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“When I make a mistake,
it echoes through the canyons
of the world. It’s clickbait, and
it’s a part of my life story, and
it’s a part of my career arc”
“If he was thinking that, I can’t imagine what my fans in the LGBTQ
community might be thinking,” she goes on. “It was kind of devastating
to realize that I hadn’t been publicly clear about that.”
I understand why she was surprised; she has been sending pro-LGBTQ
signals since at least 2011. Many have been subtle, but none insignificant—
especially for a young country star coming out of Nashville.
In the video for her single “Mean” (from 2010’s Speak Now), we see a
boy in a school locker room wearing a lavender sweater and bow tie, sur-
rounded by football players. In “Welcome to New York,” the first track
on 1989, she sings, “And you can want who you want. Boys and boys and
girls and girls.” Two years later, she donated to a fund for the newly created
Stonewall National Monument and presented Ruby Rose with a GLAAD
Media Award. Every night of last year’s Reputation tour, she dedicated
the song “Dress” to Loie Fuller, the openly gay pioneer of modern dance
and theatrical lighting who captured the imagination of fin-de-siècle Paris.
Swift, who has been criticized for keeping her politics to herself, first
took an explicit stance a month before the 2018 midterms. On Instagram,
she endorsed Democrats for the Tennessee Legislature and called out the
Republican running for Senate, Marsha Blackburn. “She believes businesses
have a right to refuse service to gay couples,” Swift wrote. “She also believes
they should not have the right to marry. These are not MY Tennessee values.”
Swift says the post was partly to help young fans understand that if they
wanted to vote, they had to register. To tell them, as she puts it, “Hey, just
so you know, you can’t just roll up.” Some 65,000 new voters registered in
the first 24 hours after her post, according to Vote.org.
Trump came to Blackburn’s defense the following day. “She’s a tremen-
dous woman,” he told reporters. “I’m sure Taylor Swift doesn’t know any-
thing about her. Let’s say I like Taylor’s
music about 25 percent less now, OK?”
In April, spurred by a raft of anti-
LGBTQ bills in Tennessee, Swift donated
$113,000 to the Tennessee Equality Proj-
ect, which advocates for LGBTQ rights.
“Horrendous,” she says of the legisla-
tion. “They don’t call it ‘Slate of Hate’ for
nothing.” Swift especially liked that the
Tennessee Equality Project had organized
a petition of faith leaders in opposition.
“I loved how smart it was to come at it from a religious perspective.”
Meanwhile, the “Calm Down” video provoked a Colorado pastor to
call Swift “a sinner in desperate need of a savior” and warn that “God will
cut her down.” It also revived heated debate within LGBTQ communities
about the politics of allyship and corporatization of Pride. Some critics
argued Swift’s pro-LGBTQ imagery and lyrics were overdue and out of
the blue—a reaction the new Swift scholar in me found bewildering. Had
they not been paying attention?
Nor did it strike me as out of character for Swift to leverage her power for
a cause. She pulled her catalog from Spotify in 2014 over questions of artist
compensation. She stared down Apple in 2015, when the company said it
would not pay artists during the launch of its music service. (Apple reversed
itself immediately.) As a condition of her record deal with Universal Music
Group last year, the company promised that it would distribute proceeds
from any sale of its Spotify shares to all of its artists. And this summer,
Swift furiously called out Scott Borchetta, founder of Big Machine Label
Group, for selling her master recordings to the music manager Scooter
Braun. (When I ask Swift if she tried to get her masters from Big Machine,
her whole body slumps with a palpable heaviness. “It was either investing
in my past or my and other artists’ future, and I chose the future,” she says
of the deal she struck with Universal.)
Swift’s blunt testimony during her 2017 sexual-assault case against a
radio DJ—months before the #MeToo reckoning blew open—felt deeply