouched since 2015) and found this monstrosity I made to mourn the demise of Google Reader (wtf is/was wrong with me?). Jesus I have no memory of making this. Troublingly, I feel very pleased with this thing and its weirdness (obviously if I was genuinely embarrassed I wouldn’t share it here). This would have been 2013.

Also, I won’t post this, but I found an old poem I wrote (lame) in 2012 for uni which is all bullet points and features the word “pre-cum” in the first line. 22 year old me: why?

More? This is the start to a novel I was writing when I was 22/23:

Sirens by the swamp. The river doesn’t move in the summer heat: green carpet of scum across the surface. Two police cruisers are parked on the grass, another blocks the footpath. An officer unfurls yellow tape.

In a local 7/11 the Slurpee machine releases its hold on life and a stickiness of Cola flavoured low calorie slush spills forth. Potato salad is left to putrefy at a hundred backyard barbeques. In a thousand shitty sedans the steering wheel is too hot to hold. In a million armpits sweat prickles through dark hair to find cool air.

The body is partially submerged in the swamp. Obscured by slime and dark water, her hair is tangled in water grass, an eel nuzzles her cheek. From the waist down she is naked, seething with ants and flies. There is a tattoo of a dragon on her hip. If there was a lot of blood it’s now vanished into the mud. Someone has performed a riverside hysterectomy: it was not tidily done.

Sirens by the swamp. Five girls stand in the shade under the bridge: jutting hips, bare feet, iPhones, string bikinis, denim shorts. One pops gum as a police officer asks her preliminary questions. Another discretely photographs the crime scene with her phone. Their families are not expecting them for lunch. It’s Werribee and it’s Christmas day.

****

ppl made a new word for wh@ happened. they said th@ she had been uncunted. 2 b fair it was pretty bad nd even sum of tha sirens said they thought a line had been crossd. dead girl wasn’t even from werribee. actually th@s probably why she was dumb enough 2 go down by tha river

the thing th@ made me haha was th@ channel 10 made such a big deal about her being found by tha sirens b/c theyre young girls and tha news ppl tried to make out like its not a safe town 4 girls nd like girls shouldnt go out alone nd they tried to use tha sirens as an eg of young women in peril. but it was like oh man have u got it wrong. those river girls are bad

honestly werribee is fine so long as ur not fool enouf 2 go down by tha river. th@ is the ao for sirens nd eeeeevery1 nos not to go their less they want they dick sucked nd there future ruined. haha 4 real the news crews + police r lucky they didnt get uncunted 2

#MF DOOM #Jake One #Ta-Nehisi Coates #Gollum #Google Reader #Fleet Foxes #open mike eagle #Brock Berrigan

[that-curly-haired-lesbian]

Hey! Could you possibly do a queer reading into Dear John and how it could possibly be about coming out?

Dear John…I-I mean @ryanprettyboyrossI just wanted to start out by telling you that I’ve been excited about writingthis forever,but then depression sucker-punched me in the soul and put a stop to all mywriting (academic or otherwise) for literal weeks and when I finally got out ofthat there was a ton of essay to write… fuuuuun! 🙃🙃🙃

Anywayyyy, I’m out ofmy funk and just wanted to let you know that ever since you sent me this askages ago I’ve been intrigued by it.

I thank you all foryour patience during my absence and hope that this analysis was worth the wait! 😊

Dear John is one of my absolute favorite Taylor songs and in myopinion one of her most underrated, but solid works lyrics-wise.

In it I think hertalents as a poet and writer really shines through (friendlyreminder that Tay wrote the whole Speak Nowalbum by herself at 19 *cries in pride*) and for that I adore the freaking sparkleout of the song in question.

However, as I’vepreviously mentioned in asks and the like, for me it’s also always been one ofthe most interesting and complex ones to analyze. I’ve always kind of assumed Dear John is one of those songs that isnot what it seems.

My theory for a longtime has been that it’s some kind of metaphor describing queer identity andexperience and then you came along and placed this coming-out-narrative in mylap. Thank you very much, by asking me to stick to that thesis you’ve made myjob a lot easier, otherwise this analysis would’ve been all over the place withpossible theories! 😊

So let’s talk aboutthis for a sec, the majority of the fandom seem to assume it’s a song writtenabout the conveniently named John Meyer with whom Taylor was allegedly in arelationship from December 2009-February 2010. Meyer even went along with thatnarrative claiming the song “humiliated” him (x) to which Taylor responded thathe was being presumptuous in blatantly assuming the song to be about him. (x)

While therelationship did last for Taylor’s bearding-standard of 3 months a lot ofGaylors do seem convinced that Meyer was Taylor’s one (at least post-fame) non-PRboyfriend, for my personal thoughts on that please read this ask. (x)

Meyer may be namedJohn and the timeline during which the song was written may fit with thetimeline of whatever was going on between him and Taylor (PR or otherwise) but “DearJohn” as a phrase or title has a history longer than that.

Perhaps what most contemporary people think of(besides the Taylor song, provided they have any musical taste at all 😊)when hearing the phrase is the 2010 movie by the same name (it possibly cameout right around the time Tay was writing the song and we do know she likesromantic movies, so she may very well have found her inspiration there) whichin turn is based on the 2006 novel by Nicholas Sparks.

Another perhaps lessknown use of the phrase is the so called “Dear John letter.”

It refers to a wifeor girlfriend writing her husband/boyfriend a letter while he’s in themilitary, the letter is written to inform him that his partner has foundsomeone else and wants to break up/divorce, the phrase dates back to at leastWorld War II.

Wikipedia defines a “DearJohn letter” simply as “a break-up letter to an absent boyfriend or husband.”(x)

That does indeed seemto fit the bill for the song, Taylor sings to a “John” that is no longer a partof her life and informs him why the relationship had to end. (This song is to let you know why.”)

So, if the song isn’tabout John Meyer at all and we were just encouraged to think so, who or what isit really about?

Well, John is apretty common all-American name, in fact it was so common during the WWII erathat it was picked specifically to be a placeholder name when referring tobreakup letters addressed to solders (“Dear John letters.”) I think it’spossible that Taylor is using this pretty generic name as a placeholder too.

In the context of hersong “John” is the set of rules, ideas and practices (such as bearding) put inplace within the music/entertainment industry (specifically the country scene)to systematically closet performers to “save” or benefit their careers. 🤮

Long story short, Ibelieve “John” to be the heteronormativity and societal pressures to conform tosaid normativity which is keeping our singer in the closet. If you will, “John”is her own internalized homophobia which is stopping her from publicly comingout.

