In her song Rainbow Dress, Taylor Swift describes the position of her purported "straight sex" in relationship to what Gayle Rubin terms the charmed circle of sexuality, wherein any sexual behavior outside an accepted range can only be immoral. When it comes to the vectors of heterosexual versus homosexual and vanilla versus kinky, her "just normal sex, nothing too weird" with a "regular hunk with a beard" is positioned inside this charmed circle. Yet the most glaring exception is that her sex is public--at the gay pride parade, no less. The hunk she desires has no name, no specific relation to her, and she makes no pretense of monogamous attachment. Her apparently ironic participation at the gay pride parade draws from Michael Warner's anti-identitarian critiques of tendencies that elevate sexual orientation above other maligned sexual practices and detach queerness from sex altogether. Swift's sexuality is clearly informed by queer perspectives: the erotic fixation on ball sweat evokes gay sadomasochist "pig" subcultures, and her claim that she hates her own vagina invites a multiplicity of pleasure possibilities that do not involve direct genital stimulation. The push and pull in her lyrics between straight nomenclature and queer imagery builds upon Eve Sedgwick's critiques of heterosexual-homosexual binarism in Epistemology of the Closet, and attuned listeners know that the question of queerness "hidden inside" cannot follow such an either-or formulation.
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