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softestsaddestbitch · 3 years

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December TC Challenge

stole this from @elder-edda (sorry for creeping! just, given the usual demographic of the tc community I was excited to find another 20-smthg)

1) what color is your tc’s hair?

He has just, simple brown hair but he’s starting to go grey which, no lie, is 100% doing it for me.

2) is your tc married?

Yes? He doesn’t wear a ring and I believe she kept her last name which makes me think it’s more of a civil partnership since they’ve been together since the early 2000s at least. But he also will refer to her as “my wife” and was telling me once that they waited until “after they got married” before moving in together.

3) if yes, do you care? would you do something with them regardless of their marriage?

I know these questions are general but I do take offense at the idea of being a homewrecker/other woman. I’ve met his wife, she’s really nice.

4) what’s your worst memory with your tc?

I put my foot in my mouth SO OFTEN. Good lord. Especially my last semester at that school? He was acting weird and I had just realized after fucking ... four years?? that I romantically liked him. So I kept bringing up my weird age fixation and other bs bc I have adhd and am possibly autistic?? and can’t read a room to save my life.

5) what’s your best memory with your tc?

One year we had a really bad snowstorm, so bad in fact that I had my first-ever snow day. The college that I used to go to has four campuses across as many cities, and C has to drive in twice a week to my (old) town from his. Now, morning classes had been canceled but afternoon classes had been given the go-ahead. C, who does not check his emails until he arrives at campus, evidently did not get this message until he was already in town and therefore didn’t have a morning class, but did have an afternoon class. On this day I had a late morning class that had been reinstated, but my prof didn’t get that memo so I also was on campus but didn’t have a class. So I went to visit his office, which I had been doing throughout the semester (I didn’t have a class with him at the time) and we just ... hung out for like 2 hours. It was so nice and one of the anecdotes he told me still haunts me lol.

sidenote: at the time, I hadn’t yet realized that I liked him, but I still went out of my way to visit him. Damn I was a dumbass.

6) does anyone in your school know how you feel?

ish? I told a classmate but in a “haha joking” kinda way. And a friend who went to that school knows. No one at my current school knows.

7) does your tc know how you feel?

I think he might? might have a lil inkling which would explain why he started acting so weird my last semester. Or at the very least was told/realized how bad it could look that he was getting so chummy w/ a student.

8) do you think there’s any chance your tc reciprocates your feelings?

He and his wife have been together for around 20 years now. No. No, I don’t think so. Maybe in an alternate universe.

9) are you getting your tc a christmas present? if so, what is it?

I have in the past! Specifically like, a tin of cookies lol. I’ve also given him an actual present when I left. I do intend to send him a Christmas card every year but not this year because ... you know ... the apocalypse.

10) have you ever flirted with your tc?

Flirtation inherently has intent. So, no. How he interpreted our interactions I don’t know.

11) how long have you had a crush on them? what began it all?

SO! TIMELINE!

I was at my old school from September 2014-April 2019, I had C for the first time in September 2015. Like I mentioned above, I did not realize I had a crush on him until literally the middle of my final exam of my class with him December 2018, so I’ve only consciously had a crush for about two years now. However, as I also mentioned, I went out of my way to stop by his office, even when I didn’t have a class with him. And my relationship with/feelings towards him are complicated so I’m not going to say I did so solely because I like him, but I would put it maybe closer to somewhere in 2017. You don’t plan your schedule around someone you don’t feel strong feelings for.

12) do you believe you’ll get over them shortly after you stop taking their class/have the chance to spend time with them?

As of today, it has been been exactly a year and a half since I last him in person. In the time since, I have cried over missing him, routinely gone back to keep up with his current research projects, and made his picture a part of my home screen. I almost exclusively listen to the playlist I made for him - so much so my Spotify Wrapped is pretty much that playlist with a few extras.

13) what kind of grades do you get in their class?

Haaaaaa pre-supension I was failing his classes. My first semester back I got .... a mid/high 70? and I finished my last class with him with an A+ and the essay I had written for his class had the highest grade between the two classes so..

14) does your tc ever do any tiny, little things that you adore?

When he puts a hand in his pocket and leans against the wall. When he tucks his hair behind his ear because he keeps falling in his face (he has long hair, a little past his shoulders). When he can’t stop himself from googling something even if its in the middle of class. How you can ask him anything at any time. The way he would chuckle at my jokes. How his handwriting hasn’t improved in decades. How easily he brushes off toxic masculinity. His candidness and willingness to share little anecdotes. The way he used to always smile whenever he saw me. That he goes home everyday to have lunch with his wife.

15) are you their favorite student?

I was! And it was obvious to other students that we had a friendly, casual relationship too. For a time, if his other students had questions about him they would ask me, and I usually had the answer. I didn’t matter in the long run, but I was.

16) do you two share any tastes? movies, books, music, etc.

He’s a legal historian, I’m a baby legal/political historian. We also like the same historical cooking youtube channel.

17) is your teacher religious?

I doubt he would say he’s religious, but I feel like we have a similar relationship to religion which is to say no formal association, but had profound effects on our childhoods and subsequently, presumably, how we view things as adults.

18) do you masturbate to them?

Yes.

19) do you communicate with them outside of school?

I sent him a meme once. And asked about the socialist uprising scandal he was apart of. I also almost emailed him while at a museum exhibition with my history friend. These are all through email.

20) do you have any tc songs or songs you relate to your tc? what are they?

SO my number one song this year was “You are the Reason” by Calum Scott because, you guessed it, of him. But also:

I Lost a Friend - Finneas When You’re Ready - Shawn Mendes You Are in Love - Taylor Swift Break My Heart Right - James

& given the season, especially w/ what transpired last year, Last Christmas by Wham!

21) what’s your favorite thing your tc has said/memory you have with them?

One time he kinda trailed off in the middle of lecture after stating that he thought of xyz a particular way which contrasted one of the popular schools of thought, and the way he plainly said, “well, yeah, which I guess ... is I’m arguing it” almost like he was semi-surprised with himself has always stuck with me.

But also, in addition the memory I shared earlier, we spent an hour and a half talking about grad school and what to expect and how to get there.

22) do you plan to continue a relationship with them after you leave school?

I trid, I really did. But he doesn’t “socialize with students part or present” so I can’t exactly see him. But I did get some academic-related from him at the beginning of the year.

23) how will you deal during the summer? will you see him/her?

He’s a hermit who used my last vacation before I moved to go on all the vacations he had to postpone because he was working on his last book. And this past summer ... Covid. This question is obviously directed at high school students, but in general, he lives in the back of head always, and when I’m in my hometown for the summer my heart aches because theres a none-zero chance I’ll see him, but I know I won’t.

24) does your tc support gay rights?

Yes. He’s never been put in a position that I know of where he had to outright condemn homophobia, but in one of his classes, he actively made the choice to make the very first reading of the semester about how women in ancient times had more agency than assumed, and also how the woman in the case study was a lesbian.

25) what class do you have with them? And what period? Do you have them every day?

History classes. I won’t get into specifics because it’s kind of an eclectic mix and I’m paranoid someone from the area could come across this. But I had him twice a week every semester that I had him. Again this kind of question is more so applicable to high school students, not so much university students.

26) have you ever drifted out during a lecture thinking about them and missed information?

No. In his classes he is too enthralling, and I’m a good student otherwise.

27) have you stalked them online? what did you find out?

In theory. He’s a fifty-year-old history professor whose reaction to a description of the big lipped/tiny face filter on snapchat was “that sounds disgusting.” The man doesn’t have social media, and if he does those privacy settings are on so students can’t find him he thinks he’s very professional. I do visit his mini-bio section on the college website fairly often tho.

28) have you ever run into them outside of schools? what happened?

I did once. He introduced me to his wife, who said “oh you’re E! C has talked about you” and it apparently he had done so positively, and blew my mind because this was back when I was failing classes and also, as a person, I don’t believe that people think about me when I’m not there. They gave me a restaurant recommendation and afterwards his wife surprised me a they were leaving the restaurant because ... we had listened to them, and they also went there for lunch that day.

29) has your tc ever spoken of teacher-student relationships? what did they say?

It had recently come out that it had been found out that another professor had been in a relationship with a student and he’s the one that brought it up before class one day (with all of us not just me). He didn’t say anything for or against it, just that it was generally discouraged, but that most schools did have policies in place to handle the situation.

30) do you regret telling anyone about your tc? if you’ve kept it a secret, why have you done so?

Absolutely not. I can’t tell my best friends because they’d do nothing but give me shit for it and it would call every time I mention him into question. But the friends that I have told ... its been so freeing, and like a weight has been lifted from my heart. One friend in particular I unloaded on her all my emotional shit pertaining to him this past summer and she was so understanding it legit since then I’ve been less distraught when thinking about him. It still hurts, but it feels less like I’m suffocating now.

#personal #professor crush #professor crush community #teacher crush #monthly challenge #december

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bananaofswifts · 5 years

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

#taylor swift #vogue #article

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hearyourheart · 5 years

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

10 notes · View notes

lids-flutter-open · 5 years

Text

James orsino -goth gay YA ch 5

“Hey,” Orsino said. He was smiling at me. “Nice to see you. James, right?”

“And you’re Orsino.”

