Fandom has the media in a chokehold

The New York Times vs Taylor Swift drama is more revealing than you think

Photo by Bank Phrom on Unsplash

Every time Taylor Swift has a new album, new re-release, new tour, new leg of a tour, new film, new boyfriend, I feel a surge of mild panic. As an editor at a national newspaper, my job requires me to react to the news cycle, SEO trends, social discourse, etcetera, all of which Swift dominates every time she so much as trots out for dinner. There came a point last year, just after The Eras Tour film rewrote the rules of cinema, when journalism hit peak-Taylor Swift. 

Every possible angle had been exhausted: superfans, superfan dads, superfan boyfriends, anti-fans, the merch machine, her inner circle, her upbringing, her family, her ‘squad’, her feuds, her Easter Eggs, her own boyfriends, her impact on local economies, her impact on cinema, her impact on country music, her impact on basketball, her impact on Etsy, the list goes on. 

A Taylor Swift reporter was actually hired by Gannett media, which of course prompted a flurry of pieces from reporters reporting on said reporter. And, as I wrote about in November, Vulture published an entire (very entertaining) longread on where she goes out for dinner. Short of inventing something utterly mad, I don’t honestly know how any editor is going to generate anything fresh to say ahead of her UK leg in June, when we will need to feed the beast once again.

Which is perhaps why the New York Times has commissioned one of the most unhinged articles I have seen in the field of mainstream culture journalism since I started in the industry eight years ago. Titled “Look What We Made Taylor Swift Do”, and written by New York Times Opinion editor Anna Marks, the piece weaponises Swift’s own fondness for ‘Easter Eggs’ against her by cobbling together every single possible clue from lyrics, interviews, ‘explicit sartorial choices’, videos and social media to speculate, wildly, that the pop star – currently in what appears to be a very happy heterosexual relationship – might actually be queer. 

After a shockingly crude opener about ‘closeted’ country singer Chely Wright’s suicide attempt, the pressures on musicians to be straight to be bankable, and Wright’s plea for an openly gay “hero”, Marks writes:

“What if someone had already tried, at least once, to change the culture by becoming such a hero? What if, because our culture had yet to come to terms with homophobia, it wasn’t ready for her?

What if that hero’s name was Taylor Alison Swift?”

The piece goes on for several thousand words, and, despite including Swift’s own quote to Vogue that she is in fact not part of the LGBTQ community but a staunch ally, “Rights are being stripped from basically everyone who isn’t a straight white cisgender male. I didn’t realize until recently that I could advocate for a community that I’m not a part of”, and despite the writer acknowledging that “discussing the potential of a star’s queerness before a formal declaration of identity feels, to some, too salacious and gossip-fueled to be worthy of discussion”, Marks comes to the conclusion that Swift is ‘in the closet’. And that it’s time she, and her fans, stopped trying to ignore it because: “By maintaining a culture of lying about what we, uniquely, have the knowledge and experience to see, we commit ourselves to a vow of silence.”

In a way the piece feels like a relic from a different era of journalism, when trying to ‘out’ celebrities was a pernicious kind of sport for tabloid media. But also it feels distinctly now: written by someone who has spent far too long scrolling through deep Reddit sub-threads such as ‘Gaylor’, where fans analyse her work through a queer lens, sometimes to an extreme degree that borders on conspiracy theorising. In moments, the article is so full of the writer’s own projections that it seems like it could veer into fanfic. 

While a minority of fans have defended the article and accused those who decry it of homophobia, judging by thousands of comments on the NYT website and across social media, it would seem that the majority of Swift’s queer-identifying fanbase have taken issue with it. Of course fans should be free to engage with her music in whatever way they like, and queer readings of any kind of art are worthwhile (as are interrogations of ‘queer baiting’), but there is a huge difference between personal interpretation and artistic analysis, which was done sensitively in this Vulture article from 2020 for instance, and accusing, via an international newspaper, that someone is lying to themselves about their sexuality and therefore implying their current relationship is a sham. As one exasperated fan wrote: “Maybe, what you see is what you get. A young woman who is an empathetic ally who has a football player boyfriend.”

It’s easy to dismiss the media as a declining power when it comes to celebrity, but there’s no doubt that articles like these have real-world consequences for the subject in question. At the height of One Direction mania, when gay fanfiction about Louis Tomlinson and Harry Styles had become so frenzied the media regularly wrote up stories about ‘Larry Stylinson’ (and even inspired a controversial fanfic scene in Euphoria), the real-life friendship between Styles and Tomlinson suffered. As Tomlinson later said about their estrangement in an interview: 

“It kind of happened naturally for me and Harry because a certain amount of the fans drew up this conspiracy. When it first came around I was with Eleanor, and it actually felt a little bit disrespectful to Eleanor, who is my girlfriend now. I’m so protective over things like that, about the people I love." He went on to say: “It created this atmosphere between the two of us where everyone was looking into everything we did. It took away the vibe you get off anyone. It made everything, I think on both fences, a little bit more unapproachable.” (Speaking of Harry Styles, Anna Marks also wrote a NYT opinion speculating about his sexuality in 2022.)

Swift’s team have denounced the piece, which led to another bizarre moment: the roping in of poor Shawn Mendes. One of her reps told CNN: “This article wouldn’t have been allowed to be written about Shawn Mendes or any male artist whose sexuality has been questioned by fans.” 

There are many things to take away from this Taylor Swift story, but one of them is that the chokehold fandom has on the media is becoming increasingly – and disturbingly – powerful. The fact that 5000 words of fan theory that would have caused a ruckus even in the depths of Reddit somehow managed to be signed off and published by a series of senior editors at one of the most respected media titles in the world is a depressing indictment of journalism today.