That being said thisis just an idea (cred to the asker, @ryanprettyboyross of course) on what thesong may be about, I personally have thought up many a theory regarding thisone in my time and everyone else is free to do so as well.

Credit for the lyricsbeing used goes to AZLyrics as usual; you all know the drill by now.

Without further ado,let’s get analyzin’

–

Long were the nights when

My days once revolved around you

Counting my footsteps

Praying the floor won’t fall through, again

–

Let’s have a look at these opening lines, Taylorclaims to have difficulty sleeping, this is because her life (or “her days” akaher every waking moment) revolves around pleasing someone who isn’t herself. 

Her days revolve around living up to the perfect image of America’s LittleHeterosexual Sweetheart™ that her team as well as her masses of adoringconservative fans built for her.

She can’t truly be herself and has to be careful whatshe does, what she says and how she acts. A feeling I’m sure many closetedpeople are more familiar with than they’d like.

She watches her every steps, every movement, everyword very carefully as to not accidentally out herself. She prays that peoplewon’t catch on and she’ll fall from her country princess throne (or through thedelicate floor of heteronormativity she has to constantly step on) and ruin herown career.

That constant fear is stressful for anyone who iscloseted, but must be so on an evendeeper level for someone who’s so public and simultaneously so deep in thecloset. A sad fate for such a young, talented artist and quite frankly it devastatesme to think about it in any greater detail. 💔

–

And my mother accused me of losing my mind

But I swore I was fine

–

Taylor must feel lonely to say the least, essentiallybeing required to refrain from being herself and hiding her truth, but one can atleast hope she has the unwavering support of her family and close friends towhom I think it’s safe to assume she’s out and has been for quite a long time. (Probably at least since high school, maybeeven earlier? My point is that she was most likely out to at least the family,if not to most of her friends long pre-fame.)

Her mother is mentioned here and my interpretation ofthe line is that Andrea is starting to see what the constant bearding andheteronormativity is doing to her daughter.

Perhaps she worries that Taylor is truly losing hersense of self and inquires whether the oldest of her children feels the PRgames have gone too far and if she wants to stop it and publicly come out? Afterall, Taylor’s parents raised her in a family free from homophobia if we’re tobelieve Taylor herself.

Taylor however reassures her mother that it’s fine;it’s all just a necessary part of the job and a small price to pay to get tolive her professional dream.

Chely Wright, a lesbian country singer who was closetedin the industry for a long time wrote the following in her book, Like Me: Confessions of a Heartland CountrySinger:

“I’d made a dealwith God early on that I’d go without love in my life, just give me music” (x)and I think that’s a pretty universal mindset among closeted musicians.

The chance to have music and performance andcreativity in one’s life is worth giving up on a happy and truthful personallife for. As long as you get to practice your art any personal sacrifices don’tmatter, or at least they’re not supposed to. Taylor promised her mother thiswas the case for her as much as anyone else.

–

You paint me a blue sky

And go back and turn it to rain

–

Here I think Taylor’s describing what this idea islike in theory, the idea of a fruitful career with hordes of adoring fans andcommercial success is all she ever dreamed of ever since she was a little girlwho repeatedly begged her parents to relocate the family to Nashville.

In practice though, it turns out Nashville is a prettyscary place for a young, gay singer, in fact the community there is viciouslyhomophobic. (x) Something that probably became apparent to Taylor pretty soon.

The perfect dream of country music stardom wasTaylor’s blue sky, but pretty soon it had been turned to rain by the systematichomophobia in the community she now found herself a part of.

–

And I lived in your chess game

But you changed the rules everyday

–

PR is a lot like chess, it’s one thoroughly thoughtout move after another, but instead of getting your opponent’s queen you moveand strategize in the hopes to please the general public with its conservativecountry fans. Not only them, but also producers, record labels and PR teams allcommitted to keeping the public image of heterosexuality, the one that sells andkeeps their artists afloat in the mainstream.

Taylor does her best to keep up with these moves andcountermoves, but it confuses her and she feels like what is expected of herchanges from day to day thus causing her to struggle with keeping up. Whatshe’s allowed to do, say and sing all changes constantly to adapt to the latestPR strategy and Taylor feels lost and helpless in the machinery that is theeconomy of homophobia, like a pawn lost on a giant chessboard.

–

Wonderin’ which version of you I might get on the phone,tonight

Well I stopped pickin’ up and this song is to let youknow why

–

Who is she talking about here then?

Well, I think this line is describing her relationshipto Team Taylor. I am assuming a kid like Taylor has had extensive mediatraining on how “not to appear gay” or whatever *puke* so if she messes up shelikely knows she’s going to get a call from her publicist.

Sometimes I’m sure that phone call wasn’t all toonice, as we’ve discussed before it seems Taylor’s publicist from her youngerdays was a very big fan of having Taylor stay in the closet, so if Taylor daredto publicly venture out of it in even the smallest of ways I’m sure she’d knowwhy that wasn’t advisable by the end of the night.

I’m not saying Taylor’s publicist was homophobic ornasty or mean, because obviously I don’t know that. I’m saying however, that I’msure she did what she thought was necessary to protect Taylor’s career andimage (aka to keep her safely closeted.)

I’m also not saying Taylor literally stopped pickingup or started ignoring her publicist, I think what the “stopped pickin’up-line” means is that perhaps she stopped listening, or at least she stoppedletting what was said get to her.

The song as she mentions was written to let “you” knowwhy it is that she stopped listening.

I don’t think“you” is the publicist, I actually think that “you” here is a more general you,as in all of the people who tried to get Taylor to understand that homophobiais just a given part of the music industry.

This is the song where Taylor says she’ll keep goingalong with their games, at least for the time being, but she’s had enough ofthe self-hatred.

As young gay people I think we’re all familiar withhow being constantly surrounded by homophobia, be it from our parents,classmates, or just society in general (or you know, a conservative musicindustry) keeps us from truly accepting ourselves.

We may very well be aware that we’re gay, but we don’thave to like it, we can wish it away and hate ourselves for feeling what we’refeeling. (Chely Wright’s Wish Me Away,anyone?)

Dear John isthe turning point for Taylor, she decides that no matter what anyone else saysand the fact that she has to stay in the closet, she can still love herself andbe okay with who she is, at least within herself. Just because she’s goingalong with the bearding and the heteronormativity doesn’t mean she has toapprove of it, she doesn’t need to hate herself just because it seems everyoneelse does. Somehow there’s strength in that heartbreak, I think.

–

Dear John, I see it all now that you’re gone.

Don’t you think I was too young

To be messed with?

