In late August, when Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce announced their engagement and broke Instagram records in the process, some of the most internet-addled minds collectively wondered one thing: How are the Gaylors holding up?
A small but incredibly passionate subsection of Swifties, Gaylors believe that Swift harbors secret queer tendencies, which she hints at in her music through her infamous deployment of Easter eggs and cryptic clues. Many if not most of them have been hoping against hope that Swift would dump Kelce and just come out already; the engagement was, therefore, rather unwelcome news. “[This is] gaylors’ 9/11 and it’s not even september 11th yet,” one person wrote on Twitter; “GAYLORS ARE OFFICIALLY DEAD THANK YOU,” wrote another (to the tune 37,000 likes). Screenshots of the most unhinged reactions in the Gaylor sub-Reddit began making the rounds, before the 50,000-member strong group went private. “Idgaf about the engagement,” another representative comment read, “but it gives me joy to watch gaylors lose.”
Gaylors have been in the trenches for years now, however; they’re not so easily deterred. And now that Swift’s new album, The Life of a Showgirl, has disappointed many lifelong Swifties, the Gaylors, long an internet punch line and a prime example of parasocial superfans, have begun taking on quite a different reputation. My feed’s been flooded these past few days with former haters who’ve gained a newfound respect for Gaylor truthers: “I’ve been fascinated by gaylors this era, like yall will survive anything … kudos mama”; “I’m not a gaylor but I am now an ally. They are a special breed of Taywarrior”; “I’ve come back around on Gaylors [and] now I respect the hustle I honestly do.” The Gaylors, after all, are used to disappointment in the object of their fervent standom. Years and years of disappointment.
And sure, they’re delulu — some Gaylors thought, for example, that Swift wearing stripes in her engagement photo shoot was suggestive of her feeling imprisoned — but are they any worse than the run-of-the-mill Swift superfan? The ones who send mildly critical journalists death threats and dox their family members; the ones harassing Matty Healy’s fiancée Gabbriette; the ones who spend their free time analyzing every lyrical bread crumb and secret album-liner note in endless pursuit of the real human being behind the billion-dollar brand.
You might think a record about the football star she’s marrying would have absolutely nothing to offer your typical Gaylor, but TLOAS has turned out to be their richest text since 2019’s Lover, when queer-suggestive Easter eggs piled up in such abundance that I got swept up in the intrigue myself. Swift was swapping “he/him” pronouns to “she” and “her” in live Midnights performances! All her promotional material for Lover was heavy on rainbows! She teased a huge announcement and music video on Lesbian Visibility Day! Of course, that music video ended up being for the unlistenable “ME!,” while another awkward-but-wholesome lead single on that album, “You Need to Calm Down,” was written explicitly to promote the passage of the Equality Act, a U.S. Senate bill that would protect LGBTQ people from discrimination.
But now, in “Actually Romantic,” which is seemingly Swift’s response to Charli XCX’s “sympathy is a knife” — where Charli lamented her own insecurities when she briefly shared airspace with the global superstar — Gaylors have been gifted Swift’s most explicitly sapphic song yet:
“All the effort you’ve put in
It’s actually romantic
I really gotta hand it to you, ooh
No man has ever loved me like you do”
And then there’s the bridge:
“You think I’m tacky, baby
Stop talking dirty to me
It sounded nasty, but it feels like you’re flirting with me
I mind my business, God’s my witness that I don’t provoke it
It’s kind of making me wet (Oh)”
This song feels straight out of 2004, when Mean Girls’s Regina George — an out lesbian in the remake 20 years later, incidentally — accuses Janis Ian of preying on her and her girlfriends at a pool party. One wonders how, exactly, “your English teacher” Swift managed to completely misinterpret Charli’s song, in which the artist is honest and vulnerable about experiencing self-doubt in the vicinity of someone as famous and powerful as Swift is (“I couldn’t even be her if I tried”). Was Swift being deliberately obtuse? And did she not paid attention back in 2008 when Hilary Duff taught us all that you shouldn’t use gay as an insult? She’s essentially doing as much, insinuating as Regina does of Janis, “You must just have a big, fat, lesbian crush on me.”