“I’m Robin,” said a girl with good skin and short hair in a flat-top. She looked like a panel from a 1980s lesbian comic. “I’m Orsino’s sister.”

“Hi,” I said. “Does anyone want weed?”

They did. We smoked and January talked to Ian. I didn’t get all of what they said, but Ian was glowing. Overhead the trees dropped a few leaves and some of the pine needles from the scrubby little pine tree by the house blew over the yard and into the bonfire, sparking as they went. There were at least fifty people at the show. Probably more, inside the house and around in front where they weren’t meant to be. People were slowly trickling back around the edges of the show space in the garage, waiting for the temperature inside to finally get cool enough to repopulate.

“So are you from around here?” I asked Orsino. “Or where?” I had given him a joint I’d rolled earlier and been carrying around in my cigarette case. He coughed a lot as he smoked.

“Down south about an hour,” Orsino said. “Near Centralia, kind of. But most of the time lately I live up in Tacoma with Robin and January. My dad owns some cows and a chicken farm and my mom is always fighting with him and it’s bad to be around. You?”

“I’m from here,” I said. “I’m in high school. One of the ones near the farms. It’s all rednecks. No gays really.”

“You go to that Compton House thing?” Orsino asked. “I know that’s like, a big thing for gay kids here. My therapist was trying to get me to go since I didn’t like the trans group in Tacoma.”

“I go,” I said. “I’m on the Speakers’ Bureau doing sex education at schools and public organizations and stuff.”

“Oh,” Orsino said. He waggled his eyebrows. “You know a lot about sex then?” He exhaled some of the smoke from his joint into my face and smiled.

“In the public health sense, anyway,” I said. “I know where to get condoms and free dental dams.” I paused. I really wanted to say something flirtatious, but wasn’t sure what to start with. “And I know from Delaney and Genet and White for the rest, though who knows what I’m missing in that sense.” I could feel my hands reach up and touch the bad little patch of stubble on my neck. I wished there was a mirror or a dark window around I could glance into to make sure I didn’t look like a fool. I crossed my legs and turned more towards Orsino.

“Don’t know who those guys are,” Orsino smirked. His eyes were really dark brown and the firelight was sort of reflected there. I couldn’t tell if he was making fun of me for the references or making fun of me for doing sex education as a teenager like some kind of Young Democrat. I didn’t know his vibe enough to tell.

“They’re all older. Delaney’s the one you’re supposed to read, I’m pretty sure,” I said. “Or at least, he’s the one most likely to have been read by hot people, from what I can tell.”

“Oh, it’s a book,” said Orsino.

“He’s an author,” I said. “Samuel Delaney. Chip Delaney. Time Square Red, Time Square Blue. Science fiction and sexy gay memoir. Never mind. I’m stoned. I’m sorry.”

“He writes about sex and taught you sex, is what you’re saying.”

“Yeah.”

“Does he write about like specific kinks you were trying to communicate to me or something?”

I felt my face grow hot. “Public bathrooms,” I said. “Is one thing he’s very into. Not that I am. Unless you are. But that’s not—it’s just his prose.”

“Do you always give a … what’s it called. A bibliography. Do you always do that when someone asks you about sex?”

“Do you always ask boys about sex two seconds after meeting them?”

“Only when they’re hot,” Orsino said. “Then yeah, I do. Sorry, I can’t read social cues well. Was that out of line?”

“No.”

“You didn’t answer the question. You go around give out bibliographies about sex? Like that pink hair lady who draws that weird comic about sex toys online?”

“You’re the one named fucking Orsino,” I said. “Literary references are something you signed up for.” I took a hit from my pipe. I was starting to feel slightly more comfortable, but it wasn’t happening fast enough. I glanced at Orsino’s hands. The nails were short. His pinky nail on his left hand was painted black but none of the other fingernails were. There was a little stick-and-poke of a rabbit on the back of his right hand.

“Maybe I should change it,” he said. “To something butch. I can be Harry. Or Brandon.”

“A trade name,” I said.

“A farm boy name.”

“Brandon is a G.O.P candidate name.”

“Now that’s trade.”

“What music do you like, Brandon?”

“Well, I’m here. OVID’s good. January can be a bitch a little bit, but it’s good music. And I like Dyke Drama and G.L.O.S.S, obviously. And LOONE. But also Mitski. And Blood Kennel and Limp Wrist and Dick Binge. But I also like The Shins.”

“My dad likes The Shins,” I said. “I have like a gag reflex about The Shins.” I could hear my voice, catty and faggy. “They’re such a dad band. How old are you, anyway?”

“Eighteen,” Orsino said.

“Okay. Well, for an eighteen-year-old you sure like dad bands.”

“It’s good music,” Orsino said. “You gotta listen to the lyrics. What about you?”

“I only listen to Ariana Grande,” I said, smirking at him stupidly and fluttering my eyelashes. I might have been being dumb, but he was still smiling at me, so I wanted to try being bolder. “And Gaga. I literally only listen to Just Dance by Lady Gaga and Pete Davidson by Ariana Grande every single day of my life. On repeat. I hate punk music.”

“Oh, really,” Orsino said in a flat-affect kind of voice. “You must be having a really interesting time here tonight then.”

“It’s really funny music,” I said. “And nobody is wearing platform boots or a rainbow pin or jewels or teal hair or anything.”

“I saw someone with teal hair,” Orsino said.

“That was me, actually. Earlier. I came with teal hair and an Ariana Grande tour shirt and changed.”

“Oh really,” Orsino said. He made eye contact with me and then slowly reached out and pulled at one of my curls. “I like what you’ve done with your hair since then. Insta-dye job to black. Insta-goth. It’s a really cute haircut on you, actually.”

“Thanks. I did it in the bathroom sink,” I said. “Just now. Using charcoal from the fire. I thought, oh no, everyone has dark hair or bad orangey dry bleach jobs. I have to fit in.”

“You’re doing good and blending in,” Orsino said. He finished the joint and ground out the end in the dirt under the stump. “Wait. Did you just neg me for my bleach job?”

I felt my face fall. “What?”

“You said bad bleach jobs and looked at my hair. Were you making fun of me for my bleach job? You know, negging me? I know it’s all dry forest fire thatch up here.”

“I guess I did,” I said. I looked at his hair and back at his eyes.

“Didn’t expect you to be acting like a straight English major goth at a sorority party over here,” Orsino said. “Calling all the girls ugly cause you think it’ll make them like you.”

I swallowed. “You’re right. That was cruel of me. I made fun of your name, earlier, too, and that was wrong. I shouldn’t be mean to cute boys.”

“And my music taste.”

“That’s just a difference of opinion.”

Orsino looked at me like a cat playing with a mouse, but in a friendly way. “You were very cruel about my hair, though. I feel so small.”

“Sorry. It’s a bad habit. You can do two negs for me now. Tell me I’m ugly so you can hit on me better.”

“Hm,” Orsino said. He swung one hairy leg over the stump so half of him was in shadow under the trees and his right foot was nestled in the ivy and broken glass that lay all along the perimeter of the Goat Mansion yard. “Well, you aren’t ugly, so I can’t do exactly that. Maybe I want to save my negs. Find your weak spots and then go in for the kill.”

“I’m shaking,” I said.

“Okay. I have one. My first one is that your mustache sucks. It’s like really cute that you’re trying it and I know what you’re going for, and the concept is attractive to me, and I like your philtrum, but it’s a bad mustache.”

“Ooh. Ouch. That stings,” I said. “I think it stings more because of all the compliments you threw in with it to cushion it.” But I scooted closer to him.

“I can do more.” He looked at me hard. “If you consent. I can be meaner about it.”

“About my mustache? Okay,” I said. “But I might be hurt and never speak to you again.”

“You’re trying to look like Freddie Mercury or something, right? You look like a summer camp counselor from the 1980s.”

“Ouch! You sure snatched my wig.” I put on a faggy voice. It kind of did sting to hear him say that, though also I knew that my mustache amounted to about twenty-four downy bad little hairs. But I guess I deserved it.

“See how it feels?” Orsino scooted a little closer. I found myself appreciating how broad his shoulders and torso were compared to mine. I looked at his smile. His canines were a little crooked.

“I actually am a summer camp counselor,” I said. “During the summer.”

“I’m Sherlock Holmes.”

“I can give you another weak spot,” I said. “I’m a nerd and I used to be a horse girl. Got any horse related disses?”

“It doesn’t count if you give them to me. That’s a self defense maneuver. Also I don’t know if you’re even telling the truth. It’s gotta be something you’re sensitive about.”

“Are you sensitive about your hair and your name?”

“Yes! I’m a punk. My image is very important to me. Talking shit on my hair was mean. You started this whole battle.”

“Okay, fine. I’m sorry already. But give me time to recover from your first cutting remark before you do any more to me.” I put away my pipe. I glanced briefly over at Ian. Jukebox had left and now he was talking to Opal and Robin a few feet away. I felt like socially I was obligated to join their shit instead of sitting here talking to this boy I didn’t really know yet. At least so I could be up on the whole deal with Miss San Juan and the Dusties or whatever the new band was called. “Do you want to meet my friends?” I asked Orsino, standing.