–

As the chorus comes around Taylor addresses her owninternalized homophobia (who she’s apparently named John, perhaps becausesociety expects her to conform to their heteronormativity and end up with aJohn, a generic cishet boy) for the first time.

Now that her internalized homophobia/“John” is goneand she’s realized she doesn’t have hate herself she’s starting to see howfucked up it was that she ever did in the first place.

Many on thissite have discussed the fact that a pre-fame Taylor didn’t seem scared ofappearing gay, but it seems sometime after her mainstream recognition there wasa shift and she started fearing her gay side.

The heteronormative, homophobic values within theindustry truly messed with her, as she chose to word it. She went from out andproud to closeted and terrified.

She brings her age into the conversation, asking ifshe wasn’t too young to be messed with?

It seems that Taylor is as livid as me when it comesto the prospect of society teaching kids to internalize homophobia andself-hatred.

She wasn’t brought up that way (x) but she came tolearn that she was supposed to be ashamed of who she was as soon as she wastold by the people in the industry, the very people who were supposed to lookout for her that she had to sing about boys and “not act gay” if she everwanted to get on the radio or reach mainstream success.

–

The girl in the dress

Cried the whole way home, I should’ve known.–

The “girl-in-the-dress-line” is interesting to me andperhaps it is the line that resonates most with me in this entire song.

As someone who’s all too familiar with being forced toact feminine and wear dresses and being guilty of constantly policing their ownbody language as to not “act too gay” or “too un-feminine” I can say that I seemuch of myself in that person who wants to rip their pretty dress to shreds,but just ends up crying about it when no one can see instead.

Why? Well, making a public statement and refusing towear the dress would mean taking a step out from the shadow of thatinternalized self-hatred.

Admittedly though, I struggle with dysphoria which I’massuming (or rather hoping since I wouldn’t wish it on anyone) Taylor hasn’t. Despitethis I would say that being uncomfortable in dresses and “not being yourtypical princess” (to borrow a phrase from Taylor) isn’t limited to those of uswho aren’t actually girls, there are girls and women who aren’t comfortablewith being feminine or with wearing stereotypically feminine clothes (“she wears short skirts, I wear t-shirts”)and I’ve previously spoken of how I suspect Taylor to be one of them. (x)

Obviously I can’t know that for sure, but I feel thatperhaps Taylor is a lot less feminine than she publicly lets on and that’swhere this dress-line comes in.

With its beer and its cowboy hats and manly men Iwould assume that in addition to being at least implicitly homophobic thecountry music scene is also fairly dependent on gender roles, meaning that forsomeone like Taylor that means dresses and boys and makeup galore.

In my analysis of NewRomantics I mentioned that attending some event with a boy she barely knewand a pretty dress must’ve felt incredibly alienating at times to a young starwho’s just started understanding the perceived necessity of bearding andheteronormativity in this industry. So alienating in fact that I wouldn’t blameher for shedding a few tears from time to time, “mascara tears in the bathroom”as well as tears on the way home in a pretty dress she didn’t want to wear.

The dress couldalso be a metaphor of course, one to describe the heteronormative role she’dbeen forced into with all the bearding and femininity. A metaphor that’s saying“the girl you made look so pretty on the outside felt so ugly and ashamed onthe inside” the girl in the pretty dress that appeared to have it all couldn’t bringherself to be truly happy. (Lucky One, anyone?)

Lastly she’s saying she should’ve known this would bethe outcome of entering the industry, she should’ve known it had been naive tothink she could continue to be her authentic self while also being mainstreamfamous.

–

Well maybe it’s me

And my blind optimism to blame

Or maybe it’s you and your sick need

To give love then take it away

–

Whose fault is it, then, that poor Taylor is somiserable?

Well, she suggests, maybe it’s her own for being sonaively optimistic and thinking that staying closeted wouldn’t feel like a bigdeal as long as she got to work with music. Or maybe it’s the industry’s faultfor adoring and praising her as long as she followed their set of rules, buttaking that love away the moment she started to break the rules, not to mentionthreatening to take the fame away entirely should she ever dare come out. It’ssick says Taylor, how two-faced these so-called “fans” and “supporters” are andI wholeheartedly agree!

–

And you’ll add my name to your long list of traitorswho don’t understand

And I’ll look back in regret how I ignored when theysaid,

“Run as fast as you can.”

–

We’ve talked about “gender traitors” before, a termthat shows up in Margaret Atwood’s TheHandmaid’s Tale from 1985 (as well as the excellent 2017 HBO series) aswell as in a bunch of feminist course lit I’m familiar with, to describe homosexualsand primarily homosexual women.

I know Taylor likes classical literature, but I can’tbe sure if she’s read that one, although I hope so since it’s brilliant!

Anyway, regardless of her reading habits I don’t thinkthe term is what Taylor’s referring to here. I think she’s simply saying theindustry will blacklist her. Put her on a list of traitors to the industry whoaren’t committed to upholding the order and the rules and doesn’t understandwhy it’s necessary to keep the environment so conservative and unaccepting.

In other words,were she to ever come out the country music community would freeze her out.This seems to be a real fear among those in the closet in Nashville and Chely Wright spoke about it at length. (x)

Someone seems to have warned Taylor not to getinvolved with the bearding and the systematic closeting. Maybe it was hermother or someone else who saw the potential dangers of internalized hatredsuch a process would create within such a young girl and thus advised Taylor torefuse to conform and run far away from that homophobic nonsense before shelost her sense of self.

Taylor of course, didn’t listen she was too busyreaching for the dream of music she’d always wanted and now that she’s olderand wiser she of course regrets letting the closeting process be the price shepaid for it all, but she was young and thought the adults who told her to goback in the closet knew what was best. Now of course, she wished she would’verun and taken steps to be an out artist from the start, instead of going usualroute of forced closeting and aggressive hetero marketing.

–

 (Chorus)

–

Dear John, I see it all now it was wrong

Don’t you think nineteen’s too young

To be played by your dark, twisted games?

When I loved you so, I should’ve known.

–

At one point in time Taylor obviously had a real andvery strong love for country music (and given the fact that she still occasionallyghost-writes a country hit or two I’d say she still does) but here she addresses“John” who now seems to be the country music industry itself and says shethinks she was too young to be dragged into the systematic homophobia thatlives rampant within that industry. She loved the music so much, she loved thepeople and the aesthetic, but the dark side of the industry in Nashville was anunfair price to pay for that love Taylor reasons. Don’t forget that Dear John was on Speak Now the album that came before Red which in turn was the first album where Taylor definitelystarted leaning more towards pop music. 

