As a music journalist, celebrity drama can be a slippery slope. On the one hand, if I like the artist to the point where I’m genuinely invested in their life away from the music, I will gladly indulge. On the other, to some it might place my respectability as a music journalist into question when I’m so willing to delve straight into the vapid side of parasocial internet culture. I think that’s slightly unfair, but I can understand why people feel like that.
But let me be totally clear: I draw a hard line when it comes to speculating about the sexualities of these celebrities. It might seem like a weird place to draw the moral line, after all it’s just harmless guesswork, but projecting the language of queer identity onto someone who hasn’t asked for it (and in the case of Taylor Swift has actively asked people to stop) carries much bigger implications that deserve to be unpacked.
Firstly, we must get to the core of why some queer people choose to Lebel themselves in the first place. Doing so feels liberating because we have the freedom to assign them to ourselves divorced from outside influence. Divorced from a system that constantly tells us we’re not allowed to exist and thrive. By allocating those labels to someone else, you’re defeating the purpose of a label as something self assigned and personal to an individual, and, as a result of that, undermining the significance of that label for everyone who might identify with it.
If you’re dishing out labels and saying such and such is gay or bisexual or whatever based on what you perceive to be evidence, you are, knowingly or otherwise, diluting the significance of labels into a series of checkboxes, which, most queer people would agree, is not what a label should represent. It spreads a bad message and is not aligned with the goals of the queer community.
Queer identity is a gift to be cherished, not a weapon to be wielded, so why people insist on throwing out labels based on ‘evidence’ is a product of non-effort on their part. If they want openly queer role models to look up to, can they not find them themselves without callously projecting language that was built to liberate onto people who don’t identify with it? What service to the ‘Gaylors’ think they’re fulfilling by doing this? Whatever it is, I’m certainly not seeing it.
Of course, the people who unironically engage with this discourse will never acknowledge any of this. The emotional bond they’ve built with the artist overrides any rationality, and for that they have my empathy. It’s a special feeling to be that invested in an artists work. Maybe work on how you can use that feeling for good in future. Give it a few years and even the most devout ‘Gaylor’ will be embarrassed by this phase.
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