Even More Lore
With glorious guest editor Fiona Stainer
Dames Nation, we have a treat for you this week as we take a break, while the Taylor Swift analysis train rolls on. Fiona Stainer, who may already be known to you as the sparkling Twitter presence who brought the world an immortally classic thread of Harry Styles cosplaying as Cate Blanchett, or as the author of a lovely newsletter of her own, wherever it was I was supposed to be, joins us this week as our guest essayist, sharing her deeply personal reflections on folklore and Taylor’s influence on her self-understanding as a gay woman. (She’s also celebrating her engagement to the love of her life referenced in the essay. Mazels!!)
I want you to know / I'm a mirrorball / I'll show you every version of yourself tonight
Thus sings Taylor Swift on ‘mirrorball’, the sixth track of her surprise sixteen-track studio album folklore, released with little fanfare in late July. In one line, knowingly or not, Swift distills what she has always been: a dazzling ball of light, reflecting back myriad selves. It’s a potent image, one that particularly resonates with me as a queer fan of Swift whose coming out was soundtracked by her discography.
If you move in the same queer internet circles as I do, you’ll know that folklore is considered by many to be Swift’s gayest album yet. Speculation about Swift’s sexuality is nothing new, but it has ramped up significantly over the course of her last two album cycles. I won’t go into detail on the specifics - they’re only a Google search away if you’re curious - but, put simply: over the course of her career, a steadily increasing number of Swift’s (for the most part but not exclusively LGBTQ+) fans maintain that Taylor Swift is gay. Or bisexual. Or queer. The label is disputed, but one aspect is agreed upon: Taylor likes girls. And now, here is folklore, in which second person pronouns abound, and in which Taylor sings from the perspective of someone enraptured by a girl named Betty. And that’s before you even get to the album artwork, which many have argued perfectly embodies the cottagecore lesbian aesthetic.
Swift’s queerness is in the eye of the beholder; readings of her work and persona as queer ultimately say far more about us, her queer fans, than they do about her. For as long as Swift has written songs, her listeners have scrambled to assign context to the stories she tells, mining her personal life for clues to unlock deeper meaning. Her brief words on folklore, published in a message to listeners at the time of its release, show her to be acutely aware of the way multiple personas are constructed for her from readings of her source material: ‘Speculation, over time, becomes fact,’ she writes ‘Myths, ghosts, stories, and fables. Fairytales and parables. Gossip and legend. Someone’s secrets written in the sky for all to behold.’ Through her persona and her work, we weave our own folklore.
I have loved Taylor Swift for a long time. I have liked girls for a longer time. I have known that I like girls for a much shorter time. I was drawn to Swift for her sound and for her storytelling. That’s what her songs were to me back then - stories. Having never really looked twice at a boy besides a couple of innocent yet ardent crushes between the ages of thirteen and fifteen - nor been in a relationship, nor experienced a devastating breakup - I wasn’t among the ranks of those who found her lyrics painfully, joyfully relatable. Instead, they were beautifully-wrought fables - elaborate fantasies on a Shakespearean scale, playing out in a mythical high school setting.
Back then, Swift was heavily influenced by fairytales. You only have to look at her song titles to see that. ‘Enchanted’, ‘Love Story’, ‘White Horse’ - all evoke images of the traditional - and traditionally heteronormative - fairytale narrative. You’ll be the prince and I’ll be the princess she sings in ‘Love Story’, the video for which features Swift in a gown, standing on the ramparts of a picture-perfect castle. It feels significant that at age thirty, Swift should choose to title her latest album folklore. Fairytales and folklore have an overlapping history, but in moving away from fairytales towards this darker, earthier form of fantasy-weaving rooted in ‘history and memory’, Swift demonstrates at once a distancing from and an examination of the simplified narratives of her past.
That’s something that has resonated with me as a queer fan of Swift. As someone who came out just two years ago at the age of twenty-six, I have more than a few memories to examine. All the crushes on boys I never had. All the ‘friend crushes’ on girls I most definitely had. The obsessions I’ve had with various female celebrities from as early as I can remember. As many queer people will attest to, the process of coming out doesn’t start when you tell people you’re not straight. It’s a slow and deeply personal experience that is often accompanied by numerous moments of retrospect as we evaluate past experiences in light of what we know now.
