Taylor Swift’s Real Invisible String: Compulsory Heterosexuality
“You said the way my blue eyes shined put the Georgia stars to shame that night, I said that’s a lie.”
people will look at you w a straight face and say this woman is heterosexual
I was 13 years old (tayvoodoo!) in 2006 when Taylor Swift’s debut album, Taylor Swift, was released. I had been boy crazy since I was about five years old and the 14 tracks on this album added rocket fuel to my fire.
The words she wrote about boys made them sound so lovely. Despite having had devastating and all-encompassing crushes on boys for years, I hadn’t spent much time actually talking to them, and I romanticized them in my young Pisces rising brain through her lyrics.
“I was seven and you were nine, I looked at you like the stars that shine, in the skies, like pretty lights.”
“Drew looks at me, can he tell that I can’t breathe? And there he goes, so perfectly, the kind of flawless I wish I could be.”
“He’d never tell you, but he can play guitar. I think he can see through everything but my heart. First thought when I wake up is ‘My god, he’s beautiful.’ So I put on my makeup and pray for a miracle.”
And, of course:
“Corey’s eyes are like a jungle, his smile is like the radio.” (what did I POSSIBLY think this meant?!)
I played this album on repeat for days, weeks, months. I sat in the beach house my family rented for a week in the Outer Banks, scouring nearby houses for boys I could project these lyrics onto. There was one cute boy on our block, but he showed absolutely no interest in my existence. All the better to yearn for. He said the way my blue eyes shined…
I blasted Cold as You in my bedroom at home, thinking about my 5th and 6th grade crush, Cameron. He had told me he couldn’t date until he was 13 because he was Mormon, but then started dating our classmate Kaela near the beginning of 6th grade. Oh what a shame, what a rainy ending given to a perfect day. Just walk away, ain’t no use defending words that you will never say.
Over the next 17 years, Taylor went on to release ten more albums and four re-recordings after her Masters were stolen by S****** B****. With each new album, I received a tidal wave of new words I could use to describe the boys I liked. The way you move is like a full-on rainstorm, and I’m a house of cards, I sang as I whirled around the basement, dreaming of Tom, my co-star in Kilmer Middle School’s production of Into the Woods. I still yearned for him even then, years after leaving middle school and going to different high schools. He is gay, as musical theater crushes tend to be.
(yes, my middle school was called KMS, I’m aware)
Red was released in 2012, when I was a sophomore in college. Tonight I want to dance for all that we’ve been through, but I don’t want to dance unless I’m dancing with you. I sang these words in my head over and over on my walks to see John, the president of Delta Sig, at his frat house. A month later, after he had Wronged Me, these lyrics were replaced by the chorus to I Knew You Were Trouble, which had reached meme status at this point thanks to a YouTube video involving goats.
My delusion reached a peak in 2021 when I met and started dating my evil now-ex boyfriend, JDemon. Thanks to a deadly combination of being a Pisces rising, Neptune being in my first house for a decade and directly opposing my Mercury in Virgo, and our moms having the same birthday, I quickly concluded that we were soulmates. And boy, was I annoying about it. I made him a birthday card that said, “I once believed love would be black and white, but it's golden.” I listened to Reputation on repeat and started toying with theories that I was exactly following Taylor’s life path (her boyfriend is named Joe and they’re going to get married; my boyfriend is named Joe and we’re going to get married!!!). I determined that King of my Heart was About Us and it became my most played song that year.
Things weren’t all sunshine and rainbows, however much I deluded myself into thinking they were. The weekend after Red (Taylor’s Version) was released, we were camping at a music festival a couple hours east of LA and around the campfire the discussion somehow turned to a woman JD had dated several years back and how bad she was at blowjobs. I stared pointedly at him, highly uncomfortable, and he didn’t make any move to change the conversation topic. I left the campfire to do my skincare and go to sleep in our tent, all the while singing under my breath “not weeping in the party bathroom, some actress asking me what happened, “you, that’s what happened, you” from All Too Well (10 minute version).
By the time The Tortured Poets Department was released in April 2024, JD and I lived together, and I had never been more miserable. For two months after we moved in together, I cried every day (something I told myself was just part of The Process). I would lie on the floor in my office and do a body scan, looking for the love that had once consumed every square centimeter of my body. The love I described as golden, the king of my heart, the Joe to my Taylor – even though at this point they had been broken up for a year. I wasn’t yet aware that he had been emotionally, financially, and sexually abusing me for years, but I know that when I heard Taylor talk about wanting to kill herself in almost every song, it struck a chord.
