Let's unpack the 'Gaylor crashouts'

As soon as Taylor Swift announced that she and Travis Kelce were engaged, pop culture fans began salivating for reactions from a specific corner of her fandom. Other celebrities sending well wishes to the happy couple? Boring. Brands looking to capitalize on the moment? Yawn. Analysis of the ring, the dress she wore, the lush garden Kelce dropped to one knee in? Snooze. The real entertainment came from seeing how the “Gaylors” would respond to Swift marrying a man.

“Gaylors” are, broadly speaking, fans of Swift who think she’s queer. A lot of people think she’s bisexual. Some think she’s a lesbian. The theory is much more widespread than you might think, and it varies person to person. On one end of the spectrum you have people who casually suspect that Swift may have been more than friends with model Karlie Kloss or Glee actress Dianna Agron a decade ago. On the other end you have people who spend hours a day on Reddit speculating that Swift’s relationship with Kelce is fake and that her lyrics contain endless clues about being queer. And aside from the fixation on Swift, Gaylor has flourished into a community for mainly queer women to support and connect with each other.

The Gaylor theory has existed online for as long as Swift has been a public figure, so for almost 20 years now. But in recent years, as the Eras Tour propelled Swift to become the highest-grossing live performer of all time, the Gaylor community has also seen exponential growth—and scrutiny. Since 2020, the subreddit “r/gaylorswift” grew from under 1,000 members to over 50,000 members. There are Gaylor influencers with nearly that many TikTok followers, and you can buy a slew of fan-made Gaylor merch on Redbubble (Example: a t-shirt that says “I swear, you could hear a hairpin drop,” which is a lyric from Swift’s 2020 album Evermore. A “hairpin drop” is also—and this is true—historic queer slang for subtly hinting that you are gay).

As more people have questioned Swift’s sexuality, even more people have questioned why they are questioning it. An anti-Gaylor brigade has risen up to relentlessly mock, snark on, and even harass Gaylors. The main Gaylor subreddit has gone private in the past to try and protect its members, including young teenagers. I interviewed one of the subreddit’s moderators earlier this year, and she told me that around the release of Folklore in 2020, a bunch of minors who were into Gaylor were doxxed and outed to their parents—a truly dangerous kind of fandom warfare that could result in a child becoming homeless or worse.

The anti-Gaylor sentiment reached a fever pitch on Tuesday after the engagement news broke, with posts on X like “the gaylors are losing it” and “the gaylor conspiracy is so funny because you could not imagine a more heterosexual woman if you tried” getting millions of views. These viral posts were accompanied by screenshots of Reddit comments, most of which had fewer than 5 upvotes (Reddit’s version of likes) that said things like “For all we know, she just wanted an excuse to wear the actual wedding ring she got from her actual WIFE” and “Oh christ, happy for her but this is the worse news of my life. Worse than my grandad dying.”

Once posts mocking Gaylor started to go viral, people started trawling the depths of Reddit looking for similar material. A lot of the comments posted weren’t even from the Gaylor subreddit, and some of them seemed to be ragebait. With an incoming tidal wave of trolls, the r/GaylorSwift moderators once again set their community to private.

“Our sub has put in so many safeguards to prevent trolls from posting, because they will often post things that are essentially their homophobic fantasy of what a gaylor would say in order to share on social media for attention,” one of the moderators told me. “I want it to be very clear that we went private to protect users from doxxing and harassment, not because ‘Gaylors are crashing out.’ We are not. We have expected Taylor Swift to get engaged since she started dating Travis Kelce.”

Backing up a bit, I’ve also seen a lot of posts from people seemingly earnestly asking why anyone would think that Swift isn’t straight. Based on my extensive research, reporting, and personal experience, there are several things happening here.

1. People have short memories, but between roughly 2014 and 2019 there was tons of mainstream media speculation that Swift wasn’t straight. TMZ reported in December 2014 that Swift and Kloss had been caught kissing at a concert for The 1975. The grainy footage is far from decisive. I lean “No.” A lot of people, including many who are not even Gaylors, lean “Yes.” Then, in 2019, the album rollout for Lover was so explicitly LGBTQ-focused that people actually accused Swift of queerbaiting when she didn’t come out.

2. Swift’s success has always rested on the intense parasocial relationship she has encouraged within her fandom. Throughout her whole career, she has incentivized fans to speculate and project their own lives and experiences onto her autobiographical lyrics. She leaves Easter Eggs for fans to guess who she’s singing about and teases that people have yet to uncover all of her secrets. A lot of her queer listeners have, reasonably enough, wondered if lyrics like “I prefer hiding in plain sight,” “I don’t want you like a best friend,” “The rumors are terrible and cruel, but honey, most of them are true,” and “You can want who you want, boys and boys and girls and girls” could be clues about Swift’s own queerness, because her discography is comprised of clues about how people don’t understand the real her.

3. For a lot of Gaylors, it really isn’t that deep. It’s just a fun way to analyze her music through a queer lens. A lot of queer women grew up being Swift fans and have now found a supportive community through Gaylor. Sure, there are some people obsessed to an unhealthy degree—welcome to fandom—but the community isn’t a monolith. IRL spaces for queer women are dwindling and often inaccessible, and being a Swiftie is one of the most common shared interests people have.

I’ve also seen a lot of people say things about Gaylors as a whole that just aren’t true, like that they don’t care about queer artists who are out or that they are harassing Swift. It’s actually no more harassing to speculate that someone could be queer than it is to speculate about someone’s heterosexual relationships, which is overwhelmingly how people and the media engage with Swift. A lot of Gaylors actually critique the sexism and heteronormativity inherent to most of the public’s perception of Swift. And I find it disappointing that so much of anti-Gaylor sentiment reinforces the idea that sexuality is clearly determinable by who you publicly date, that marrying a man means you’re straight, and that it’s shameful to think someone could be queer.

“I think the fantasy of Gaylor is kind of this thought experiment. She’s the biggest she’s ever been, everybody loves Taylor Swift, and what if she has this thing in common with me that not everybody loves? To refuse to even entertain why that might be compelling is missing the point of what living in a heteronormative society is like,” said Ophie Dokie, a feminist YouTuber and fellow Gaylor sympathizer. “I don’t mind if somebody is looking at Taylor Swift and imagining that the most powerful pop star in the world is closeted, especially if that makes them look at themselves and when they were closeted with more empathy.”

Ultimately, while I do think some of the jokes about Gaylor are funny, a lot of the anti-Gaylor discourse devolves into punching down, harassing random queer people, and misconstruing what is mainly a fandom community for queer women. One of the joys of fandom is that it is a forum for self-discovery, for creativity, and for feeling less alone. It’s often the safest space young marginalized people who are struggling with their identity have. If some of those people truly can’t cope with Swift’s marriage, then putting them on blast isn’t going to help them—or anyone. And while I don’t claim to know the intricacies of Swift’s sexuality, the truth is, none of us do.

Thanks for reading, and if you enjoyed this piece, please consider upgrading your subscription for just $5 a month! You’ll get access to my paywalled stories, too.

And a few other things from this week:

• I published a piece in WIRED about a slew of new reality TV shows about virginity and how politics are informing celibacy.

• Pink News featured me and my fiancée in a story about the threat to gay marriage in the U.S. (gee, I wonder why demoralized young queer women might fantasize about Taylor Swift being gay instead of marrying a man!).

• I joined Matt Bernstein on A Bit Fruity to talk about engineering a culture war and the Sydney Sweeney of it all.

That’s all for now. Until next time!