"What does anyone know what I like or don't like in this world. Doesn't anyone know what I prefer or don't prefer in love." Raphael first recorded these verses by Manuel Alejandro in 1981. More than 40 years later, they could be made her own by another globally successful singer.
On January 4, The New York Times published an opinion piece of more than 5,000 words in which journalist Anna Marks speculates about Taylor Swift's sexual orientation. Through a more than interested exegesis of some of the lyrics of her songs and elements of staging of some of her video clips and performances, the journalist tries to argue that Taylor Swift belongs to the LGBT+ community as something more than an ally, something that the singer herself has denied on several occasions.
The article has caused an international uproar – it's the first time a media outlet of the stature of The New York Times has suggested something like this about the singer – but the conjectures surrounding Taylor Swift's non-heterosexuality are far from recent.
More than friends?
The fact that the stars in the closet on more than one occasion have passed off their lovers or romantic interests as just friends – as happened, for example, with Whitney Houston and Robyn Crawford – has encouraged many to want to read something more in the close friendships of their idols. That's why the relationship between Swift and model Karlie Kloss gave rise to all kinds of speculation about them almost before they met.
In the singer's January 2012 Vogue cover story, she declared, "I love Karlie Kloss. I want to make cookies out of it." They didn't even know each other yet, but Karlie Kloss, who had launched her own cookie line, Karlie's Kookies, responded with an invitation on social media: "In your kitchen or mine?" It was a few months before they met, but it wasn't in one of their kitchens, but at a Victoria's Secret show that took place in 2013, in which Swift sang and Kloss walked the runway. "We didn't know each other, but now we're BFFs," Kloss told the Hollywood Reporter. Soon after, Kloss shared a photo on Twitter of the two alongside a verse from the song Love Story: "We were both young when I first saw you." (We were both young women the first time I saw you.)
"We were both young when I first saw you.." favorite Taylor song xox @taylorswift13 pic.twitter.com/2qyrAqFesI
— Karlie Kloss (@karliekloss) December 11, 2013
A year later, they both participated in the Victoria's Secret fashion show again, but this time they both opened it hand in hand. Then Entertainment Online echoed a good number of followers of both who began to ship them, that is, fantasize about a romantic union between the two. Followers of this fantasy coined the term Kaylor, a union of their two names, and began to look for signs of a possible relationship between the two.
Just two days after that show, what these fans considered definitive arrived: a blurry photo in which a kiss could be glimpsed between the singer and the model while they attended a concert of the group 1975. The #kissgate, as the event was known, gave rise to hours and hours of speculation and fanfictions (fictional stories written by fans about their idols) starring both proliferated. In fact, in July 2023, the New York Times published an article titled "A lesbian romance between two celebrities changed my life (even if it never happened)", in which the writer Emmeline Clein told in the first person what it meant for her to have participated in that fantasy.
But let's go back to 2014. The singer's entourage denied that kiss and that the relationship between the two was something more than a close friendship, but for those who want to believe that a celebrity they admire is bisexual or homosexual in the closet, these denials only come to support the hypothesis that the non-heterosexuality of their idol is something that his entourage He strives to hide in order to avoid damage to his career, as, on the other hand, this has been and continues to be the case in many cases.
Swift moved to New York – her song "Welcome to New York" will resonate in the minds of many – and became close friends with Kloss, with whom she posed for the cover of Vogue in March 2015 in a report in which they discussed, among other things, a long road trip through Big Sur that the two had taken together.
It was the time when Taylor Swift constantly showed off her squad, the gang of friends that accompanied her, made up mostly of other stars such as Selena Gomez – with whom we saw her whispering at the last Golden Globes – Cara Delevingne, the HAIM, Emma Stone, Blake Lively, Camila Cabello, Jennifer Lawrence and Lena Dunham, among others, many of whom starred with her in the video clip of her song Bad Blood in 2015.
This, together with the fact that her romantic relationships were brief and numerous, contributed to conjectures about her sexual orientation from a conservative position such as can only be the one that doubts the heterosexuality of a woman because she has many friends or her boyfriends do not last long.
In those years (from 2013 to 2017) Swift had consecutive romantic relationships with Harry Styles, Calvin Harris and Tom Hiddleston, but from 2017 Swift began her longest relationship to date, with actor Joe Alwyn, with whom she was dating until 2023, which silenced the rumors.