She’s said that Red wasn’t “sonically cohesive” and there seems to be a reasonfor that, Red wanted to be pop, butTaylor didn’t yet dare to fully take the leap that’d later come with 1989 and leave country behind, so Red became a mixture of Taylor’s desireto break free from country music and her very strong love for it, a toxicrelationship indeed, with the country music industry.

Nonetheless I think Dear John was Tay’s breakup song for country music, Red was the first step towards leavingthat industry behind and Dear John waswhen she first decided it was time to do so and shake off (sorry I couldn’t resist) that homophobic environment.

–

You are an expert at “Sorry”

And keeping lines blurry

Never impressed by me acing your tests

–

She laments some more about the rules and the peoplewithin the country music “machine” (as Wright refers to it) she says they’revery good at not personally being homophobic, it’s like when someone says “Ihave nothing against you gays, BUT”  the industry at large and perhaps mostlythe people within it who work close to Taylor claim that they wish things couldbe different, but that the homophobic structure in the music industry is necessaryto uphold it or whatever. They’re basically experts at making excuses for whyhomophobia is so deeply ingrained in Nashville and country communities ingeneral. They keep the lines blurry between claiming they’re keeping Taylorcloseted to protect her from the homophobia exuded by fans and parts of themusic industry and by doing it because they themselves are blatantly homophobicand scared Taylor will stop making them money if she comes out.

It’s the sortof situation where you think “Are they doing this to protect me or to protectthemselves?”    

Taylor plays her role perfectly, she has everyoneconvinced she’s as straight as they come and yet Team Taylor don’t seem happy,they have more hoops for her to jump through and more strategies with which tokeep her locked in the closet and they never seem 100% happy with Taylor’s “StraightPerformance (aka her “Acing their tests”)

–

All the girls that you’ve run dry have tired lifelesseyes

Cause you’ve burned them out

–

Then she goes on to mention other people who are inthe closet and work in country music, or in Hollywood, people (and here,specifically other women) whose closeting processes are so far along that theyhave just accepted they’ll never be able to come out and live as their trueselves. Girls who have accepted this is just their lives now.

The girls who go into lavender marriages and just dealwith it, no one being able to spot just how dead they are behind the eyes,except for a young, fellow gay who’s terrified she’ll end up like them. End uplike the women the entertainment industry  has already ran dry and ensnared in their PR gamesto the point where they see no way out, girls who are so closeted they’ll taketheir truths to their graves.

–

But I took your matches

Before fire could catch me

So don’t look now

I’m shining like fireworks

Over your sad empty town

–

It might be too late for those girls, Taylor pointsout, but not for me, not yet. By writing this song she’s taking the firsttentative step towards stopping her own closeting process. She won’t let theindustry dampen her passion for music or her will to be herself, she’s stoppedthem now, or at least she’s going to, they’re going to witness her succeed evenwhile breaking out of that tightly locked closet. She’ll shine like (colorful… 🌈🌈) fireworks over the sad reality that is homophobia and bearding.

–

(Chorus)

–

 I see it all now that you’re gone

Don’t you think I was too young

To be messed with?

The girl in the dress

Wrote you a song, you should’ve known.

–

Now that she’s decided to slowly but surely leave itbehind she can see how messed up systematic closeting is, especially when doneto someone so young and hopeful as herself.

 The girl they dressed up andfeminized, hetero-proofed™ against her will when she was still too young toknow any better wrote them all a song about how messed up they are.

They should’ve known she wasn’t like the others and wouldn’tlet herself be trapped and limited, go Taylor!! 🌈🌈🌈

–

So perhaps the way I wrotethat didn’t frame the song in so much a coming-out-narrative as an it’s-okay-to-want-to-come-out-narrativeand it’s okay to take tiny steps towards that goal while simultaneouslyflipping off everyone who want to stop you. 🌈

Hope you alllike that idea of this song. 😊

I can’t promiseanything, but I’m hopefully back now as my essay is due next Friday, whereupon Ishall have more time to hang out here and talk to you guys and do analysis regularlyagain! (Hopefully every Sunday)

I’ve really missed itas well as all of you, so if you guys have requests for songs to be analyzed inthe future or just questions for me about Kaylor, Gaylor or anything else, myaskbox is open! 😊

Next song to be analyzedaccording to my list is Fearless! 💃🌈

#gaylor swift #kaylor #songs #queer analysis #asks

[that-curly-haired-lesbian]

Can I have a queer analysis of Treacherous? I know it's low-hanging fruit but it's my current favorite Taylor song.

Wow, I’m clearly ahuge pushover when it comes to personal deadlines! In all seriousness though, thelast few days have been insane! I apologize to anon and everyone else who’sbeen waiting for this; but yes buddy, you can absolutely have an analysis of Treacherous. After all it’s a great songand imo it’s one of Taylor’s gayest!

All interoperation ofthe lyrics are my own and everyone else is free to view it as they personallysee fit, this is merely a suggestion for how to read the song.

AZLyrics provided thelyrics for this as always, so cred to them.

–

Put your lips close to mine

As long as they don’t touch

Out of focus, eye to eye

Till the gravity’s too much

–

Opening lines make something pretty clear, this is asexy song. It’s a song about temptation and lust and most of all it’s a songabout giving in to those things.

So we’re talking about a kiss here or perhaps moreaccurately, the moment just beforeyou kiss someone, when your lips are very close to theirs but not yet touching.How everything else sort of goes out of focus when you’re physically that closeto another person and how all you can see are their eyes and perhaps moreimportantly in this context, their lips. Then finally in the last line gravitypulls the two lovers together and they close the small distance left betweentheir lips and kiss.

“But, Theo!” You all shriek in alarm, “You haven’ttalked about any gay stuff yet, what makes these lines specifically gay?” Well,the pronoun of the lover is kept unspecified for one and the lines could be talking about how as closetedgay lovers you’re constantly tiptoeing that line of what is the appropriatedegree of affection to show in public. You can’t kiss, but is putting your lipsclose together and looking deeply into each other’s eyes, letting the rest ofthe world go out of focus okay? Yes, as long as your lips don’t touch you couldget away with it says Taylor. It’s a risk though, because sometimes the gravitybecomes too much and pulls you in when you’re that close together so the safe betis to only do stuff like that when alone with your secret gay lover, but thenagain nothing safe is worth the drive, is it? Nope, that’s what this whole songis about.

