If every Gaylor died tomorrow, there would STILL be more fans that find their way towards believing Taylor is queer because she has spent her entire career using hundreds of queer symbols, metaphors, flags, shibboleths, & more in her work. These things explicitly exist so closeted artists can signal to their community that they're part of the community, without suffering the oppression, abuse, and career limits that coming out to straight people's standards causes.
There has never been a time in US history where out queer people could achieve the same things as closeted or straight people. Closeted people are everywhere, and have always made a lot of our films, music, literature, etc.
There are many reasons celebrities don't come out: safety, morality clauses, having career goals they still want to achieve, fear of familial or religious rejection, and having a lot of conservative fans who they seek to help deconstruct through their work are just a few.
Pointedly: queerflagging is done voluntarily by people who are TRYING TO BE SEEN by their community, and the idea that noticing it is disrespectful or disgusting does not make sense.
Y'all are happy to say you value lesbian or sapphic or gay or queer visibility when the holiday hits, but when you arent LEARNING AND UTILIZING knowledge about how queer people have found each other even when being heavily oppressed, YOU DON'T KNOW how to see people in these communities and in that failure you deny them visibility.
The reason you have been told speculation is disgusting or intrusive is because it benefits a patriarchy that suffers the more people realize that queerness is normal, healthy & more common than they want you to think.
When you invent circumstances where queerflags are not interpreted as queer, you dilute the value and utility of these symbols for other queer people, and you separate an artist from their community and vice versa. This is committing violence against someone we are in community with and against the sanctity of queer communication.
The idea that celebrity queerbaiting is more common than legitimate queerflagging is not backed up by basis of fact. The idea that celebrities who spend lot's of time around queer people could be flagging queerness without realizing it just does not make sense. If they were signaling something they didn't mean, someone would tell them.
And with Taylor, so many of the signs of symbols that Gaylors have glommed onto are things Taylor has used again and again, demonstrating that she not only used them deliberately but also that she knows what they mean and she wants to convey that meaning. Hairpin drops in both lyrics and literal hair pins, constant lesbian flag colors, friend of dorothy/dorothea are just the most obvious things Tayloe has come back to over and over across many eras.
The word queerbaiting is one disproportionately leveraged against people who will one day come out of the closet.
The idea that Taylor hates Gaylors is not out of any basis of real statements from Taylor. The arguments used against Gaylors are most commonly segments of larger passages that are targeted at the media. When Gaylors are made the scapegoat of every wrong in the community, the people who actually harm Taylor, such as the media, are allowed to continue to get away with that harm.
The idea that Taylor talking about hating paternity testing is against Gaylors is cope from fans who dont want to accept that they ARE doing something Taylor explicitly has called out: making her music about one or more men, when those men didn't make those songs. Taylor is trying to get more fans to focus on HER story and who SHE is and what her music says about HER and the only subsegment of fans regularly doing that are Gaylors. And the fans who constantly try to derail our discussion by saying, "No, this songs about Matty," or whoever their fave male muse of the moment is, ARE the ones paternity testing by inferring that song has one man who was instrumental in its creation.
The nasty things haters say about Gaylors ALSO MEAN TAYLOR because SHE is the Gaylor putting all of these signs and symbols in her work. So maybe before flagging Gaylors off, Swifties should pause for a minute and think: "If Taylor is #1 Gaylor and sees this message, how would it make her feel?"
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