🌈 Taylor Swift Shocks the World with the Most Bisexual Move Ever, Leaving Fans Divided as the Gaylors Rage Against Her Latest Bold Move—What’s Behind the Outrage?

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Among all the Taylor Swift fans who met last week’s news of her engagement to Travis Kelce with ecstatic celebration, there is a small community who processed it in despair: the Gaylors.

A long-running sub-fandom, the Gaylors are convinced that Swift is a closeted lesbian who sends coded signals about her queer sexuality through her songs and promotional materials. On Tumblr and Reddit, they share theories that her many romantic relationships with men are red herrings, fabricated to distract from her secret relationships with women, most notably her onetime best friend Karlie Kloss.

One prominent subreddit, r/gaylorswift, has about 50,000 members. Last week, when Swift posted about Kelce’s proposal, the community was wracked with dismay. Members posted that they were “speechless and disappointed,” that this was “the worse news of my life,” that they were “so confused” and “gonna vomit.” Some surmised that the engagement could be yet another ploy: “For all we know, she just wanted an excuse to wear the actual wedding ring she got from her actual WIFE!”

Soon, the schadenfreude began. Screenshots of the subreddit posts were passed around on social media, where Gaylors were mocked as delusional weirdos. Soon, the r/gaylorswift moderators made the subreddit private, presumably to ward off trolls and allow users to mourn in privacy. “Your feelings are valid,” one Gaylor assured any saddened peers who felt “misled” by Swift’s alleged sapphic Easter eggs.

Not all Gaylors were disheartened by Swift’s engagement to her vacuous football man of choice. “She can be with whoever she wants to be with,” Rosy York, a big-time Swiftie who wasn’t emotionally affected by the news, told me. “There’s a limit to how disappointed a person could reasonably feel. She’s not your friend.” (York requested a pseudonym for professional reasons.) York isn’t queer, but she fully believes that Swift is, citing “the entire Reputation album,” as well as Swift’s rainbow-doused promotion of her Lover album during Pride month in 2019, which included the release of a ham-handed anti-homophobe song and a surprise performance at the Stonewall Inn.

“I’m not crazy about the idea that it’s so curated for public consumption,” York said of Swift’s relationship with Kelce. But neither does she care that much. The only thing that would upset York, she said, would be if Swift were straight but deliberately seeding hints that suggested otherwise in a bid to hype up her LGBTQ+ fans—a marketing faux pas known as “queerbaiting.”

I, for one, do not believe that Taylor Swift is secretly queer. All the compulsive decoding of her supposedly sapphic signals strikes me as an enormous waste of time, albeit no more so than the efforts of the equally obsessive fans deriving emotional sustenance from speculating about her relationships with men.

But the Gaylor response to Swift’s engagement brought to mind a statistic that has lived rent-free in my brain since I first encountered it a few years ago, and I’d like to offer it as a beacon of hope to Gaylors in their grief-stricken time: Only 1 percent of bisexual U.S. adults are married to a same-sex spouse. More than 17 percent are married to an opposite-sex spouse. The pattern holds for bisexuals in serious unmarried relationships, who are about five times as likely to be living with an opposite-sex partner as a same-sex one.

This is according to a 2020 Gallup poll taken to assess the impact of the nationwide legalization of gay marriage. It predictably found a jump in same-sex married couples since the Obergefell v. Hodges ruling in 2015, which legalized gay marriage in states that had previously banned it. More interesting, in my view, was the discovery that more LGBTQ+ people in the U.S. are married to or living with an opposite-sex partner than a same-sex one.

It seems counterintuitive, but it makes a lot of sense when you look at the crosstabs, which disaggregate people by their specific identities. And the numbers could not be clearer: Bisexuals, who make up a majority of people who identify as LGBTQ+, are extremely unlikely to end up living with or marrying a same-sex partner.

So while it’s possible that Swift’s engagement is just one more thread in her meticulously woven tapestry of faux heterosexuality, Gaylors should take comfort in the knowledge that she may just be a bisexual woman doing what bisexual women often do: marrying a man.

Some Gaylors get it. When one user in the subreddit asked, “are y’all hanging up your Gaylor shoes?” someone quickly rejected the suggestion. “This is classic bisexual behavior,” they wrote.

Queer people know that sexuality can be complex and changing. Lesbians who’ve lived to see formerly straight acquaintances ditch their husbands and come out in middle age will tell you to never take marriage to a man as the last word on someone’s identity. I’m not saying that Swift is going to leave Kelce for a swaggering baby-faced WNBA player or a high-femme beauty influencer in 2035; I’ll eat an orange glitter The Life of a Showgirl LP if she does. But she wouldn’t be the first to do it.