Taylor Swift is gay! Did I get your attention?

Graphic by Julia Norkus

By Stephanie Weber

If I have to hear one more conversation about Taylor Swift possibly being a lesbian I might scream. I grew up on her music, was an unapologetic fan, and I still have my original Fearless (2008) and Speak Now (2010) CDs. Now when I hear her name I shutter at the sound; what once was an artist who inspired childlike wonder is now a trigger. No, I don't want to talk about her queerbaiting (not to mention Matty Healy, but that’s not in my purview) and nor do I care.

As a queer person, I’m tired of talking about if a musician is gay or not. This is the not so delicate act of “queerbaiting.” The term comes from film theory and criticism; it’s a way of understanding character development and representation through a queer perspective. It explains how to flag if a character is gay and not only what that identity means in a specific film but also within the larger film canon. Between 1934 and 1968, Hollywood was ruled by the Hays Production Code. These strict regulations and guidelines limited the kind of stories filmmakers could produce in regard to nudity, prohibition, vulgar language, and of course homosexuality. The Code enforced “good Catholic morals” and created grounds for censorship. Queer film studies is often separated into “pre-Code” and “post-Code” films, examining the ways that queer people were represented when they were banned from the silver screen. In this historical context, queerbaiting describes traditional queer film tropes, like the gay male pansy or the killer lesbian vampire, and how gays fought for representation. More contemporarily, it’s used to describe characters who appear gay but actually aren’t (e.g. Janis Ian from Mean Girls or Ryan Evans from High School Musical), leading viewers on and ultimately disappointing them.

Queerbaiting has its place in discourse about co-opting queerness and directly profiting from it—rainbow capitalism in a different form compared to Target pride collections. However, putting time and energy into these conversations discussing the intimate queer politics of celebrities is exhausting and maintains their platform. Within the last five years, the term queerbaiting has entered the vernacular of teens on TikTok who ran with it, failing to understand how to actually use the word or the historical context it comes with. The term is thrown around to interrogate the lives of real people, basically trying to figure out if a person is queer based on how they dress or behave. Of course, the concept of flagging or passing/clocking is legitimate and has been used for decades to identify other gay people who would otherwise face homophobia if they were out. But real people can’t queerbait. It’s impossible. Either they are queer or they aren’t. Nuance aside, young people love to talk about who is secretly gay and who is simply an effeminate man. What needs to happen is a shift in how we think about queerness and who can embody it. 

Taylor Swift and Harry Styles are often the biggest names in these queerbaiting conversations in regard to their music and fashion choices. Swift ranks number three in the world for most streamed artist, just below Kayne West, with over 85 million listeners a month. Harry Styles is similar, albeit standing at number 16 on Spotify. Fans speculate that Swift is a queer icon (scratch icon, just queer) because of her supposed relationships with famous actors and models who happen to be women and her current relationship with the band MUNA, who opened for several of her Eras Tour concert dates. “ME!” an underwhelming and cringe-fail 2019 collaboration with Brendon Urie of Panic! At The Disco that just so happens to have a very rainbow capitalism music video and her song “Lavender Haze” put fans in a gay frenzy. Prior to the release of Midnights (2022) discourse about the opening song’s title dominated the internet because of its so-called ties to the Lavender Scare in the 1950s, a government campaign which propagated a fear of homosexuals and persecuted them through state-sanctioned homophobia. The color lavender is also a symbol of lesbianism. Swifties and haters of Swift alike argued that Swift should have been aware of these connotations when naming the song. As a lesbian, I’m allowed to say the following: after listening to it and ranking it in my top three songs from that album, I can safely say “Lavender Haze” has nothing to do with queerness. 

On the other hand, Styles has been picked apart over his clothing; his sparkly shirts, heels, and suspenders with nothing under them have sparked conversations about his sexuality. Since his One Direction days, fans have speculated he was intimate with one of his bandmates. If you’re curious about these “fan theories” go on Reddit or Tumblr from 2013. I am not providing them here. 