And yet … implying that Charli’s attention makes her wet? It’s one of the most sexually explicit lines Swift’s ever written; to Gaylors, as clear a sign as any of raging, if repressed, lesbianism. On “Wood,” the album’s cringey ode to the power of Kelce’s “magic wand,” the tone is cheeky, aloof, heavily reliant on innuendo; not even “his love was the key that opened my thighs” feels quite as frank or as carnal as the whole of “Actually Romantic.”
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Sure, you could read the “kind of making me wet line” as (another) attempt at being cheeky — just teasing! — but for an artist who’s expertly stoked her fans’ intense parasociality for her own immense financial benefit, of course there are going to be Gaylors taking this song at face value.
I’d have to imagine Swift also knows that Gaylors would latch onto lyrics like “pretty and witty” in the titular track (the famous song using those words in West Side Story completes the phrase, of course, with “and gay”). In that song, Swift waits by the stage door for a performer named Kitty. “Wow, she came out,” Swift sings. Then she tells the newly out performer: “You’re living my dream.” If one were so inclined — and the Gaylors are indeed inclined — one could read the song as a commentary on being closeted in the public eye, the impossibility of having “a magnificent life that’s all mine” because “that’s not what showgirls get.”
But now, just as it was in 2019, after even non-Gaylors were temporarily duped into believing the world’s biggest superstar was about to come out as something other than straight: How could any of us really believe that Taylor’s orientation is anything other than “capitalism”?
Because of course, no Easter egg “proves” anything other than the fact that Swift knows how to keep her fans guessing, to come back for more and more and more, to buy yet another special secret project variant for still more clues. A never-ending gay goose chase. We’re talking about the world’s most successful living self-marketer; there’s just no way she’s ignorant of the Gaylor fan base or of their purchasing power. And while she’s claimed that her Easter eggs always point back toward the music, rather than her personal life, a lot of Swifties just don’t buy it: All of her music points back toward her personal life.
Though I’m intrigued by some of their theories, what annoys and, frankly, embarrasses me about many in the Gaylor fandom is their belief that, in coming out, Swift would become their liberal-policy-supporting advocate, their queer hero. (Remember last year’s bizarre opinion longread in the New York Times suggesting as much? It resulted in this CNN Business article: “Taylor Swift’s associates dismayed by New York Times piece speculating on her sexuality: ‘Invasive, untrue, and inappropriate.’”) To me, the idea — one shared by Swifties across sexualities and ideologies — that Swift is ultimately a force for moral good is an even sillier belief than the half-joking crumb of hope going around social media right now: that maybe, just maybe, the Gaylors were right after all, and this album is deliberately bad heteronormie performance art.
Many Gaylors, and indeed many Swifties, are struggling to recognize the Taylor they thought they knew — in this, the latest and straightest of her eras. She’s now clinched the PR-perfect happy ending. The woman who not long ago proudly called herself a “childless cat lady” when endorsing Kamala Harris for the 2024 elections is now making light fun, on “Wi$h Li$t,” of people who “want those three dogs that they call their kids” and dreaming of a whole block’s worth of little Travis Kelces.
It’s not just that Swift has decided she wants to get married and have children after all — more power to her — but that her embrace of a more traditional path, her long-awaited happy ending, has coincided with a pretty frightening time for everybody else. Waking up this morning to the Supreme Court hearing arguments about abolishing bans on conversion therapy made me wistful for 2019, when Swift was among many public figures making somewhat corny and awkward but ultimately significant and needle-shifting declarations in favor of LGBTQ rights. So as much as they frustrate me, I really do have sympathy for the Gaylors, who desperately wish that this extraordinarily powerful person whom they’ve loved and supported for so long would stand up for them. But given the disappointment of so many fans over this album’s content and marketing rollout, how many of them will keep endlessly searching for a version of Taylor Swift that can possibly live up to the one in their fantasies?