–

And I’ll do anything you say

If you say it with your hands

And I’d be smart to walk away

But you’re quicksand

–

The first time I heard this song I was actually quite surprisedat how racy this was for a Taylor song (of course this was before both 1989 and Reputation)

This is about sex in case anyone was confused and thehands-line immediately brings lesbian sex to mind so that’s um…gayyyyyyyy! 🌈🌈

+ the fact thatTaylor will do anything her lover asks her to (in the bedroom and maybe evenout of it, but we’ll get to that later) as long as she “says it with her hands”also implies that said lover is really, really good at the whole sex thing. So,um, eh, good going, Dianna! …I guess…Tay, this was almost TMI for someone who’sbeen listening to you since you were 16! Seriously, every time Taylor alludesto something sexual in her songs my first thought is always: “Oh my god, stopit Taylor, you’re twelve!”

Kidding, kidding; please keep writing explicitly aboutgay sex, we need more songs about that and I’m proud of you for letting yourlyrics grow up with you!  

Anyway, after the whole sex thing Taylor informs usthat the smart thing to do would be to walk away from her lover and theirrelationship, but she’s in too deep already and her relentless unforgivingattraction (physical as well as emotional) to this woman just keeps pulling herdeeper still, as if she was stuck in quicksand unable to move.

–

This slope is treacherous

This path is reckless

This slope is treacherous

And I, I, I like it

–

We’ve previously talked about Taylor using “dangerous”or “reckless” as a word for exploring or indulging in one’s same-sex attraction(similar to how she sometimes uses “princess” for heterosexual girls and otherwords associated with royalty/fairy-tales for her career-motivated, publichetero-image) and this song is the ultimate example of this.

She’s saying she knows that acting on her attraction tothis woman is a dangerous, reckless thing to do, but she’s also saying that shelikes it, she likes the element of danger, she likes being attracted to womenand to this one in particular. Being in lesbian relationships is a treacherousthing when you’re closeted and famous, for this same reason it’s also not asmart thing (career-wise) for her to do, II’s a slippery slope towards beingcaught in a compromising gay moment and having to come out. She knows all thisand yet she doesn’t care, because she wants the relationship, the love and thepreviously stated hella good sex.  (“We need love, but all we want is danger”)

–

I can’t decide if it’s a choice

Getting swept away

I hear the sound of my own voice

Asking you to stay

–

So Taylor knows that acting on these gay desires ofhers are not to recommend and yet she finds herself asking the girl to say withher to try and make the relationship work, because just as Taylor can’t controlher attraction to women (because, ya know, being gay is in no way a choice)“getting swept away” and falling for someone isn’t a choice either. Despitewhat Taylor says about now being able to tell if she’s chosen this predicamentfor herself by encouraging the ill-advised relationship to go on, we in fact donot control when and how we fall in love.

Being with Dianna may not be the smartest thing forwhatever reason, be it the gay thing or other aspects of thismaybe-not-entirely-healthy relationship. As Taylor herself has admitted therelationship most of the songs on Red areabout was in fact toxic in some ways. (x)

All that be damned though, Taylor is in love and wantsher girlfriend to stay despite it all.

–

And all we are is skin and bone

Trained to get along

Forever going with the flow

But you’re friction

–

To me the “skin and bones”-line could indicate that much ofthe relationship is sexual at this point, Like their chemistry and connection is now mostly sexual…I guess that this could also betalking about beards though, oddly enough…Hear me out here. So, Taylor and herbeards are in a sense trained to get along, Taylor (presumably) not beingattracted to men has to pretend to be all the time, not just in music videos orwhen she uses male pronoun in a song, but also to her beards and since she’ssupposedly dating this guy their chemistry has to look natural. Skin and boneprobably refers to a body right and my first impulse was to relate it to bodiesin literal, (gay) sexual context since like I’ve said this song is prettysexual, but what if she just means that she’s trained to get along with themale body out in public (just as her gay beards have to pretend to be attractedto girls and the female body in order to make them look convincing as acouple.)  Since their chemistry has tolook real and couple-y Taylor tends to just “go with the flow” and do whatlooks natural when in public with le beard (mostly just hold his hand)

This is whatshe’s been “trained” (by PR-team and publicists) to be able to do with males inorder to be “straight-passing”, but going with the flow and acting natural withyour “boyfriend” when you have a relationship with your secret girlfriendbecomes hard. Taylor often refers to herself as an “actress” in the context ofbearding and acting becomes harder when you have something real to compare itto. There are such contrasts between how Taylor acts with her beards and withher actual girlfriend that the real relationship becomes a force pushing Tayloraway from the beards and stopping any chemistry she might’ve been able toforce, blocking her “straight-passing”-ability with real and natural chemistrythat now makes whatever she does with the beards look stiff and forced incomparison (because it is….)

As we know friction is a force that slows down anobject’s movement, in this case, Taylor is the object and the girlfriend is theforce blocking her ability to seem or act straight.

Bonus fact: the “friction”-line is also very coolsince the verses before it follow an ABAB rhyme scheme, but this line goesagainst that just like friction goes against the direction of movement. THE LINE IS LITERALLY FRICTION AND TAYLORALISON SWIFT IS A LYRICAL GENIUS!!

…Sorryfor being such a lit student for a second, moving on now.

–

(Chorus)

–

Two headlights shine through the sleepless night

And I will get you a—get you alone

Your name has echoed through my mind

And I just think you should, think you should know

That nothing safe is worth the drive

–

On 1989 somethingthat seems to come up a lot in the songs that I personally assume to be aboutDianna is cars or driving. That seems to have gotten its start on Red in this song as well as in thetitular song, Red (“Loving her was like driving a new Maseratidown a dead-end street”) in this song we see the car theme yet again. To methe image being painted by this line is always two lovers going home togetherthrough the night, but with no plans of sleeping (😏) hence the sleeplessnight.

“To get someone alone” is a phrase Taylor uses quite alot in her songs and I think it refers to when her and her current girlfriendare not in public and thus can actually act like a couple as opposed tootherwise when they have to pretend to be merely friends. So basically they’redriving home together and away from the heteronormative public.

“Your name has echoed through my mind” or somevariant thereof is also a choice of words Taylor has used in more than one songand it seems to signify that she’s deeply in love or infatuated with someone. Sobasically what she’s saying is that while in public pretending to be platonicwith her girl all she’s actually thought of is how in love she is and how niceit’ll be to be alone and get to be romantic away from flashing cameras andprying eyes.

Here she’s letting the girlfriend know that while she’saware their relationship is “dangerous” (translation: gay) she doesn’t wantanything else, she doesn’t want “safe” (translation: straight) because that’s notreal (a straight relationship couldn’t be real for Taylor since she’s y’know, gay)and therefore wouldn’t be worth the effort, or “the drive” to keep with the cartheme.