I’m not surprised at Styles’ and Swift’s ability to maintain this queerbaiting façade. They are wealthy, white, and massively privileged musicians in the industry. I do not care about their sexuality, but I do care about their ability to lead fans on. It’s so easy to tweet “I wanted to address the rumors of my sexuality. Despite the rumors, I am straight but support the LGBTQ+ community and have enough self-worth to be open about my sexuality.” But, alas, the hope I have for the mega elites is once again lost. That solution is just too simple and would leave fans with even more “evidence” that these artists are hiding something. Before the end of the semester, some classmates were talking about Shawn Mendes and Camilla Cabello being each other’s beards—a term primarily used in the mid-1900s to describe a traditional man-woman couple who both appear straight but are actually gay. Think, for example, the marriage between actor Rock Hudson and Phylliss Gates who were together to conceal Hudson’s homosexuality and preserve his Hollywood career. Being a beard is a protective act; it is life sustaining, because homophobia is still alive and well. 

Regardless of my thoughts on Mendes and Cabello, the real concern is the tone of this conversation. My classmates were jovial, lighthearted, and humorous, laughing mid-sentence and lively debating gay politics that don’t affect them in the halls of Emerson, not fearing for any backlash if they were to talk in public. What these conversations do, adversely, is cause violence. These so-called “allies” create an environment so toxic that I want to leave.  Conversations about coming out as a celebrity and even as a regular person are convoluted; hypothetically if an artist of that stature were to label their sexuality as something other than straight, their career would be jeopardized and that is a reality that just can’t happen. Although he’s not a musician, actor Kit Connor was forced to come out as bisexual last year after hysterical fans tried to uncover his sexuality after the Netflix original series Heartstopper (a show about two queer schoolboys) was released. Here is an extensive list of other celebrities this happened to as well. These are examples of outing. This is not okay.

Queerbaiting and queer politics are not abstract issues—they aren’t just on your TikTok “For You” pages or Twitter home screens. They reside and fill the intimate cracks and crevices of very real lived experiences of queer people that fight for their lives every day. Homophobia starts in the home, whether this is with your family or within an institution, like college. I tried to escape it when I transferred to Emerson College in Fall 2022 from another small liberal arts school in Cambridge, finding myself searching for queer people. I came to Emerson with a minor in Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and an understanding that queer people were going to be everywhere, sharing my same beliefs. Queer people are indeed everywhere, but aren’t active in their radical liberation. We lack a structure to understand what it means to be queer in today’s political climate, or on a smaller scale, as a college student balancing notions of privilege and marginalization. Ultimately, though, your nose piercing and dyed hair does not excuse your passivity. 

Music and radio are passions of mine, so I joined WECB, Emerson’s student-run radio station created in 1948. For the Spring 2023 programming lineup, I designed a show called “The Chart,” with the tagline, “If it’s queer, it’s here!” The name comes from Showtime’s early 2000s show The L Word. Spunky character Alice Pieszecki has a radio show built upon her enterprise of The Chart, a blog to document the interconnected lives of Los Angeles lesbians. Canonically, she plays lesbian icons Tegan and Sara and is aware of the place she holds as a queer person (bisexual to be specific) on the radio. The Chart on WECB does a similar thing; it acts as a virtual space for queer people. I play exclusively LGBTQ+ music, whether it be a queer musician or an icon within the industry. Check it out @the_chart_wecb on Instagram and in the Linktree. Each week is a different theme; from an ‘80s takeover to country to hip-hop, queer people are everywhere. There’s no Taylor Swift or Harry Styles. Instead, I focus on out, open, and proud queers. I admit I’ve thought about playing Boygenius and Clairo, but stray away because I like to spotlight less known artists. 

There has been one other WECB radio show that did the same thing: Alphabet Soup. The show aired in Fall 2022, but I couldn’t find any other information about it. What I do know is that it took 75 years since WECB’s inception to have radio shows specifically dedicated to LGBTQ+ music when so many students and radio show hosts I know are queer. I am not surprised at the level of despondency of the queer student body at Emerson. My hope is that as queer people, specifically trans people, are attacked at all levels, queer students will realize the power of advocacy, even if it’s in the form of choosing to listen to real LGBTQ+ music not just during pride month.