“Sure,” he said. He pulled himself up. “Hey, you’re not really hurt about the mustache thing, right?” He wasn’t smiling as much any more. “I was just playing around. Your mustache is fine. It looks like every other high school punk’s mustache. Better than some. Better than mine. And you’re cute. You pull it off pretty good.”

I realized he thought he had misstepped and now I’d lost interest. I felt a flutter in my stomach.

“It’s a really sensitive topic for me because of my gender dysphoria,” I said in a deadpan voice. I walked over to Ian and Opal and Robin.

Orsino followed me, squinting a little as if he couldn’t tell if I was joking. He put his thumbs into the belt loops of his pants.“Are you serious?” He asked. "I’m sorry, I…”

“I won’t ever forgive you. Hey, meet my friends. Here are my friends Opal and Ian, who I guess have a band now.”

Ian paused. He had been saying something to Robin about some music stuff. I wasn’t sure what equipment they were talking about but it had hertz. He looked over to Orsino and then me and raised his eyebrows.

“Hey,” he said. “I’m Miss San Juan, otherwise known as Ian. You saw me set up and then saw my set just now. You were jumping. Didn’t get your name.”

“I was indeed jumping,” Orsino said. “It was a pretty good show for how messy it seemed like things were before it started. You did good. You have a great stage presence. I’m Orsino.” He held out his hand, arcing his arm out for a man-handshake.

Ian placed his delicate little hand in Orsino’s big one like a princess greeting her security guard. “Pleased to meet you.”

“I’m Orsino,” Orsino said again to Opal, holding out his hand again. For the first time I realized he was maybe kind of too stoned.

“I’m Opal,” said Opal. “I’m a drummer and use they/them pronouns and I’m really hungry for some trash food right now. Does anyone else want food?” They looked at me and then at Orsino. “You both look like you want some trash food.”

“Fuck yeah,” Orsino said. “Do we know when the next show starts, though?”

“There’s the gas station that doesn’t sell beer around the corner that way,” Opal said. “They have chips and sometimes hot dogs and pizza. We’ll be quick.”

“Let’s go,” Orsino said. He put his arm around my shoulders and set off toward the edge of the yard as if we had been walking together like that everywhere for years, as if he had touched me before.

“I don’t think I want food right now,” Ian said. “I’ll stay here.” He had a sort of quiet, wan tone in his voice that made me pause.

“Oh,” I said, and dug my feet into the ground to stop and pulled away from Orsino’s arm. I looked from Orsino to Ian. I didn’t want to leave Ian standing here alone right after his big set. “Ian, are you sure? You’ll need calories in a little bit.”

“I just feel like standing and smoking for a second in the quiet over here by the fence,” Ian said.

“Quieter out by the gas station,” I said.

“I don’t feel like walking.”

“I’ll stay here too then,” I said.

“I’m still going,” Orsino said. “I’m genuinely hungry.”

“Come on, then, big papa,” Opal said. “Let’s get some cheese fuel.” They turned their chair and wheeled fairly rapidly across the grass.

#james and orsino #long text #long post #writing #goth gay ya #trans #lgbt

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sapphicscholar · 7 years

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A little story in memory of Edith Windsor

This morning, I happened to see several articles making the rounds on Tumblr about how fighting so hard for same-sex marriage had been a mistake. Now, I’ve heard the arguments (you don’t work in queer theory without knowing them inside and out), and politically I’m more than a little sympathetic to the idea that the state shouldn’t get to determine the legitimacy of romantic and sexual unions, nor should special benefits be extended on the basis of one’s ability to enter into a state-sanctioned union.

That being said, as we watch the postal vote in Australia (and all the homophobic rhetoric it’s stirring up) and reflect on the life and legacy of Edith Windsor, a lesbian trailblazer whose case eventually made it to the U.S. Supreme Court and brought down the “Defense of Marriage Act” (DOMA), I couldn’t help but reflect on what the morning of that Supreme Court decision did for me.

In the buildup to the decisions that summer of 2013, I remember watching as my friends on Facebook one-by-one, then suddenly en masse, began changing their profile pictures to the HRC’s equality sign, then, after critiques of the HRC’s transphobic policies began to emerge, to a revamped version of the equality sign or to other symbols–rainbows and the like–meant to symbolize support for a decision in favor of same-sex marriage. After all, not only was DOMA under consideration, but so was California’s Prop 8. And as someone who’d spent my whole life in Catholic schools, spent years sleeping with women and hating myself for it, drinking too much and sleeping too little as I pushed away the women I had fallen for, let them finally pull away, too frustrated with dealing with someone so deep in the closet, this broad show of support was inspiring, if slightly unexpected.

Earlier that year, I’d finally done it–I’d finally come out. Not to everyone, not yet to family, but to myself, then slowly but surely to those closest to me. I’d said the words, let them sink in as true, as something that wasn’t just a dirty secret, but something I could embrace. I threw myself into all the queer theory and LGBTQ+ literature I could find, and let myself learn to claim an absolutely inspiring lineage of writers and thinkers and activists. And suddenly, here were friends and family members coming out in droves in support of my right to marry. No, changing a profile picture isn’t much effort, and no, marriage doesn’t seem like a particularly “radical” act to many, and sure, it was already legal in some states. But in my conservative Catholic hometown? You bet your ass it meant something. The kids posting on Facebook that everyone deserved the same protections under the law–they hadn’t been raised on those ideas; in fact, not that many years earlier, we’d all been in senior year of Catholic high school together being forced to write “False” next to the question of whether “Gay marriage is actually marriage” if we wanted full credit on an exam. But here they were, having learned and changed their minds and stepping up to engage with conservative relatives on Facebook, in classrooms, and at the dinner table–practicing what real allyship looks like.

Then that week finally came–the week when we knew the decisions would start being handed down. The night before the decision came down (not that we knew it would come that early in the week), my girlfriend and I went on what was, at the time, one of our first few dates, having only gotten together that month. She cooked me dinner at her apartment, and we shared a bottle of wine, and we talked for what felt like hours–about anything and everything. And by the time we looked up, it was already 2 in the morning, so, for the first time, I spent the night at her place, went to bed curled up around her (not that I slept a wink until about 6 in the morning, too nervous about snoring or moving to really relax). But I still had my arms around the woman I was not so slowly, though also not so surely (having missed all those teenage firsts during high school), falling in love with, and I was happy–happier than I had been in a long time.

That next morning, June 26, we woke up–both of us already running late for work. But before I could panic about whether I had time to shower or to find clothes that hadn’t been slept in, I scrolled through the notifications on my phone, finding two AP Breaking News alerts: DOMA and Prop 8 had been struck down. And, god, as much as I had wanted to believe that we’d be strong enough to survive a decision either way (because we had been, for so damn long, and we would be again), had convinced myself that it wasn’t that big of a deal, waking up to the news that my country had recognized my love as legal, even if I never thought it was a right they should have in the first place? It still mattered. Because I could roll over in bed and look down at the absolutely stunning woman next to me and know that if we wanted to get married, we didn’t need to fly across country to do so, wouldn’t have to worry about that right being stripped away almost as soon as it was granted, wouldn’t have to listen as our conservative neighbors and old Catholic school teachers from back home sneered and pointed out that it was “just a civil union” to legitimate their homophobia. And god, for that…for that I will always be grateful to Edith Windsor and the thousands of LGBTQ pioneers (many of whom were, of course, not white or cis or wealthy like Windsor, who was chosen to represent us in large part because she was all of those things) who fought for so many years–long before Stonewall and the HRC and the ACLU–to get us to where we are today and to inspire us to keep fighting the good fight even now.

#personal post #same-sex marriage #lgbtq #coming out #edith windsor #rip #lgbtq history #doma #us politics #text post

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un-enfant-immature · 5 years

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Wear Your Voice centers marginalized communities with a little help from Mark Cuban

It’s hard to feel seen, heard and represented as a person of color in today’s current media landscape. Ravneet Vohra (pictured above), founder and CEO of Wear Your Voice, is changing that.

Wear Your Voice is an intersectional feminist multimedia platform that aims to center marginalized communities, including those who are queer, trans, non-binary, female, black, brown, Asian, Indigenous or some combination of those identities. The site features stories race, identity, body politics, culture, health and, of course, news and politics.

“Wear Your Voice was born out of my own story growing up as a South Asian woman in a mainly white community and not feeling seen or heard,” Vohra told TechCrunch. “Not just within the community I was in, but also in multimedia. Out of my pain, I made it my power and launched Wear Your Voice.”

Vohra bootstrapped WYV for the first five years, hit a rough patch in 2018, but survived because “our audience saved us,” she said.

“That’s when you know you’re destined to stay,” Vohra said. “Because nothing speaks louder than the support of people on the Internet saying, ‘No, you are integral to our safety. You provide a safe space.’ So people started throwing money at us.”

But Vohra and WYV were still in survival mode. The company needed more than enough money to survive. It needed money to thrive.

“It’s been an interesting journey,” she said. “I’ve tried the VC route and the angel route, and I always felt like the door was getting closed in my face because we weren’t centering white people.”

Wear Your Voice didn’t receive its first bit of outside funding until investor and Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban came along. Vohra said she later “stumbled upon Mark, and that was a really defining moment.”

To date, Cuban is the company’s sole outside investor.

“With him coming on board, I now have a clearer, more defined role,” she said. “I’m now moving away from a survival mode into being able to do my job.”

