Hey y’all, this is my first time posting here but I think I have some stuff to say…?
So I was just watching old Gaylor videos from really early on in Taylor Swift’s career when I stumbled across a video of pictures of Tay with a voiceover of Chely Wright talking about being queer and in the public eye. The link is here:
Overall, her words really drove home, at least for me, the very real reality that people in the spotlight are struggling with in terms of their sexuality, and hiding relationships, and not being able to come out because they have so much to loose.
There are a few things that Chely says that really caught my attention. One of these was:
“It’s going to keep going until someone who has something to loose stands up and just says I’m gay… we need a huge, huge star, at the top of their field, the very top, to stand up and say I’m gay.”
She goes on to say:
“Nate Berkus said it so beautifully on the Larry King show the other night when I was on with him. He said , ‘Where are our heroes?’
Now, this second quote reminds me of the thoughts of other gaylor creators that I’ve seen on tumblr and tiktok (thank you to those creators you’re amazing keep up the amazingness) talking about how with Anti-Hero, Taylor is telling us that she can’t be the queer icon that we need her to be.
I think that it’s possible that this theory ties into this interview with Chely Wright. I mean, Taylor and Chely have known connections, and it’s not a reach to imagine that Taylor has probably heard this interview, right.
So the idea is that Taylor is telling us that she isn’t this hero. She can’t be this person, this ‘huge star at the top of their field’ that will say she’s gay and be our hero. How she will keep baiting us, keep queer flagging and leading us on but never come out. This message really ties in well to the message of Anti-Hero, and I think the lyrics ‘I’ll stare directly at the sun but never in the mirror’ are extremely telling of that. She’s saying that she’ll give us cryptically messages, queer flagging, go the long and painful road, but she isn’t going to face the reality of what’s in-front of her and just come out.
I also think that the line ‘All of my heroes die all alone’ from The Archer may be related to this interview. Again with the use of the word ‘hero’, I think Taylor might be referring to how many queer women from history have been closeted until their death. Take Emily Dickinson for example (We know that Taylor draws inspiration from her in her songwriting). Emily Dickinson was secretly in a relationship with her brother’s wife. She was a sapphic woman and no one was aware until her death when all of her poems and letters were found. I think maybe Taylor is saying that she’s hopeless in her own journey of coming out because of how historically, all of her ‘heroes’ never came out and were only discovered to be queer after their deaths.
In my opinion, this lyric also nicely describes how Taylor feels as a closeted queer woman. How she is queer but doesn’t feel part of the community as she isn’t out, ‘die all alone’, she’s worried that she will never have the opportunity to be a part of the queer community because she might not ever have the chance to come out (I’ll talk more on this topic in another post).
A very similar line to this (‘All of my heroes die all alone’) is found is ‘You knew the hero died so what’s the movie for’. Now, I subscribe to the common Gaylor belief that Taylor was originally going to come out during Lover era but her plan was ruined by the Masters Heist, and this line, in my opinion, has failed coming out writen all over it. I believe this lyric reflects how Taylor was going to be the hero, she was going to be the big star that says ‘I’m gay’, but then she didn’t so ‘the hero died.’
Now on the surface, ‘so what’s the movie for’ could be interpreted as how Miss Americana may have originally been Taylor’s coming out, or contained scenes and things where Taylor was openly queer but then obviously they had to cut that stuff out. We know that there were things saying that Karlie Kloss was originally listed as part of the cast… but we’ll never know now.
I think a deeper analysis of this lyric concedes to how Taylor is still queer flagging. She’s still giving us these signs. The lyric could also be in reference to how most of her fan base completely ignores and dismissed her queer flagging. She could be asking ‘why am I still doing this if no one is getting it and I can’t come out.’
Now there are a heap more mentions of ‘heroes’ throughout Taylor’s discography, for example:
Long Live ‘you held your head like a hero on a history book page’
My Tears Ricochet ‘And you were the hero flying around saving face’
Tolerate It ‘I greeted you with a battle hero’s welcome’
Now there are more than this but I think these are some of the more likely to be references to queer themes.
So yeah, that’s my thoughts. I’ve been stewing on this for a long time and I heard Chely Wright say all that and everything just kind of fell into place in my mind. Thank you for coming to my TED talk tonight.