At this point I fully believed that most of the album was about The 1975’s Matty Healy, so I allowed my mind to wander to my favorite ex-boyfriend: also named Matt, also a greasy man with dark hair. I keep recalling things we never did, messy top lip kiss, how I long for our tryst. Without ever touching his skin, how can I be guilty as sin? I waited until JD left the apartment to go to a party and I ate a shrooms chocolate and listened to the album on repeat for hours and hours. I had never related to someone so much. I had no idea how much my life was about to change.
We broke up at the end of July, after he asked me to eat a fruit roll-up off his penis and I said no (a story for another time). We hadn’t had sex in nearly a year, because of how much pain I was in from endometriosis. I had endo surgery in April, and when I was cleared for sex at the end of June, we both had to reckon with the fact that my pain was no longer a convenient excuse for our lack of intimacy. I fought and I cried for us, I started seeing a sex therapist to work through my sexual assault trauma. He was my soulmate and our moms had the same birthday and I was so unwilling to let our three-year relationship end. I had been begging him to propose for about six months, and he had said he didn’t want to get engaged until we were having sex again. We were at an inflection point.
I had crossed every single one of my boundaries for him, I had lowered every standard, I gave up dates and presents and cards and small kindnesses and then kindness altogether. But my body physically would not let me have sex with him.
I moved into my own apartment. I learned about narcissistic abuse and finally had a name for what he had subjected me to. I started working with a narcissistic abuse therapist and she helped me understand that me being boy-crazy from such an early age was not a result of me just loving men so much, but that I had been seeking and pedestalizing male attention because of my dad’s emotional abuse (he is also a narcissist). I learned that I may not have ever loved my ex, but likely confused love for limerence, a term I learned and immediately despised for how well it knew my brain.
Armed with this new knowledge about how I don’t actually know what romantic love feels like, I started on a journey through my subconscious and the Comp Het master doc. On November 19, the very day Pluto moved into my 12th house, I realized/concluded/decided (?) that I am a lesbian. Which felt, truly, like cool water being poured over my face on a scalding day, cleansing away the male gaze, my resentment towards my ex, and my insecurity from every failed crush I’ve ever had.
I had recently done a podcast episode with a friend who mentioned that Gaylor – the theory that Taylor Swift is gay and her love songs are largely (if not entirely) written about women – had been a special interest of hers for a long time. So, on a Saturday morning during a weekend I had purposely cleared of commitments, I took an edible, settled into my couch with snacks and a fuzzy blanket, and searched “Taylor Swift Karlie Kloss” on tik tok. I moved between tik tok, reddit, reading song lyrics, and texting my friend, and within two hours I was 100% certain that Taylor was sapphic (I personally believe that she’s a lesbian, but I can also accept that she’s bisexual). To cap off the night, I watched the folklore Long Pond sessions twice (and the my tears ricochet bridge about 250 times), which just made everything crystal clear.
The resulting wave of emotions is hard to put into words, but honestly, what I identify with most now is humor. You’re telling me that I believed I was attracted to men for THIRTY YEARS, largely because of this blonde woman who wrote such beautiful words about them, describing feelings I sought and craved for DECADES, and the whole time she was writing about women???!! And I was also attracted to women???? What a SICK JOKE the universe has been playing.
But once I knew what to look for, the signs had been there all along. In Tim McGraw, the song quoted at the beginning of this article, the chorus reads: when you think happiness, I hope you think that little black dress. Me with my head on your chest, and my old faded blue jeans.” If Taylor is wearing jeans… who’s wearing the dress?
I learned about the way she uses black, white, and grey to represent forced closeting / straight relationships, and color to describe WLW relationships. I’d Lie, another song I referenced earlier from the Beautiful Eyes EP (and a vault track on Debut TV if there is any justice in this world), reads: He looks around the room, innocently overlooks the truth. Shouldn’t a light go on, doesn’t he know that I’ve had him memorized for so long. He sees everything in black and white. Replace “he” with “she” and you have a song about a crush Taylor has on a girl who is either straight or thinks she’s straight, and therefore has no idea that Taylor thinks of her romantically.
A mastermind, indeed. Taylor’s invisible string, tying her to meEEeeEEeeEEee. All the way through sleazy beards named Matt, long-term beards named Joe, and into the gold of sapphic nirvana. I’m just glad I came to this realization before I ended up dating whatever the poor woman’s Travis Kelce looks like.
Long story short, it was a bad time; long story short, I survived.
limp wrist QUEEN!!!!
P.S., in the original “homophobic” version of ‘Picture to Burn’, Taylor says “so go and tell your friends that I’m obsessive and crazy; that’s fine, I’ll tell mine you’re gay.” Turns out it’s not hyperbole or homophobia, just Taylor threatening to out her lover if she talks shit behind her back. The lyric change is likely the work of her homophobic dad, Scott Swift, who is probably also the reason she changed “you” to “Drew” in Teardrops on My Guitar, a song that was originally written to be gender neutral.