With a recent influx of capital from Cuban, Wear Your Voice is building out its team, improving on its technology and forming partnerships — most recently a paid partnership with Planned Parenthood.

“My investment in Wear Your Voice was based on many factors, but the ultimate deciding factor was the high level of content they publish and the community it serves,” Cuban said in a statement. “Saying that, WYV doesn’t just serve underrepresented communities of color, it is also a place for the rest of us to listen and learn.”

Earlier this month, WYV partnered with Planned Parenthood for the Summer of Sex campaign. The campaign aims to center the experiences of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex, asexual and other sexualities, sexes and genders (LGBTQIA+) and black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC).

Sex is something that cannot be singularly defined, and yet so many continually attempt to define it through rigid hetero and cisnormative understandings. With this campaign, we are igniting and continuing important conversations about sex — from sex positivity, sexual health, and sexual liberation to purity culture’s effects on people of color, especially queer and trans folks. From desirability politics — how racism, misogyny, fatphobia, ableism, and more impact how we think about sex, attraction, humanity, and certain people’s prescribed roles — to masturbation and sex toys. From STI stigma and sex education to debunking myths about the clitoris and de-centering the penis and penetration in our understandings of sex and pleasure. We want to explore the myriad of ways QTBIPOC experience sex and the things surrounding it.

To achieve this, WYV is producing a number of articles, essays and interviews around the topic of sex.

“This is huge,” Vohra told me. “It’s a big deal for me because this explores sex through the QTBIPOC lens.”

Down the road, expect to see more partnerships with brands and corporations, Vohra said.

“There are so many other campaigns in the pipeline,” Vohra said. “We are also looking for more investment so I can continue to grow and really shake up the status quo of how normal digital media companies are operated and show them how to do it better.”

#TechCrunch

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mythicalmythos · 7 years

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Princess stories I wish I’d had as a child.

(So this wound up being about twice as long as planned but it feels good to finally get it all out there)

Okay so, this has kind of been bouncing around in my head since I saw Wonder Woman over the summer.

I grew up watching Disney movies and I am a huge Disney nerd to this day but the older I get the more I come to realize that as much as I love the Disney princess movies, I can’t really support some of their messages, intentional or not, as a woman in her 20s out of college, as I could in the past, even in high school.

Don’t get me wrong, I understand that the movies are a product of their time, and for a long time in our society the main path a girl’s life took was grow up, meet a boy, get married, have lots of babies. There was a huge amount of focus on maintaining the white picket fence life in America. Though we as women have made huge strides since the first Disney movie was produced, I feel like entertainment media takes a while to catch up to the changes society makes, especially media who’s target audience is made up of mostly kids.

In spite of all of this I think that Walt Disney himself was in favor of gender equality, even if it might not have been in the same manor and degree that we have today. He and his company made their mark on the world by making movies about female protagonists. Yes, you can argue that the women portrayed in the movies aren’t great role models and I agree with you. However, even in “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” the main conflict is between two women. (Messed up and vain though that conflict may be.) Then in 1946, Disney produced a short film called “The Story of Menstruation. That’s right. Disney made a short film that gives accurate health information about periods in FUCKING 1946. While it is not perfect (come on it’s post-War, women are still expected to marry and have babies), it explains periods in accurate and scientific language and most importantly, emphasizes that periods are a normal and healthy (if annoying) part of every uterus-possessing human’s life. In 1946! I didn’t even realize that this existed until I was in college and I didn’t believe the friend who told me about it until they pulled it up and made me watch it. Why wasn’t this used or even mentioned in sex ed growing up? Though it is old and doesn’t really explain sex past mentioning that it is necessary for pregnancy to occur, it still is just a good jumping off point as anything I was shown/told as a pre-teen. Come on, this is a great resource to show a child who is asking the early questions about puberty (which happens way earlier than any parent is ready for. I myself was a very curious child and asked a lot of embarrassing questions WAY before my parents thought they would have to answer any of them.)

Okay, that was more than I thought I had to say on that but anyways, back to the Princess movies themselves. The one that I have the biggest problem with is “The Little Mermaid.” I know “Sleeping Beauty” is pretty bad too with the whole ‘unconscious therefor unable to give consent thing’ but honestly that for whatever reason doesn’t get to me like Ariel’s story does.

Before I totally start ragging on this movie let me just say I really loved this movie for a long time. I’m very musical and the music is amazing. I grew up singing them and “Poor Unfortunate Souls” is in my top 10 villain songs. (Also Ursula is based on a famous drag queen named Divine, which is awesome.) I love all of the songs in this movie, even the forgettable one at the beginning. But once you string them together with the rest of the story, I just can’t get behind the final product anymore. A few years ago, my mom showed me a video that Mayim Bialik posted on her YouTube channel where she talks about how she reacted to the movie (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h-9pm8Zy7SY). At first I thought ‘okay she has a point but it’s still a classic story’ then I started to think about it off and on in the back of my mind, along with reading and looking into the original story by H. C. Anderson (which, not exactly a kids story, be prepared for a lot of questions and blood). And I slowly came to realize that I can’t support showing this movie to my own kids someday without first having a serious talk about self-respect. No one should be told that they have to change a fundamental part of who they are or their body to find “love”. REAL “True Love” is accepting and unconditional, fish tail and all.

So where exactly does Wonder Woman come into all of this? Well back when I saw it in June, I was a bit hesitant because I’ve always kind of written WW off because of her outfit. Not my finest choice I’ll admit, but, nerd though I am, I never have been big into comic books or the Justice League cartoons (though Teen Titans with Raven and Starfire was one of my favorites. It hasn’t been until more recently that I have really come to appreciate the superhero genre.) But when I heard that WW was getting her own big screen story, I was intrigued. I didn’t know much going in, though I had high hopes. I’m a bit embarrassed to say I went partially because of Chris Pine because I tend to enjoy the projects he picks. But when I saw the movie, I was blown away. Not that the movie doesn’t have its weak spots for me (Ares took quite a bit of convincing). But as I came out of the theater I finally understood why my brothers love superhero movies. Seeing a woman (or in this case, a lot of women) on screen kicking butt, making their own stories, and being general badasses gave me this surge of confidence that I could do anything I set my mind to. This is a movie I didn’t know I was missing until I saw it. The more I read about how Patty Jenkins went about creating the world of Themyscira, like hiring a range of women of color, female body builders, weightlifters and wrestlers, it didn’t even occur to me that muscles on women are often considered ugly by our society. These women had bodies that reflected the work that they put in everyday and the power and strength that they possess. They are beautiful and send a beautiful message to young girls that they can be anything damn social standards of gender roles and beauty.

So I saw WW months ago and had talked to my friends about it but my thoughts and the powerful message stayed mostly in my head until now. Why? Well, I was several videos deep in a YouTube binge about a week and a half ago when I came across one from ScreenRant called “10 Rejected Princesses that Actually Exist” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W3PUQtHXbiE). Now seeing as I am a total sucker for a title like that, naturally I open the video. Expecting stories from different mythos and legends from around the world (like the original Little Mermaid) I was very surprised to learn that this list was mostly made up of real women from different cultures around the world. Yes, there are a few legends and myths thrown in but mostly these women actually existed.

So turns out that this video is in fact based on a book written by a guy named Jason Porath, an ex-Dreamworks animator, who, following a bet at work, decided that these women needed to have their stories told. Some time and a book deal later “Rejected Princesses” was born. A collection of 100 stories about badass women who changed their worlds. (http://www.rejectedprincesses.com/)

I’m only about half way through but the more of the book I read the more I wish someone had given me this book as a kid. Mind you, not all of these stories are 100% appropriate (some of the ones at the end of the book are 5 on a 1-5 scale for maturity.) for every little kid but the fact that this book exists and tells real stories without shying away from the real situations that these women lived through is an amazing thing. There are women of color, lesbian and bi- women and probably many more as I haven’t finished the book yet. Haha (Trying to read three books at once is not my smartest life decision.)

The older I get, the more I see things in my childhood that reinforced the more traditional male/female gender roles on me. My parents never told me I couldn’t do something just because I was a girl and they have always encouraged me to learn and do well in school, especially they encouraged my interest in science. But as things like WW and “Rejected Princesses” come to my attention I realize that just because I didn’t realize their influence was missing doesn’t mean I didn’t feel it. I remember having few role models in media and always being told to let the boys do the physical stuff instead of me.

It is not enough to simply tell girls and women they can do anything and be anything they want. We have to give them examples and role models to show that they come from a long line of capable, independent, smart, strong, badass women and the keys to the kingdom are theirs to take and explode into the world with.

#wonder woman #badass women #rejected princesses #disney

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sundrenched-smilez · 7 years

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odd numbers for the lesbian asks! (if it's too many just do every 4th one maybe?)