–

And I would follow you, follow you home

I’ll follow you, follow you home

–

So, at first glance this seems creepily stalkerish, doesn’tit? *laugh* but I’m pretty sure that what it means is Taylor and Dianna couldn’tleave some sort of public event together. Why? Well, that’d indicate that theywere going home together (which theyobviously were but das gay, shhhhh) so instead Taylor simply left a while afterDianna and proceeded to follow her home in a separate car so they could meet upthere instead of leaving together. The lines simply refer to details you haveto keep in mind when your relationship is secret, such as not publicly goinghome together.

–

This hope is treacherous

This daydream is dangerous

This hope is treacherous

I, I, I… I, I, I… I, I, I…

–

Remember before when I said that maybe the “I’ll doanything you say”-line wasn’t solely applicable in a sexual situation? Yeah,maybe this relationship had gotten Taylor hoping and perhaps even daydreamingabout a possible come out someday. I know there has been Swiftgron speculationabout how Dianna wanted to come out, well maybe Taylor was starting toseriously contemplating doing that for/with her? She still knew however that having hope for thatblissful someday where they could befree to love openly was probably gonna lead to disappointment, it was unwise and daydreaming about it was downright dangerous since that’d feed that littleflicker of hope. Yet Taylor doesn’t seem to be able to help herself here. There’shopefulness in the very way she sings these lines if you ask me.

–

(Chorus)

–

This slope is treacherous

I, I, I like it

–

Speaking of hope, to me it seems like the song ends inquite a hopeful way too, Taylor reminds us again that she’s aware that the pathshe’s headed down may be dangerous and unwise, treacherous if you will, butthen lastly she reminds us again that she actually doesn’t care because shelikes that danger. Remind me, in Taylor’s songs what is described as either “dangerous”or “reckless” (or both) most of the time? That’s right people, Taylor Swift likes being a giant lesbian because G IR L S !!!!!!!!!!!!!! (That’s the most relatable thing I’ve ever heard tbh)

Oh god, Treacherousreally is a gay mess of a song, huh? I,I, I like it…though!

–

Thanks for reading asalways and I hope you enjoyed!

Next song is The Way I Loved You and I will try to have it up tomorrow though we’vealready established I’m not the best with deadlines, but rest assured I am getting to all of my analysis requestssooner or later, that I promise!

Don’t hesitate tosend me asks if you have suggestions for more songs to analyze from a queerperspective or if you just want to talk or have questions! 😊

#gaylor swift #swiftgron #kaylor #songs #queer analysis #asks

[that-curly-haired-lesbian]

Hey, I recently enter this whole Taylor Swift is secretly gay thing (which I totally believe now) and then the other day I was listening to "Better than revenge" and I just read your wonderful "Love story" analysis, so I was wondering if you could maybe do the same with BTR?

Yet another day haspassed without me actually sitting down to type this up, sorry about that, butbeing back at school has been sort of a whirlwind. Anyway enough about mecomplaining…Hello dearest anon and sorry for the wait! I’m so glad you’ve foundyour way to the Gaylor Swift community and I hope you feel welcome. Isn’t itfun when all of Taylor’s lyrics sorta start to make sense the second you applysome queer context to them? Thanks for enjoying my Love Story analysis too 😊

So today’s song is Better Than Revenge as you can see fromthe ask and I was originally gonna spin this completely in a beardingdirection, but then a very observant anon pointed out that the song could alsobe about a boy stealing Tay’s girlfriend. So I’m going to discuss bothperspectives here.

Regardless of whichperspectives I apply to the song though they’re all just my interpretations andI’m not necessarily right in any way, it’s all just speculation.

Before we startthough I also just want to say that I am in no way shaming bi girls here or girlswhose same-sex attraction in fact happens to be a phase. Nor am I insinuatingthat bi girls “aren’t really gay and will leave you for a boy” I obviously donot want to enforce such ridiculous stereotypes or give them any type of merit,bi girls and your attraction to girls are 1000% valid and I love you! 💙💙💗💗 

Lyrics cred toAZLyrics as usual.

–  

“Now go stand in the corner and think about whatyou did.”

–

Something we’re gonna see mostly in the chorus of thissong are references to children/things associated with children/childishbehavior and this is the first of such references. As you may or may not knowit’s common for Taylor to refer to the bearding practice as a game and to thebeards themselves as toys in her songs. This is what inclines me to think thissong may be more about being snubbed of a beard than a girlfriend being unfaithful,but more on that later, back to the line itself.

These s spoken words at the beginning of the song isseemingly shaming one of the subjects (unclear if it’s the boy or girlactually, but more likely the girl if we’re keeping in tune with the rest ofthe lyrics) of Taylor’s anger to stand in a corner and think about all the badthings they’ve done. Much like a child being sent to timeout.

–

The story starts when it was hot and it was summerand…

I had it all; I had him right there where I wanted him

She came along, got him alone and let’s hear theapplause

She took him faster than you could say“sabotage”

–

An interesting thing to consider is that this song ison the Speak Now album, you know theone Taylor wrote all herself and that famously has a bit of a fairy-tale/storytheme both in its lyrics and in the sets and costumes made for the tour. Well,this isn’t the first or last time on this album that Taylor refers to an eventfrom her love life as a “story”. 

According to her this specific story starts inthe summer at which point she was happily involved with a boy, until some girlcame along and stole his heart, leaving Taylor alone and scorned with asabotaged relationship. At least that’s the hetero narrative and if we’re toconsider the stolen-girlfriend-narrative not much changes except for perhapsthe pronoun of the person that came along to steal Taylor’s partner. If we’reto assume her girlfriend wasn’t stolen by another gay girl it’d be a boymeaning the pronoun in the above lines should switch places, making it:

“I had it all, I had HER rightthere where I wanted HER

HE came along, got HER alone andlet’s hear the applause

HE took HER faster than you couldsay “sabotage” “

 Instead of the original het lyrics, easy (and gay) enough,right?

If we’re to consider the breading possibility though,the lines become a little more interesting to me, you see the language usedhere doesn’t seem like it’d be used to describe a happy relationship to me, letme explain…

It’s summer, Taylor has the perfect beard (Joe Jonas?)and then some other gay girl just comes right along and steals him from underher nose, leaving Taylor beard-less and annoyed.

Now, onto the language thing I mentioned. Taylor saysshe had the “boyfriend” “right there where she wanted him,” doesn’t soundparticularly loving to me. Actually it sounds more like she’s holding himhostage (like perhaps under a contract?) Then some other girl (and her team) comesalong, gets Taylor’s beard alone (to discuss the terms of a BETTER contract,perhaps?) and sabotages Taylor’s plan and “relationship” by winning the beardover.

