PERSPECTIVES: It was a disappointing year to be a Swiftie
Being a queer feminist and a Taylor Swift fan never comes easy.
Whether she’s creating a heteronormative, patriarchal dreamscape in her lyrics; touting a thin, white girl squad as girl power personified; or falling into the neoliberal trap of pushing voting above all other forms of protest, Taylor Swift consistently represents a very blonde packaging of girlboss feminism. I mean, have you listened to “The Man”?
I’ve been struggling with the disconnect between my politics and my fandom since I became a Swiftie 10ten years ago. At its heart, my queer identity is political. I believe that our only hope for liberation for all marginalized people is through the complete abolition of oppressive systems. My queer politics are as anti-colonial and anti-capitalist as they are pro-environmentalism and pro-Indigenous. All struggles for freedom are interconnected, and so I see the world as a web of social justice issues that all need dismantling. Cute, fluffy feminism that aims for equality, then, isn’t enough. Instead, it often centers the least marginalized of the marginalized – like Swift, who is a woman, but otherwise holds enormous power.
So I take my love for and criticism of Taylor Swift seriously – a combination that often leaves me sobbing with my head in my hands. And yet, it never gets easier. Probably because “Blondie,” as the fandom affectionately calls her, never gets better.
This year in particular has been rough as a queer Swiftie. And I’m not sure how to reconcile my repeated disappointment in her with the fact that, despite it all, she was still celebrated as TIME’s Person of the Year for 2023.
Let me set the stage: As we rang in the new year, there were several Taylor Swift disasters that Swifties (and especially politicized Swifties) were hoping to leave in 2022: reports of Swift’s private jet carbon emissions topping the charts, the failure of Ticketmaster to handle demand for Eras Tour tickets, and the use of fatphobic imagery in Swift’s “Anti-Hero” music video, to name a few.
But most pressing for queer Swifties was what we call “Lavendergate” – and its homophobic fallout. It may come as no surprise that Swift’s (often conservative) fanbase tends to be homophobic. Indeed, a 2023 report on harassment dynamics within the fandom found that 28% of online accounts dedicated to Swift contribute to harassment, mass reporting, targeted attacks, and doxxing of “Gaylor” accounts (Swift fans, like me, who explore queer subtext in her work and life).
Yet, we were still taken aback when vicious homophobic vitriol was lobbed at Gaylors and other queer Swifties for wondering if Swift’s song title “Lavender Haze,” on her then upcoming album Midnights, was queer-coded. After all, the color lavender has long been associated with queer resistance – a fact that so-called “Hetlors” (anti-Gaylor Swift fans who defend the purity of her supposed heterosexuality) willfully ignored in order to threaten Gaylors to the point of many folks shutting down their accounts for fear of doxxing or worse.
But did self-proclaimed ally Taylor Swift step in to defend her queer fans? Of course not. Instead, she offered us a pathetic excuse for her ever-present silence through the lyrics in Midnights’ “Sweet Nothing”: “And the voices that implore / I should be doing more / To you, I can admit / That I’m just too soft for all of it.” (Ew.)
Many of us within the close-knit online community of queer Swifties crossed our fingers that our “anti-hero” would, indeed, get older and wiser in 2023 and make it easier to root for her. Instead, Swift’s white feminism has only gotten more apparent over the past twelve months.
For queer Swifties who are dedicated both to the pop star and radical leftist politics, 2023 will forever be the year of Swift’s blatant anti-feminist behavior.
In the spring, Swift publicly dated antisemitic, racist Matty Healy, frontman of The 1975. Fans launched a TikTok campaign, #SpeakUpSpeakNow, asking Swift to acknowledge the lack of safety she created for fans of color by inviting Healy to several Eras Tour shows. The controversy culminated in the May release of “Karma (ft. Ice Spice),” a move arguably using Ice Spice, a Black woman, to smooth over Healy’s racist, misogynistic comments about the rapper.
During Pride Month in June, on a Chicago Eras Tour stop, Swift made a disappointing speech that centered her so-called allyship, despite having said nothing about the nation-wide anti-trans legislation currently sweeping domestic politics. This flies in the face of her 2020 documentary, Miss Americana, and her assertion that she must “be on the right side of history” and speak up about political issues that matter to her.
Then, after going public with her relationship with Kansas City Chiefs tight-end Travis Kelce in September, Swift partnered with the NFL, an organization known for having a domestic violence problem – another issue that she specifically calls attention to in Miss Americana as being important to her. Instead, confusingly, Swift is seen rubbing elbows with (and literally high-fiving) Jackson Mahomes, brother of Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes, despite sexual assault allegations.
Currently, another online campaign is calling for Swift to take a stand: #SwiftiesForPalestine. While other celebrities, including some of Swift’s friends, like Lorde and the Hadid sisters, have been vocal about their support for Palestinian liberation, “feminist” Swift has said nothing about this, or any other, genocide.
Oh, and to top it all off? Taylor Swift officially became a billionaire – an inherently unethical financial position – in October.
Through it all, Swift has acknowledged none of it, instead asking us to be distracted by her accolades. As Ashtin Berry, activist and educator, explains on Threads, “Naming Taylor Swift TIME’s Person of the Year in the current political context is just a reminder that the media is an apparatus that frames and shapes the way we understand political tension. And TIME essentially just said it’s okay to be distracted and turned away. ‘Look, a shiny thing you like. It’s okay to ignore the violence of the world.’”
And it’s not just TIME. It’s Swift herself. I’ve never heard silence quite this loud.
The momentum that queer Taylor Swift fans, myself included, once had – for celebrating her, for analyzing her work, and for building community – has turned into bitter disappointment and a devastating lack of morale. The queered hyperfixation on Swift and her work once felt fun and playful; now it lacks vitality in a way that feels akin to grief.
Over the course of 2023, we’ve been forced to reckon with what’s more important to us: our love for Swift, or the necessity of our politics. And since the latter will win out every time, queer Swifties have fewer and fewer ways to find the pulse of what once brought so much joy.
I will beg until my knees bleed for Swift, with all of her social and financial power, to use her influence to shift tides. Until then, I have to be honest with you, Taylor: My heart won’t start anymore for you. You’re losing me.