1. Femme or butch?

for type, im vry easily wooed by butches tbh

as for myself, im genderfluid + heavily lean towards butch-ish for one gender + have been gettin more comf w that term for myself. the 3 genders i switch between, ive described as sharp, dainty and tired, for reason of not really being comf w gender labels aside from nonbinary. sharp/tired r kinda butchish, moreso sharp. like leather jackets, ripped jeans, dress pants/shirts, defs flannels (which r a given for any mood im in tbh) while tired is like mb softer, more focused on flannels + loose tank tops/shirts, shorts + certain skirts, comfy clothes, and the like

ive found that i’m leaning more towards butch lately too, like i’ve been a lot more comfortable with pants and a nice top than i have w dresses or most skirts + im wondering if i was just hanging on to femininity for sake of society, so those r things 2 think abt. i still feel comf in them sometimes, but it’s getting much less often. gender’s weird, i still cant cling to one bc of how pressuring that is so genderfluidity is still smth for me + it shifting to different percentages is okay (im thinking out loud @ this point, but its helping so i hope its interesting to read)

3. Plaid button-ups or leather jackets?

both, but primarily flannels/plaid buttion-ups

5. Describe your aesthetic

aaahh theres a lot of diff aesthetics i could go into, but i have a tag if ur interested in a visual representation? basically, cosy homes, forests, wooden steps and bridges, cats, girls/nbs, water, plants, and old video game stuff, and clouds/skies. i’m sure there’s more in there, but for a good rule of thumb !! as for like dressing aesthetic, i like to look rly gay + attractive and a lil showy? like my shorts r Short and i love crop tops + a lot of my shirts show my bra thru them, + i like showing it when i can, like sports bra + a tank top is a fav look of mine bc i can make it look like my bra is a trim on the shirt + it’s cute. i’ve been wearing dresses less often, but occasionally, i like to rock one. id love a pair of combat boots but i have like size 11/12 feet + most stores dont carry that size + im hesitant to buy some online.

7. Favorite pair of shoes?

its rly hard to find any, i have like walmart converse knockoffs atm + theyre a beige/grey color im not that huge on, it kinda reminds me of sandalwood but depressed

9. Any haircut goals for the future?

there was the undercut!! and i have that down now c: next step is to dye it blue and mb some purple. i wanna bleach it if i’m gonna dye it, but im hesitant to do that bc of how damaging it is, but since my hair’s been cut a cpl time almost all the color is out now, so i think itll b ok if i take good care of it.

11. Describe the worst date you’ve been on

i went to a cafe w someone (i think they were nb but i cant remember, it was like 2 yrs ago about ) and they were impossible to talk to bc they just kept saying “im awkward sorry” @ everything and like any conversations i tried to maintain were all one-shot responses, and like that was a lil frustrating. like i dont hold it against them or anything, more in a sense of i was rly tryin 2 carry it and just couldnt

13. If taken, talk about your girlfriend/wife!

whooh i wish i was taken, i need affection + to b cute w someone

15. Describe your dream wedding

hmmmm i havent thought much about it !! i know when i was younger i wanted to wear a black wedding dress but now im thinkin mb a suit that switches to dress @ the bottom?? that could b cool. I’d be happy w anything tbh, if im getting married, i’d just b happy to be w my wife/spouse. mb somewhere in a forest or on a boat would b cool, defs lots of good food and colorful flowers. I’d like a lot of color, most weddings ive been to are just b/w and bland for my taste (they’ve also all been straight tho so theres that.) it’s kind of wild to think that i might b married someday, but it’d b rly nice. i just haven’t thought much abt the planning of one. it’d b rly gay tho, probs give out tiny gay flags at each seat, and the cake could b lesbian flag colors. im rly drawing a blank on this, but i know id want all my friends around the country + world to be there.

17. If you could live anywhere in the world, where would you live?

i definitely want to live in a port town at some point !! idk where i’d like to settle down, ideally somewhere that doesnt get much hotter than 90 degrees + has lots of parks + is big enough for some events, like pride stuff, little festivals, a farmer’s market, and places to do things, such as a movie theater, bowling alley, mb an aquarium, if not one in a nearby town. hiking trails r also good.

19. Favorite lesbian novel/story?

on a sunbeam!!! its a huge inspiration for me, and i love it so much. it always puts me in such a good mindset when i read it, and the artist is my age, so it makes me feel like I can also accomplish great things if i rly put my heart into it!! which is such a good feeling, and it has great representation + characters that i love, and its rly gay, and in space and theres ships shaped like fish + its gorgeous : D i could go on for hrs abt it + how important it is to me. theres an nb character too, and like the aspect of found families is one that rly hits home and it helped me get thru a rough time of my life + better accept myself as queer/gay.

21. Favorite lesbian musician?

adult mom (tho i think they’re bi but still gay), or hayley kiyoko

23. Ever been assumed to be nothing more than a gal pal?

i think so, but i can’t place when, it’s been a bit.

25. Be positive! What do you like most about being a lesbian?

talking abt being gay w other girls/nbs is lovely and cathartic, i never got to growing up bc i lived in a homophobic town + i was like dealing heavily with internalized homophobia and body/gender dysphoria so i was ace for a bit. talking more abt like sexual attraction + aesthetic attraction is new to me, and that’s been a process to get to, but it’s nice that I can now do so w/o being belittled or barraged by insult. i also just love the thought of being w someone, and daydreaming abt when that happens is really nice. also,, girls + nbs r a blessing and brighten my day and im so glad im attracted 2 them

27. Turn ons?

absolutely communication, that’s a need. i had a bad experience w someone bc she wasn’t communicative at all, and failed to tell me that we weren’t dating despite us going on several dates + kissing??? like i wont go too into it, but hatchi matchi it was a mess. so yeah, communication, affection, and like reassurance that they actually want to be with me, and that my presence is wanted and enjoyed. I got a lot of “i dont care”s for answers last sort-of relationship, and that was rly discouraging. another turn on is for them to initiate talking and things, like holding hands or planning to hang out + such. consent is another big one.

29. Do you usually ask other women out or do you wait for them to ask you?

i usually tend to ask them out, but im still dealing w internalized junk, so its difficult. i also havent any situations in which they liked me back, which is frustrating. like i got lead on earlier summer for abt a month until i asked what we were doing + didnt rly get an answer, and it was this whole mess. i generally try to make the first move tho, bc i know firsthand how difficult it is, but that being said, it’s still hard for me to know for sure if theyre interested + i dont wanna make things uncomf w them, so i’ll wait until i think there might b attraction. that being said, once that’s all out of the way, i like to consider myself a good flirt when im trying.

31. Talk about your interests or hobbies!

i have lots of interests!! im obsessed w steven universe, its my fav show (and if u ever have time, we should totally watch it together sometime, i rly think you’d love it, it’s super gay + heartwarming.) i really love playing music and learning new songs, which im rly great at memorizing. talking to friends + gettin 2 know them better is always nice and fun. i like to draw new things + see the different ways ppl draw, so seeing art on here is always fun for me. i’m also rly into polygon videos (it’s a youtube channel, not like videos abt polygon haha) and this podcast called the adventure zone. season one just ended, so i might start listening to another one called friends at the table. i rly wanna start a podcast w someone, but can never find anyone to start it with. idk what I’d talk abt but if i could find a partner for it, i think it’d be a lot of fun. mb smth abt games or books/queer representation in media. doing a dnd podcast would also b rly fun, but a lot of work + editing so mb later down the road !! im blanking on other interests atm, but animations and cartoons r lovely and i aim to make something in that field one day, if not just a comic.

my hobbies r mostlyyyy drawing, dnd things now every thursday, hanging w my friends, playing video games, sometimes writing (i rly wanna start a comic, and im tryin to get my butt into gear on it), goin to parks, listening to music, and goin 2 events w roe + cesar, two of my friends. sometimes ill play music!! i need to get more than the keyboard i’m lending, but i love performing. ill also watch leg birds on youtube, theyre a lesbian couple that plays gams + theyre rly sweet.

33. Do you love easily or does it take time for you to warm up to someone?

its easy for me to love friends, doesnt usu take me more than a few months of knowing them if were talking a lot. as for falling in love, that takes me a lot longer. ive never rly been in love w someone. i thought i was once, but rly it was just my first gay experience w someone and i wanted it to be perfect so i projected a lot of things + made it better than it seemed to myself for the duration of it, which wasn’t healthy, so i wanna avoid doing that again, + take things slower next time. or at least for what they are.

35. Ever fallen for a straight girl?

a few times, they were just crushes tho, so it wasnt too too bad

37. Favorite comfort food?

hot cocoa or tea. as for food food, i dont think i have one. mb french toast or cinnamon rolls.

39. Vegetarian? Vegan? None of the above?

i used to be a vegetarian!! for like a yr, but it was difficult for me to eat and feel full, and i was pretty underweight, so i stopped.

41. Early-riser or night-owl?

both, i tend to stay up, but getting up early can be nice if i dont have to do anything. like just gently waking + making some tea and a nice breakfast + sittin around for a bit.