At the same time, the intensity of the friendship between Swift and Kloss descended to the point that the singer did not attend the model's wedding to Joshua Kushner in 2018 (which made her Ivanka Trump's sister-in-law).
It's worth noting that while Kloss was the most important of Swift's female friends to be singled out as the singer's alleged romantic interest, she wasn't the only one. There was also speculation of a possible romance between Taylor Swift and Dianna Agron, something the Glee actress addressed in an interview with Rolling Stone in May 2023. When asked about shipping, Agron replied: "That's very interesting. I mean, there are a lot of stories about my love life that are wildly lies. It's fun."
You need to calm down
In 2019, another event once again made a certain sector of Swift's fandom insist that the singer is in the closet. It was the song "You Need to Calm Down", the second single from their seventh album, Lover. What Does Nobody Know) begins with a few verses in which the singer criticizes the speculation surrounding her figure and the pressure of the press, and then goes on to become an LGBT anthem, designed by and to defend the community at a very specific moment in which the Trump administration – see, the father of her former best friend's sister-in-law – was jeopardizing some of the recent pro-LGBT legislation in the United States.
In fact, in the same way that in the video clip of Bad Blood she was accompanied by her friends, the video for You Need to Calm Down is full of cameos from numerous LGBT celebrities such as Ellen Degeneres, Laverne Cox, RuPaul and Billy Porter, among others. And he closed it with an open petition in change.org his name to pressure U.S. senators to pass the Equality Act, to protect LGBTQ+ people from discrimination in their jobs, schools, and homes.
A certain fan furor mixed with the confusion of those who look at the finger instead of the moon put back on the table the speculations around the singer's sexual orientation for a detail: in some shots of the video clip (from 1:49 to 2:00) she appears with a wig with the colors of the bisexual flag.
A few months after the release of the music video, Swift starred on the cover of Vogue's September Issue, the most important issue annually for the publication. In the interview that accompanied the photo report, his support for the LGBTQ+ community was especially emphasized much further – and much earlier – than with his video clip. Swift said: "Anyone who isn't a white straight cisgender man is being stripped of their rights ... I didn't realize until recently that I could stand up for a community I'm not a part of. It's hard to know how to do it without being so afraid of making a mistake that it paralyzes you. Because my mistakes make a lot of noise. When I'm wrong, it reverberates in all the canyons of the world. It's clickbait and it's part of my life story and part of my career story."
Swift once again excluded herself from the LGBT community, but if there is one thing that characterizes speculation about sexual orientation, it is that it can be endless because they are based on the premise that the star in question is trying to hide a reality that for some is obvious. In this case, there is also the paradox that those who assume that the singer is bisexual believe that she, while hiding it, is trying to leave clues about it, so any subjective interpretation of any lyric, gesture, element of staging is susceptible to be read from this key.
In fact, on the occasion of the release of the new recording of her album 1989, in October 2023, Swift again addressed this issue tangentially by clarifying that if at one point in her life she went out partying only and exclusively with girls it was to avoid something that made her uncomfortable: that every time she went out informally with a boy, Immediately the press pointed to him as her romantic interest. Trying to prevent this from happening, paradoxically, increased speculation that he might be sexually interested in women.
And so we come to today, when the well-known speculations occupy space in one of the most important newspapers in the world in a text as extensive and detailed as, at best, debatable. The only thing we have to refute it is the singer's word – her current relationship with NFL player Travis Kelce is not incompatible, as no other would be, with a possible bisexuality. Why shouldn't we trust her? Or rather, why shouldn't we do so in the case of an artist who is widely an advocate for the LGBTQ+ community? The fact that unfortunately there are still artists in the closet is not enough of an argument because it could be valid for everyone. And for none.
In the conjectures surrounding a celebrity's sexual orientation, very different and almost antagonistic factors come together. The first and most important is the urgent need of LGBTQ+ youth to find role models and mirrors of success in which to look at themselves. In a community often struck by stigma and discrimination, they are never enough. But the boundary between that urgency and intrusion into the private lives of celebrities, or even the assumption that certain behaviors — close friendships, lack of a stable heterosexual partner, aesthetic preferences, etc. — are unequivocal evidence of a non-heteronormative sexual orientation is blurred and can be harmful.
The fact that Taylor herself in 2019 was aware that any slightest move of hers is clickbait does not make her responsible for what others, anyone, want to read in her. Because in the end, no one but her can know for sure what she likes or doesn't like in this world. In other words, what does anyone know?
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