At the same time as I was tentatively beginning this process of coming out to myself, my best friend sent me a Tumblr masterpost detailing every aspect of ‘Swiftgron’ – Swift’s rumoured romantic relationship with Glee actress Dianna Agron. I found it addictively compelling. With hindsight I can see easily why this theory appealed to me. Not yet out to myself, I was beginning to subconsciously explore my identity through the media I engaged with. Swiftgron offered a depiction of queerness that didn’t feel that far from what I already knew. The post centred on a persona I’d been engaged with for years, and offered queer readings of songs I knew every word to, having listened to them countless times. Thinking of Swift as queer thus became a lens through which I could reconcile my past experiences with my new, burgeoning understanding of myself.
Alongside this process of exploring my sexuality, I found myself falling in love for the first time (with, incidentally, the very same girl who sent me that Tumblr link). The sentiment of Swift’s songs suddenly felt within reach. The sweeping drama of ‘Come Back... Be Here’ perfectly described the long-distance angst of our transatlantic relationship. ‘Treacherous’, a song about the delicious inevitability of a friendship becoming something more (believed by many to be about Agron) - put your lips close to mine / as long as they don’t touch - was a mainstay on playlists we sent to each other in the blurry, exhilarating months before we knew what we were. And then, once we did, the wide-eyed, sparkling crescendos of ‘Sparks Fly’ were now not just evocative but relatable. The songs that I had historically listened to obsessively but detachedly took on new meaning, in the same way that my past experiences were taking on new meaning as I re-evaluated them in light of what I knew now. In short, just as Taylor’s songs made a lot more sense to me when they were about girls, my life made more sense to me when it was a queer one.
There’s a line in Swift’s 2014 single ‘Out of the Woods’ that describes the memory of a polaroid picture being taken: You took a polaroid of us / then discovered/ the rest of the world was black and white/ but we were in screaming colour. It’s a classic Swift lyric: simultaneously specific and universal, incisively instilling meaning into a fleeting moment. For me, as I continue to make sense of moments in my past, this lyric evokes the idea of self-reflection; of climbing out of yourself and viewing yourself at a distance, only to see yourself more clearly.
And now, with folklore, we’re back in the woods once again, and the reflection continues. Listening to the album, I was struck by a similar line in ‘illicit affairs’: You showed me colors you know I can't see with anyone else. It’s one of countless on the new album that evoke the idea of evolution and evaluation. The record is a deep-dive into the retrospective - what was so, what you remember as being so, what might have been, what you wished had been. It finds resonance in fleeting moments, and reframes the past to make sense of the present. In ‘invisible string’ Swift ponders the idea of fate: and isn't it just so pretty to think / all along there was some / invisible string / tying you to me? In the song, fate is framed as a good thing, a positive force that draws Swift out of all the wrong arms and towards her current love.
Not only that, but it allows her to reframe her history: Cold was the steel of my axe to grind for the boys who broke my heart, she sings. Now I send their babies presents. In one casual yet razor-sharp line, Swift acknowledges a past persona - that of the perpetually wronged woman, cursing her exes’ names in dramatic ballads - and repositions that persona in the context of her present, without minimising its significance. It evokes a peace between past and present, which as a person late to discover their queerness, I find comforting. It speaks to the fact that history can always be re-envisioned in light of what we know now. Time, wondrous time can be collapsed, and our experiences repurposed. As in the song ‘cardigan’, we can draw stars around our scars.
One of the most potent examples of retrospective on folklore is the nostalgic ‘seven’, a song that harks back to childhood innocence. It can be read as inherently queer, charting as it does the childlike love between two young girls who dream of running away from the world and not having to cry or hide in the closet. Swift talks of love passed down like folk songs. When I hear that line, I’m reminded of the way queer love - and more broadly queer culture - manifests itself in the world. It lives outside of the mainstream, passed on through a shared understanding - a shared lore.
In a culture in which heterosexuality is the norm, queer people have to seek out their own mythology - and we do, consistently finding space for ourselves in texts that weren’t created with us in mind, through superimposing alternative queer narratives on existing stories. We look for our own folklore within the fairytales. That, to me, is what makes folklore the album so appealing. Swift doesn’t just allow us to look for our own meaning - she invites us to. They say the greatest films of all time were never made, she sings on folklore’s opening track; a one-line précis for the endless possibility woven throughout.
That possibility is something harnessed by all fans of Swift. But for queer fans in particular, it resonates as an acknowledgement of the stories we weave from her words. ‘Gaylor’ is ultimately not about Swift, but about the way in which we conceptualise her in order to understand ourselves. With folklore, Swift is showing herself as she is: a mirrorball, revealing to us our rich selves, there for the taking.
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