43. What is your Myers-Briggs type?

enfp-a

45. At what age did you know you were a lesbian?

i think like 16-17? it took me a bit to get words for identity, like lesbian/nonbinary and the like, but i always knew, like id call myself an individual as opposed to gendered terms that i was referred to, and always felt rly yucky w deadname + the wrong pronouns

47. Are you crushing on anyone at the moment (celebrity or otherwise)?

ive got one crush atm !! and another person who seems nice, but i wanna hang out w before like thinking abt a crush (im poly, which perhaps goes w/o saying, but i always like to state it when talking abt these things, jic )

49. Talk about your dreams/aspirations for the future

i’d like a partner or two, to get some bongos- i got to play some a couple weeks ago, and it was the most fun i’ve had playing anything!! having smth with an instant response that i could make up rhythms with was really rewarding and so much fun. i know i want a cat at some point, to go on cute dates + cuddle and kiss a lot w someone, to visit my friends in other places, dye my hair, get a better job, to travel a bit, make a comic, go to college for animation and storyboarding, mb go to camp at some point, and I’d like to make some more friends here, i’m already making some, which i’m super happy about, but it’s always nice meeting new ppl

thank u for asking!! this was relaxing + fun, and a lot of the topics were cathartic to talk about, and i needed it. so thanks for listening too kinda

also im queen of commas, i’ve discovered while typing this

#msg in a bottle #cass charts #idk what i want my ask tag to be

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theloverera · 5 years

Text

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

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persephonestourrp · 6 years

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@katrinahummel:

♫ Mama told me not to waste my life ♫

Elizabeth and Burt Hummel were so excited when they found out they were finally pregnant after trying for so long. There were a few complications along the way, though, and their daughter came earlier than planned, but she was a fighter, like any true Hummel was. After a few days in the hospital, the happy couple got to bring their beautiful Katrina Hummel back to her home in Overland Park, Kansas.

Liz and Burt both doted on their darling miracle of a daughter, the one they thought they’d never had and almost lost, all the time. Kat, as they nicknamed her, was their pride and joy, and she loved them just as much back. In fact, she was definitely one of only a handful of kids who cried at both the first pre-school drop off and the first kindergarten drop off.

Kat was especially close to her mom. Her mom was beautiful and taught Kat about skin care and fashion, gladly letting Kat walk around in her heels and put on makeup after school. Liz was a former art teacher, so she also taught Kat how to draw and about famous artists, all while still watching Disney movies with her -- though Kat would loudly pointed out that the guys weren’t that great. Her mom signed her up for ballet lessons, ice skating lessons, and made sure she practiced every day for her piano lessons. While Kat loved spending time with her dad and even eagerly learned about cars at his garage, she just wasn’t as close to him as she was to her mom. Hey, that’s what you’d expect when her mom was the one who took her to all her lessons and picked her up from school.

So Kat knew something was up when her dad was the one picking her up after school one day in fourth grade when she was just nine years old. She wearily walked over to him knowing, even at her young age, that something was terribly wrong. And as soon as Kat asked what was wrong, her dad, who had always been so strong and brave, burst into tears. Her mom had been in a car accident and died on impact. A broken-hearted Burt half-heartedly sued the driver of the other car, winning tens of thousands of dollars he put in savings for Kat, but nothing could heal the damage that had been done to their family.

Of course, school just had to find a way to make that even worse. One of her first days back after her mom’s funeral, Kat hugged one of her friends in the restroom and tried not to cry. Apparently the angles of their heads made it look like they were kissing, and even though they were only in fourth grade, rumors spread and Kat and her friend were mocked for being gay. And when Kat learned what that meant, it made the mocking sting even more, since she realized that she might’ve actually kissed her friend in another circumstance. Her friend ended up transferring schools for the next school year, and Kat spent her tenth birthday without her mom and without a real birthday party.

Things changed that summer, though. Kat’s cousin Marley Rose and her mom moved into the Hummel house. Kat had tried to cook and clean, but seeing as she was so young, she wasn’t really successful. Millie Rose, Marley’s mother and Liz’s half-sister, was having difficulties just keeping up with rent and utilities. So the arrangement was supposed to help the Roses get on their feet and help the broken hearted Hummels through a tough time, but they just ended up staying together. And while it took a little while for Kat to warm up to Marley after everything that happened in the past few months, they soon became fast friends that bonded over music, Disney, and writing. Marley didn’t even care what anyone at school said about Kat, telling her she didn’t even see the big deal if she had kissed that girl anyways, which made Kat feel better than she had that whole year.

The two grew closer and closer over the years, really behaving more like sisters than cousins. In some ways they were like a typical nuclear family, since Kat could go to Millie for motherly advice and Burt would jokingly threaten to disown Marley whenever she wore her University of Nebraska spirit wear (her mom was a longtime Cornhusker fan and raised her daughter to be the same, even though Burt was, of course, a KU Jayhawks fan). Kat might not have understood sports, but she understood that family teasing.

Over the years, they both got into more activities, both together and separate, and Kat developed some confidence. So, after years of soul searching, she finally sat Marley down before their sophomore year of high school, both of them deciding to share a secret. Marley admitted, with excitement, that she had started writing songs, and while Kat was excited about that and wanted to see them, Marley asked Kat what secret she wanted to share. While Kat emphasized that she hadn’t kissed that girl, she was, in fact, a lesbian. Marley was, of course, very supportive and accepting. And, after a few days, she admitted she kind of had a feeling. Whatever feeling she had was apparently shared by Millie and Kat’s dad, since neither seemed too surprised. That was kind of weird to Kat, since she didn’t get what seemed gay about her past her short nails (which she learned was a thing, but she only really kept them short so she could play piano when she wanted to), but it was better than being disowned or anything.

That year, Kat worked on coming out, and while some guys were jerks about it and some girls started covering themselves in the locker rooms, Kat was flourishing. However, Marley wasn’t. Kat had been worried about her for months, especially when she fainted at school. Then Kat found her best friend bent over a toilet with her fingers down her throat, and Kat sprung into action. She told their parents, and all three of them got Marley to start therapy.

Kat had already lost her mom, her first best friend, to something she couldn’t prevent; she wasn’t going to lose Marley to something that she could prevent. So Kat was attentive to everything, researched every aspect of eating disorders, and watched Marley like a hawk. When it came time to apply for colleges, Kat was relieved that Marley applied to schools in New York, too. She didn’t like the idea of the girl not being by her side; not only did she want to keep an eye on her, but she couldn’t think of anyone she’d rather have as her roommate in the Big Apple.

♫ She said spread your wings, my little butterfly ♫

Deciding on a school was a hard choice for Kat. For years Kat juggled a love and passion for both fashion and music, but she knew pursuing both career paths wasn’t realistic. After a lot of soul searching, Kat ended up choosing to go to Parsons to major in fashion design. She decided music was something she wanted to do, but fashion was what she needed to do, either by being a designer or running Vogue. So Kat would sketch and create outfits, often using Marley as her model, while Marley would write songs. Eventually Marley started bringing over her friend Norah Puckerman to help with the songwriting process, and Kat slowly started to befriend her as well, even if the two of them wouldn’t admit it at first.

Since Marley started hanging out more with Norah, Kat found her own thing: YouTube. During her freshman year, Kat started her own channel called Kat’s Korner. She started simple by doing some makeup tutorials, but when she did her first skin care tutorial, she started to really get some followers (there was a reason her skin was always on point). Kat went on to give fashion and life advice, while also showcasing a lot of Marley and even Norah. She came out after some speculation from her fans, because she wanted them to know she was proud of her sexuality, though she rarely talked about her love life on the channel.

That was partly because her love life was basically non-existent. She dated one girl in high school, but they broke up shortly after Kat moved to New York. After that, it seemed impossible to find anyone who interested her who was interested back. Tinder was full of creepy guys wanting threesomes and girls who just wanted a fling. She was too scared to get a fake ID to go to a gay bar, so that never happened. It was depressing, so she threw herself into school and her YouTube channel, and then when Marley asked if she’d join her band, Kat threw herself into that as well. She occasionally dated around, but just never found anyone that sparked her interest enough for her to slow down and try to date them for real. It was better too busy to try to date than have to deal with rejection or failure.

Soon after Kat, Marley, and Norah joined forces, they held auditions and found Quinn Fabray. After that, Kat’s life was a blur of school, YouTube, and The Sirens. Her channel often featured her bandmates in interviews or vlogs, which helped promote them and get them bigger and better gigs in New York. They were starting to actually be fairly successful, and Kat loved having a life where she could pursue fashion and music.

Of course, she’d always pick fashion in the end. When her senior year approached, she was optimistic that her increasing level of YouTube fame (which, by the way, definitely helped pay the bills) would help her get a job in fashion. Kat started filling out applications for Vogue and some fashion lines in between homework and band gigs.

But instead of getting an interview for Vogue, Sabrina Smythe came to one of their performances and The Sirens got a recording contract.

It wasn’t really what Kat expected. She almost wasn’t sure if she wanted it. She loved performing and, again, she had wanted to pursue that along with fashion, but she decided fashion was her first and true love. After years of dedicating herself primarily to fashion, she wasn’t sure she was ready to go to music as her main career. Of course, Kat realized it would be dumb to turn down the job, so she signed on and, of course, promoted the album to her followers. And their self-titled debut album was a huge hit, definitely partly due to Kat’s fans.

Once she graduated college and the album had been out for a while, the band went on tour. Kat’s YouTube page got even more hits, and when the media found out she was gay, she suddenly became an inspiration and a role model. That and her love of fashion got her involved in some solo ads and photoshoots and she even got to write a guest article in Vogue like some god damn fairy tale dream come true. She would always joke that she felt like the Pete Wentz of the group; she was the bassist who a lot of people seemed to know, and she also used to have romantic feelings for Ashlee Simpson.