–

I never saw it coming, wouldn’t have suspected it

I underestimated just who I was dealing with

She had to know the pain was beating on me like a drum

She underestimated just who she was stealing from

–

So my anon suggested that maybe Taylor was dating abi-curious girl who left her for a boy? These lyrics certainly make it looklike that could make sense.

Anon rightfully pointed out that there’s no focus onthe boy who supposedly cheated and broke Taylor’s heart, there’s only focus onthe girl he cheated with, making it seem like Taylor is more emotionallyattached to the girl and hurt by her actions while she (Taylor) couldn’t careless about the boy involved.

Taylor “never saw it coming and wouldn’t havesuspected it” Suspected what exactly, that the girl she was seeing would end upleaving her for a boy? She didn’t know she was dealing with a bi-curious girl,said girl had no consideration for Taylor’s feelings upon being used like this,to satisfy a curiosity. Even though she must’ve understood it’d hurt Taylor shestill went ahead and left with the boy. As a lesbian who has had the misfortuneof dating and falling for several of these “mostly straight” girls who ended upleaving me for boys this makes sense to me (and also hurts, I feel poor Tay’spain!)

What about the last line though? “She underestimatedjust who she was stealing from” well, this could be a simple case of switchingpronoun in order to #NoHomo-proof again, as in it should really be “HE underestimated just who HE was stealing from”as in, the boy who stole Tay’s girl better watch his back.

Or the pronoun could be right and it’s meant to saythat Taylor’s ex didn’t know whose heart she was stealing and underestimatedthe emotional impact her leaving would have on Taylor, both of those certainlywork for the-stolen-gf narrative.  

How about bearding though? Well while thestolen-gf-thing might work best for making sense of the lines above ashe-stole-my-beard perspective can certainly also be applied. My thought hereis that Taylor never saw it coming that this random girl would show up andmange to win over Taylor’s beard causing him to break the contact they’darranged. Perhaps Taylor underestimated the girl in the sense that sheunderestimated the team, as in she didn’t think the other girl’s managementwould be able to work out a contract that’d interest the beard more than TeamTaylor’s contract did, but she was wrong and caught by surprise.  Then Taylor reflects on how as a fellow gaygirl her rival should understand the pain of being snubbed of a beard and whatan uncomfortable position that put Taylor in, but she clearly didn’t care andthus underestimated just whose beard she was stealing and how Team Taylor mightreact to someone who just waltzes in and steals a perfect bearding arrangement. Basically,“My team is coming for your team and I have lawyers, fuck you!”

–

She’s not a saint

And she’s not what you think

She’s an actress

She’s better known

For the things that she does on the mattress

–

This could either be Taylor trash-talking her ex for“acting gay” and not being who Taylor thought she was, making these linespretty self-explanatory. Or it could be Taylor trash-talking the beard-thiefgiving us a little more to unpack here.  

The first few lines could be referring to how the girlin question isn’t as “perfect” (or saint-like) as the general public thinks sheis, just like Taylor she might have a few “sins” she’s hiding from her fans(just like we’ve established most celebrities do) like homosexuality for example,thus she’s not what her fans think, aka not straight. The actress-line could besaying the girl is literally an actress as to give us a very not-so-tellingclue for who she is (there are many actresses that may be bearding after all)or it might be saying she’s the same type of actress as Taylor (“I’ll be theactress starring in your bad dreams”) and acting straight by bearding.

Mattress-line is interesting, first of all it’sclearly Taylor’s discreet way of calling someone a slut (ew Tay, slut-shamingisn’t cool even if you’re hurt!) It could either mean the girl is known forusing girls for sex, but dating boys (to go with the ex-idea.)

Or it could mean the girl who stole Tay’s beard isknown in the industry for sleeping with/dating girls and fake-dating boys tocover it up, (just like Taylor, this girl’s homosexuality is an open secretamong celebs.)

Although to me it’d be weird to call someone else outfor the exact same things you yourself are doing and basically calling themfake for it since that’d also imply that youare fake; but I digress.

Could mean that she’s known for stealing people’sbeards though, maybe she’d done that before she did it to Tay? Pure speculationthough, obviously; but it would make more sense than Taylor simply calling herout for bearding since that’s something Taylor does too and thus has no rightto be shaming anyone else for, ya feel?

–

Soon she’s gonna find

Stealing other people’s toys

On the playground won’t make you many friends

She should keep in mind

She should keep in mind

There is nothing I do better than revenge

–

Remember that I said we’d be seeing references to toysin the chorus? Well, here we are. I’ve pointed out before that just like Taylorlikes referring to PR and bearding as “a game” she likes talking about the menshe beards with as toys (“toying withthem older guys, just playthings for me to use” to point out one example ofthis metaphor in other songs.) If we’re to go with the het-narrative here somegirl has stolen Taylor’s beloved boyfriend and she’s heartbroken, right? So whyon earth would she be referring to this boy as a toy? To me that sounds likeshe’s using him (or playing with his feelings if you will) and theirrelationship didn’t mean much to her in the first place, almost as if oh Idon’t know, he was a beard used for her PR-games.If we look at PR as a game referring to the PR-people in Taylor’s life as“toys” makes sense, what do you use when you play? That’s right, toys. Here Taylor is telling her rivalthat it’s not nice to steal other people’s beards and that this practice won’tgive her any friends, or a nice reputation in the industry.  

The last few lines look like a threat to me, eitherdirected at the boy who had the never to steal her girl, or at the girl who hadthe nerve to steal her beard.

It looks like the person who stole from Taylor Swiftbetter watch their back as Taylor is letting them know that she might retaliateby 1) writing a song where she bad-mouths the boy for stealing her gf(ex-theory) or retaliate with legal action, alternatively by simply making thisgirl’s life hard in the industry and perhaps even making it a challenge her forher to get beards in the future. (“Won’tmake you any friends”) There’s no telling what Revenge: Taylor Editionmight mean in a bearding situation.

