Flashing lights and we
took a wrong turn and we
fell down a rabbit hole...

Welcome to wonderland, my page dedicated to Gaylor. If you are not familiar, Gaylor, sometimes called the Gaylor fandom or Gaylorism, is a subculture within Taylor Swift's fandom consisting primarily of queer women dedicated to analyzing her work, and often her life and relationships, through a queer lens.

As with many subcultures, there are smaller communities within this fandom, and the definition of Gaylor varies significantly between different communities and between different people. And of course, how the community is perceived by the rest of the Taylor Swift fandom varies as well. Many people have rather narrow conceptualizations of Gaylor which focus on small subsets of the community, often equating Gaylor to a specific set of beliefs. As someone who has been analyzing Swift's lyrics through a queer lens since I was fifteen and an active member of the Gaylor community since 2019, I can attest that people who self-identify as "gaylors" hold a vast range of beliefs, feelings, and opinions when it comes to Taylor Swift and her potential queerness. Some people exclusively analyze her work through a queer lens and avoid discussing her personal life entirely, others believe she is bisexual and is currently dating Joe Alwyn but has dated women in the past, others believe she is a gold-star lesbian who is married to Karlie Kloss and has a secret baby with her, yet all of these people may self-identify as gaylors. I have found some amazing friends in this community, kind, intelligent people whose lyrical analyses could be developed into academic articles. I have also been called a delusional cult member for being a gaylor. I have also been accused of working for Josh Kushner for not believing in the right version of Gaylor. It is far more complicated and meaningful than people give it credit for.

My intention is for this page to be an exploration of the Gaylor community—its history, its culture, and the wealth of analysis that it has produced. I am tired of seeing this community reduced to its most toxic traits. It is controversial. It is messy. It has brought me a lot of anxiety and grief. It has also brought me some of my favorite parts of my life. I want to capture that in all its complexity.

Wait, you think Taylor Swift is gay?

If you are familiar with Swift's reputation as a maneater, it probably sounds pretty outlandish that she is anything other than heterosexual. However, this has been a fairly popular idea in Swift's fandom for some time now. Fans all have their own reasons for believing this. Many of us, myself included, start out by noticing themes of secret, forbidden, and doomed love, often between friends, then start to look at Swift's behavior in a different light. For instance, if you think she might be queer, her sparkly pride flag dresses on the reputation stadium tour and the rainbows all over Lover might look less like a fashion statement and more like small steps out of the closet. You might start reconsidering public relationships, asking if her intimate relationships with her female friends could be more than platonic and if her highly publicized relationships with men could be a bait-and-switch.

I am not here to prove to you that Taylor Swift is gay. First of all, I don't think it's possible to "prove" how anyone identifies, especially if you don't know them personally. Second, even if I could somehow prove that Taylor Swift is gay, I don't see that as a worthwhile endeavor. Rather, I'd like to compile an archive of the history of Gaylor, revisiting theories from across the years with a critical eye, and have some conversations about dynamics within the Gaylor community and how the community interacts with the wider Swiftie fandom.

Gaylor and the Ethics of Celebrity Gossip

There are many ethical concerns when it comes to Gaylor. Is it possible that we are forcing someone out of the closet before they are ready? Or, could her behavior be considered flagging, the practice of subtly conveying to other queer people that you are like them through fashion or turns of phrase? Or is she queerbaiting, a straight person teasing that they might be gay to create media buzz and potentially sellf records? Wait, is it even possible for a real person to queerbait? Either way, is it okay to speculate on something so private, especially about someone you don't know? Is there a difference between gaylors and people who think she's secretly engaged to Joe Alwyn? Are we all the same kind of creepy? What do we consider acceptable in terms of celebrity gossip, and why? Is it even possible to engage with celebrity, a phenomenon steeped in privilege and exploitation, in an ethical way?

I plan on exploring the ethical considerations of Gaylor and celebrity gossip in more detail in the future, but in the meantime, I want to share an essay that I wrote for a queer theory class during undergrad that discusses Kaylor and real person fanfiction or "RPF" as a consequence of changing historical definitions of homosexuality and personal identity.

From The Invention of Homosexuality, Privatization of Sex, and Taylor Swift:

"The tendency to speculate about people’s sexualities is a fairly modern invention. As queer theorist David M. Halperin explains, before the invention of the term “homosexuality” in 1892, same-sex desire was understood as an aspect of sexual inversion, which “referred to a broad range of deviant gender behavior, of which homosexual desire was only a logical but indistinct aspect.” Homosexuality, on the other hand, specifically focuses on “sexual object choice,” therefore reflecting a “major reconceptualization of the nature of human sexuality, its relation to gender, and its role in one’s social definition (34).” He explains that isolating sexuality from gender created a sexual taxonomy which placed people in exclusive binary categories characterized by the gender of one’s partners. According to Halperin, the creation of this taxonomy inspired “the multiplication of techniques for deciphering what a person’s sexual orientation ‘really’ was -- independent, that is, of beguiling appearances” (35). Therefore, the desire to speculate about a person’s sexual orientation is a modern phenomenon as the ability to classify sexuality according to sexual object choice did not exist until the nineteenth century. If Swift was not a modern celebrity, her writing and her relationships with women would be understood in a completely different way."