Now that the second album is out and the tour is about to start, Kat’s excited to see how it goes. She’s also nervous since, well, a few companies have reached out to her about starting a fashion line. This has been her dream for years, so she wants to make sure every design she creates is absolutely perfect. Combine that stress with traveling, performance nerves, Marley worries, Quinn/Norah worries, YouTube videos (Sabrina insists she keeps doing them), and the fact that she has to deal with all the pressures of being the “out” member of the band...let’s just say that Kat has a bit of a short fuse at the moment. Stir in the fact that her dad convinced her to hire her stepsister as their tour drummer, and you have a recipe for disaster.

♫ Don’t let what they say keep you up at night ♫

Marley Rose: What can Katrina Hummel say about Marley Rose? It’s really almost too simple: Marley is truly Kat’s best friend. Marley saved Kat from a lifetime of loneliness, and Kat will always be grateful for her; she gave her confidence and stuck by her side when no one else their age did. She’s not sure if she would have survived her schooling years if Marley hadn’t moved into her room. Yeah, they annoyed and still annoy each other like any sisters do (and, truly, they’re sisters at this point, not cousins), but they love each other. Although it’s been years since Marley developed her eating disorder and she hasn’t relapsed, Kat has been terrified of losing her since, and, okay, she can admittedly be a bit too protective of the girl. How could she not be when losing her would mean losing her best friend and confidant? Marley knows everything there is to know about Kat...except that whole Sabrina thing. Regardless, Marley is the most important person in Kat’s life, and after years of worrying about and protecting her, Kat can’t just turn that fear off. She even sat Norah down for a talk about watching Marley when the two decided to move in together, but she stills worries...even if it’s nice to have her own space for the first time in years in her very fancy (if small) studio apartment.

Norah Puckerman: When Kat first met Norah, they did not get along, but they’ve since found common ground and a true friendship. They have a lot of fun teasing and bickering with each other and fighting over what movies to watch when they all hang out and making sure Marley makes good decisions (even if Norah suggests tequila shots time to time), and, okay, they sound like they’re married...whatever. Their friendship reached another turning point during the creation of Persephone in the Underworld. The two of them spent a lot of late nights writing out lyrics and harmonies, each of them pushing the other while laughing over late Chinese delivery food. She also gave Norah a big speech on watching over Marley when the two decided to move in together, and Kat’s been impressed with how much Norah’s been watching over her. They’d always been friends, but now there’s an additional level of respect between the two of them. Kat’s intrigued to spend more time with her, since they’re bunking together on this one. Sabrina also wants Kat to tutor Norah on proper interview etiquette whenever she can, but she’s not sure Norah’s going to like that part very much, and even Kat doubts she can get Norah to control her tongue. And it’s probably a sign that Kat has spent too much time with her when she starts to joke about how she must be the first girl who wanted Norah to not use her tongue, huh? Well...it’s a funny joke, and Kat can admit that, if it wasn’t for the potential drama, she wouldn’t be completely against something like that happening once or twice. But she thinks Norah deserves something more than just a hook-up, though she’s not sure Norah agrees with her.

Quinn Fabray: First of all, Quinn is literally the prettiest girl in the world, so jot that down. But seriously, the first thing Kat noticed about Quinn was how attractive she was. She marched into their audition (in a fantastic outfit, Kat would add), and then she was good on top of it. Kat and Quinn quickly bonded over fashion and makeup, something they seemed to have more in common than the others - Marley dressed well and Norah could put together a nice smoky eye, but neither of them had as similar of styles as Kat and Quinn. Kat loves Quinn with all her heart, and Quinn seems to be the only person who gets Kat to calm down her Marley stresses, since sometimes she seems like the only person Marley listens to at all. In return, Kat’s always there for Quinn when she needs to talk about her family or sexuality issues. They’re both, of course, completely comfortable deciding on the outfits the band will wear for performances together. It’s a true sign of trust that Kat would let anyone help with that.

Sabrina Smythe: So, remember Kat’s love life? Well, being famous makes dating hard enough, but it’s even harder when you’re a gay woman, so your dating pool is already limited. It’s even harder when you hooked up with your manager who hates commitment and now wants to be all “professional” with you. Kat hasn’t told anyone what happened between the two of them the night of their album release party...or that they’ve hooked up a couple of other times since then. Hey, Kat might look innocent, but she likes sex, okay? They both haven’t hooked up for months, which is good, because Kat knows the two of them wouldn’t work in the long run. Or, well, at least she tells herself that; Kat’s not sure she’s entirely convinced herself. But, then again, she also knows after years of not dating, she probably isn’t the best judge of a good relationship anyways.

Kitty Wilde: The high school version of Kat would never have seen herself befriending Kitty Wilde. Kitty, while fashionable and snarky, is also a God-fearing Christian, and Kat is very much an atheist. Just from knowing what she did about Quinn’s family, Kat was a bit wary about getting to know her. But when push comes to shove, Kat will try to get along with most people, especially people who happen to be playing with the band on tour (Kitty’s playing drums for their set since they don’t have an official drummer). The two ended up bonding over similar interests in celebrities, fashion, and, of course, the awful feline puns that came with their names. Honestly, try being a lesbian with the nickname “Kat”; she’s pretty sure the only name that would be worse is something like “Pussy Galore”. Anyways, Kitty quickly got a spot on Kat’s channel and the two embraced their names to start doing vlogs and instagram posts together labeled #KittyKat or #KitKat, though they worry people will see that trending and assume it’s about the candy. Anyways, the two have developed a fast friendship, and Kitty has promised to help with Kat’s channel, which she honestly needs to survive this tour. Kitty is one of the few people on tour who's actually getting her to relax.

Santana Lopez: Kat knows that she does what she does well, and not just when it comes to instruments. She has the highest follower count of everyone on tour, she does the most Q&As, and she makes videos constantly. She’s also possibly the best known member of the band and has branched out the most. So, of course, Santana loves her for that. And as Kat learned about Santana, Kat started to really like her and admire her social media status. While the two can butt heads, the two of them respect each other a lot and it’s nice. At least someone on their managerial team actually respects her.

Jackie Puckerman: Between KittyKat, her fashion line, the music rehearsals, and her own drama, Kat hasn’t had time to keep up with all the gossip as much as she normally would. And that means she hasn’t gotten to know Jackie too well. But, weirdly, whenever their conversations happen, Jackie seems to bring up Norah. And given her complicated feelings about that subject, she’s not necessarily into talking about it with someone she doesn’t know that well. Or, then again, maybe someone on the outside looking in can offer a better perspective. She’s still debating.

Rachel Berry: Rachel is so talented. Honestly, she gave Kat chills when she first heard her sing on “Stars in the Sky”, and that was their first take! Really, that’s all Kat knows about Rachel from in-person interactions. Of course, now she’s heard so many stories and praises from Kitty that she really wants to get to know her better. Kat assumes that any friend of both Quinn and Kitty is a friend of hers, but the two have never really gotten to talk much. Kat doesn’t want to push her into being friends or anything, but actually having a full conversation with her would be nice, especially since Kat’s getting so close to Kitty nowadays. She assumes Rachel would feel the same way about it, even if she seems a bit mean about it.

Blair Anderson: Kat and Blair have an…interesting relationship. At first the two of them got along, because they do have some similar interests - singing, musical theater, all of that. And maybe there was some flirting, but for Kat, it was all in hopes of making Sabrina a little jealous. She’d look back over at Sabrina every time Blair made her laugh and hope to get a response, but she never got it. And, yes, she felt bad about doing it and stopped, eventually. Now the two are somewhat friendly, but Kat doesn’t fully trust anyone who spends that much time with both her stepsister and Sam. Then again, Blair is also sisters with the Best Looking Woman in North America (which, come on, everyone calls her), which intrigues Kat some more...but pointing that out seemed to piss Blair off for whatever dumb reason.

Sam Evans: Sam is sweet, dorky, and, honestly, she makes Kat laugh a lot. Hell, she even does a good Bella Swan impression, which should really be impossible (and it’s a bit hot when you’re a gay girl who’s always been into Kristen Stewart and considered yourself Alice Cullen and, seriously, Alice/Bella would’ve been perfect). In any other situation, Sam would be someone Kat would crush on, or at least be really close friends with...but that’s unfortunately not the case. Kat has noticed the tension between Sam and Sabrina, and it’s obviously very sexual. She has no idea what’s actually going on between those two, but she’s suspicious. Kat’s keeping an eye on Sam, since she’s not sure how she feels about Sam and Sabrina possibly having something - especially since Sabrina insisted she wouldn’t pursue Kat because of their professional relationship.

Fiona Hudson: Kat had a crush on Fiona in high school, okay? Yeah, it’s dumb because, while she’s pretty, she’s a huge dork and the only reason Kat liked her was because she was actually nice to her. While Kat got friends throughout high school, she was still mocked and bullied a lot. Fiona was her knight in flannel armor, the girl she liked from afar. But then Kat got a girlfriend and she eventually moved on...only for Fiona to move into her house and become her stepsister and bond with her father. While Kat had grown up sharing her father with Marley, seeing someone else get along so well with Burt hurt. Seeing how much Fiona and Burt laughed and joked together when Kat helped plan the wedding tore her up. They never laughed and talked like that. And then her father had the nerve to ask her to get her a job? Kat did it, though she made sure she would not play drums for her band. Fiona couldn’t have everything that was hers...until their initial tour drummer had to drop. Kat tried her best to persuade them to use Kitty for both sets, but Sabrina said it would be too hard on Kitty and the band was afraid it would make their set suffer and couldn’t Fiona just play their rather simple beats? Kat is furious about the situation, but she’s good at hiding how she feels by just putting on a smile and saying she’s joking. And at least it’s not like Fiona’s joining the band, right?