–

She looks at life like it’s a party and she’s on thelist

She looks at me like I’m a trend and she’s so over it

I think her ever-present frown is a little troubling

She thinks I’m psycho ‘cause I like to rhyme her namewith things

–

Ex-theory:

This might mean that the girl Taylor was seeing is oneof those typical straight girls who makes out with other girls at partiesbecause it’s a hip thing to do to get attention, kinda like being on the listfor a cool party. She looks at Taylor (and other gay girls) like it’s somethingtrendy or cool to sleep with or kiss them, but then quickly move on from.(She’s “so over” over her “bi-ness” after trying it…) The frown thing, might bethe girl putting up her nose at Taylor or acting all high and mighty when thegay girl actually says she thought what they had was real. What’s troubling forTaylor is how the girl just brushes off their chemistry and bond like it meantnothing 😞 and then proceeding to think Taylor’s overreacting or acting stalkerish and crazy when she can’t let the girl go and writes a song about theexperience (or “acts psycho” by “rhyming the girl’s name with things” akawriting an emotional song about being pissed off.)

Bearding-theory:

As I see it it’s insinuating that this girl thinksshe’s hot shit and doesn’t think Taylor is anyone important and thus not worththe courtesy of, you know, um, NOT gettingher beard stolen... She essentiallythinks she’s more important than Taylor and she needs the beard more, sinceTaylor isn’t as famous and wouldn’t suffer as much if her secret came out.

The trend-part might mean the girl thinks Taylor willbe irrelevant soon enough and won’t need to beard.  

What about the frown-part? Could it mean that Taylordoesn’t think the girl acts “straight enough” as in she isn’t looking happywhen around the boy she’s supposedly dating (because she might have that commonlesbian thing where she’s repulsed by men/uncomfortable pretending to be inlove with them, I second that personally!) And Taylor thinks she herself does abetter job of convincing people she’s actually straight (or is a better“actress”) basically she’s better at bearding, meaning she should’ve gotten tokeep the beard since the other girl isn’t convincing anyone she (or the beard)is straight anyway, making it “troubling” for their images.

Last line is saying the girl thinks Taylor’s weird andmaybe even unstable/scary for making such a big deal out of the bearding theftand writing a song about it (or “rhyming the girl’s name with things”)

–

But sophistication isn’t what you wear or who you know

Or pushing people down to get you where you wanna go

They wouldn’t teach you that in prep school so it’s upto me

But no amount of vintage dresses gives you dignity

–

I personally honestly have trouble seeing these linesfrom the ex-gf-was-stolen perspective and can really only come up with abearding explanation for this, but if you can think of a way it fits with theother thing feel free to point that out on this post or to send me asks aboutit…

Anyway, Taylor’s saying that sophistication isn’t whatyou wear or who you know. To me this indicates that she’s saying that whilethis girl might think she’s more famous and important than Taylor and thus moredeserving of a beard, the level of fame isn’t dictated by “what you wear or whoyou know”

While the het explanation for this is that Taylorthinks the girl who stole her boyfriend is stuck up for wearing fancy designerclothes and being chummy with other celebrities, I think the line isinteresting from a bearding perspective.

This is because while we now use the term “beard” or“bearding” for both men and women in the olden days of Hollywood the term for alesbian using a guy as a “date” in order to seem straight used to be merkin while the corresponding gay guyterm was, you guessed it, beard. (x)

Why is this interesting you ask? Well, both a merkin(and a beard, if it’s a fake one, but a merkin to a greater extent) is a thingyou wear to cover up the truth of what you look like (or in the non-literalsense what you are, aka not straight) so sophistication or fame isn’t dictatedby “what you wear” aka who your beard/merkin is, or who you know. The “who youknow” thing makes it sound like the girl pulled some favors with important industrypeople she knows in order to get to Taylor’s beard and steal him away, veryunsophisticated behavior if you ask me.

Taylor is also saying the girl is pushing people downto get where she wants to go, she’s stealing a famous “boyfriend” from Taylorin order to get more famous by her association with him (aka get to where shewants to go, fame-wise) and in the process she’s pushing Taylor down and makingher less relevant by ending her association with said famous boy.

In the het narrative the “prep school”-line is anotherattempt at making sure we know Taylor’s romantic rival is a huge snob who wentto a fancy school, but in bearding terms it might mean the girl’s team “forgot”to teach (or prep) her about the importance of not playing dirty on thebearding-playground and stealing other’s beards when they were teaching her allabout how the PR-game works.

“vintage dresses” a nice way to say merkin? After alla merkin was often used by prostitutes in the olden days (making it vintage)and in a way it could be called a “dress” or at least a dressage. It could alsojust be acknowledging that bearding is an old (vintage) practice in Hollywood andthat it will never give you dignity, or straightness. Thus calling out bothherself and the other girl for using such a temporary solution, the boy will disappearwhen the contract is up anyway and that the girl shouldn’t go through suchtrouble to steal someone’s “disguise”

(Chorus)

–

I’m just another thing for you to roll your eyes at,honey

You might have him but haven’t you heard

I’m just another thing for you to roll your eyes at,honey

You might have him but I always get the last word

–

From both the cheated-on and the bearding perspectiveTaylor is threatening the thief and saying that while they might view her as aminor annoyance or complication (“roll their eyes at her”) they should be watchingtheir backs because she’ll win this fight.

–

(Chorus)

–

Do you still feel like you know what you’re doing?

'Cause I don’t think you do.

Do you still feel like you know what you’re doing?

I don’t think you do

I don’t think you do

–

While the rival might have thought it was a good ideato steal Taylor’s lover and/or beard at the time when they did it, she’ssuggesting they rethink it now. It wasn’t such a smart move after all andTaylor is saying she’s noticing the person start to realize that perhaps they shouldn’tmess with The Taylor Swift™

–

Let’s hear the applause

Come on show me how much better you are

(so much better, yeah?)

So you deserve some applause 'cause you’re so muchbetter

–

The girl who broke Tay’s heart is suggesting it’s somuch better to date boys and she’s doing so much better while doing that, huh?Well congratulations, here are some applause for being straight!

So earlier I said the beard that was stolen may havebeen Joe Jonas, why? Well he has a song called So Much Better (x) supposedly written about the girl he “dated”after Taylor and how she was a better girlfriend (more like, a better beard) thanTaylor and that is what she’s referring to here. “Oh you gave him a better bearding offer/contract than me? Well, fuckyou here are some fucking applause for the smooth way in which you stole mybeard, real classy!”)

She took him faster than you could say“sabotage”

–

(S)he/ stole the beard/girlfriend and sabotaged Taylor’sbearding plan/relationship faster than you can say the word “sabotage” and itsucked…

–

Thanks for reading asusual, this is a little longer than the other ones on account of being writtenfrom two possible perspectives, but I hope you enjoyed this approach.

Never hesitate tosend me requests for analysis or Gaylor questions 😊

Tomorrow’s song (I’llactually post it within the deadline this time I promise!) is Treacherous 🌈🌈🌈

#gaylor swift #Kaylor #bearding #songs #queer analysis #asks