♫ And they can’t detain you, ‘cause wings are made to fly ♫

How do you feel about being publicly out while Quinn and Norah aren’t?

[answer here]

Have you ever considered quitting the band to focus on fashion?

[answer here]

JBI asks: If you could give anyone on tour a makeover, who would it be?

[answer here]

#katrina hummel #kat hummel #bio #c #the sirens #switched #kurt hummel #kh #o

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isdairyqueenclosedyet · 7 years

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Is Celesbian Gossip A Step Backward, Or A Sign Of Equality?

Demi Lovato during the 2017 Global Citizen Festival.

BuzzFeed News; Getty Images; Alamy

There's a musical episode of Boxed In - director and writer Amy York Rubin's very funny series of digital shorts for IFC's Comedy Crib - that kicks off with Rubin's character receiving a news alert from TMZ: Dianna Agron dishes on the unique intimacy of female relationships. Rubin, sitting in a coffee shop, gets mobbed by a group of women wondering what the news alert might mean.

Stop! Everyone stop what you're doing! one woman yells, knocking a coffee out of an unsuspecting patron's hands. A traditionally attractive female celebrity just made an ambiguous comment about her sexuality!

The entire coffee shop bursts into song - Tell your friends, spread the news, someone famous might be gay - while Rubin's character attempts to staunch the flow of their excitement.

Seriously, this is what we care about? she says. What about everything on the news?

We've got news, they sing back at her. Someone's gay!

By the end of the bite-size episode, another news alert clarifies that (a fictionalized) Dianna Agron isn't gay after all. But Rubin's character has gotten swept up in the commotion, right when everyone's just lost the faith: Wait! Did you guys see this picture of Kendall Jenner and Gigi Hadid?

The episode perfectly captures how easily LGBT fans can get swept up into speculation about a celebrity's sexuality - even at a time when there are more out celebrities than ever before.

The "Fame" episode of Boxed In.

IFC

Twenty years ago, before public support for gay people was anything like what it is now, Ellen DeGeneres risked her career and made history with her 1997 Yep, I'm Gay Time cover story, paving the way for many of the celebrities who have proudly claimed their queerness or openly expressed affection for their partners since. Though nowadays, you're more likely to see a celebrity casually mention their sexual orientation in a tweet or Snapchat or Instagram post than to see one more formally claiming an identity in front of the world.

But the years-long uptick in out celebrities, and the steady normalization of out queer people in Hollywood and beyond, hasn't stopped the are-they-or-aren't-they rumor mill from churning - if anything, it has only picked up steam. Female celebrities can inspire their own particular kind of fervor. In 2017, there's a new generation of famous lesbians and bisexual women (celesbians, if you will) who are casually living out a real-life version of The L Word in front of our eyes, inspiring mass social media followings from fans hungry for the latest celesbian gossip - including for the many celebrities who aren't confirmed to be sleeping with other people of the same gender, but are the subjects of constant, frantic speculation. The recent brouhaha around Demi Lovato (who's been spotted holding hands with a female DJ, and who refused to label her sexuality in a recent interview, after which she defended her decision in a series of tweets) is the latest example of the celesbian gossip train going a bit off the rails.

There is no simple, clear-cut binary of out versus in.

Whether queer celebrities have a responsibility to come out - especially those who have referenced potentially queer experiences in their work, or who have profited from the LGBT community's support - is a question that long precedes celebrities' ability to tweet about it. But that question has become more complicated in a time when coming out is seemingly not as big a deal as it once was, when a new generation is embracing ideas of sexual fluidity and eschewing labels, and, as always, there is no simple, clear-cut binary of out versus in. For female celebrities, that complication is compounded by the gal-palification of intimacy between women, which happens less frequently now in the tabloids but still makes the rounds (like it did with Lovato in September).

We're also living through yet another revival of lesbian chic - a theme in fashion and pop culture at large that paints a certain kind of edgy, feminine-leaning androgyny as the next new hot thing, boiling lesbianism down to a passing but commodifiable fad. And while positive representation of queer women on television is on the rise, it's still far from perfect, leading many LGBT fans to look to celebrity gossip on social media to get their fix of queer drama - and queer possibility. As more famous women continue to come out at younger and younger ages (much like the general population), our cultural fascination with the way they introduce and perform their queerness is only continuing to grow. Whether or not that's a good thing depends on who you ask.

Demi Lovato's sexuality has been the subject of speculation for years. While promoting her new album, Tell Me You Love Me, released late last month, Lovato gave an interview to PrideSource's Chris Azzopardi that reignited an old debate. They spoke about her LGBT activism: She's headlined pride events, including filming her 2013 video for Really Don't Care at LA Pride, and last year accepted the GLAAD Vanguard Award, which honors entertainers who have promoted LGBT rights.

But when Azzopardi mentioned that Lovato's sexuality has been thoroughly dissected on the internet, and gave her the opportunity to speak on it as directly as you'd like, Lovato swerved: Thank you for the opportunity, but I think I'm gonna pass. She explained that she chooses not to speak openly about her orientation because I just feel like everyone's always looking for a headline and they always want their magazine or TV show or whatever to be the one to break what my sexuality is. I feel like it's irrelevant to what my music is all about.

Earlier, Azzopardi had asked about the criticism her 2015 song Cool for the Summer had received from some lesbian websites like AfterEllen for, they argued, implying that women should sample queer sexual relationships only temporarily, and keep it a secret. My intention with the song was just fun and bi-curiosity, Lovato said. I think people look at song lyrics - they look too into it. I wish I could tell that website to 'chill the fuck out' and 'take a break,' because it's just a song.

Demi Lovato and Lauren Abedini on a Disney outing.

Twitter: @justcatchmedemi

The interview, published on September 15, gained a lot of attention, particularly because Lovato had just been spotted with a gal pal - a phrase that many lesbians have started to consider a sort of no-homo dog whistle for possible girlfriend - at a Disney outing a few days earlier. The gal pal in question was out DJ and producer Lauren Abedini. The two were photographed holding hands (and more), leading to widespread speculation that they might be dating. (Lovato's publicist did not respond to a request for comment.) Lovato declined to talk about her sexuality, but hinted that her new YouTube documentary coming out on October 17 might detail some things about her sexuality, because if ever I want to talk about it, I want it to be on my own terms."

But the internet really blew up after HuffPost's Noah Michelson wrote an essay declaring that Demi Lovato's Reason For Refusing To Talk About Her Sexuality Is Total Bulls**t. Lovato responded directly to Michelson, tweeting, Expectant and rude. Watch my documentary and chill out. She also tweeted a couple more general statements to her 49 million followers, which garnered her a number of you-go-girl writeups from places like InStyle and PopSugar: Just because I'm refuse [sic] to label myself for the sake of a headline doesn't mean I'm not going to stand up for what I believe in ... If you're that curious about my sexuality, watch my documentary. But I don't owe anybody anything.

How can they look us in the eyes and tell us how brave we are for being who we are - and ask us to fill their pockets - if they won't do the same?

In his piece, Michelson argued that Lovato is open about so many other aspects of her personal life - so why not this one?

Michelson told me that he has written about his beliefs that sexual orientation should not be considered a 'private' characteristic before, and it's never gone over well. But, he said, he wasn't expecting Lovato to respond, and he didn't expect so many people to misunderstand what I was saying.

Michelson believes in the political power of coming out, for all of those in a position to do so, but especially feels that those who present themselves as allies and/or make money off of their relationship with the queer community have an even greater responsibility to be open about who they are. How can they look us in the eyes and tell us how brave we are for being who we are or how proud we should stand - and ask us to fill their pockets - if they won't do the same? Michelson stressed that people can refuse to talk about their orientation, though he generally thinks they shouldn't, but the reason for it should not be 'that's private' - especially in the specific context of who Lovato says she is and claims to stand for.

It isn't only journalists, though, who may have taken issue with Lovato's message. In a June interview for Paper Magazine, out bisexual pop singer Halsey - who earlier this summer released Strangers with a fellow out bi singer, Fifth Harmony's Lauren Jauregui, and who has been a vocal LGBT activist - called out pop songs about experimental hookups, which she said perpetuate Bisexuality as a taboo. 'Don't tell your mom' or 'We shouldn't do this' or 'This feels so wrong but it's so right' That narrative is so fucking damaging to bisexuality and its place in society. Halsey didn't mention Lovato specifically, but the lyrics sound like they were plucked from both Cool for the Summer and Katy Perry's I Kissed a Girl. Lovato, at least, appeared to interpret Halsey's criticisms that way at the time, tweeting what looked like a response. (When asked for comment on the interview and Lovato's tweet, a representative for Halsey responded that the two are friends and there is no drama and no comment, pointing to Lovato's Instagram post from July showing Halsey and Lovato posing merrily together. Happy National Coming Out Day Positivity to you! she added.)

Halsey and Demi Lovato in July.

instagram.com

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