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digitaldialogue77 · 3 years

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In the film Moonlight, the main character Chiron was bullied as a child for being gay. This film seems to portray a heteronormative environment with an emphasis on what masculinity meant to the characters in the film. This can be seen by the way the main character is treated throughout the film, and the struggle that he goes through to become the man he is at the end of the film. Masculinity in the film to have a very dry cut definition of what it was to be a masculine man, with an emphasis of a man having a woman to fit the heteronormative idea of what this should look like. Throughout the movie Chiron did not show interest in women, he was trying to figure out who he was. One scene in the movie he was talking to Juan about sexuality, and he was asking about the names that he was being called by other kids who were bullying him. In the first part of the film Chiron meets a man that becomes a father figure for him, someone he looks up to throughout the film. Juan was a drug dealer, who met Chiron when running from Terrel in one of the scenes that was a part of the beginning of this film. Chiron meeting Juan set up the story for the rest of the film, in the third part of the film it shows Chiron following in Juan’s footsteps. Juan taught him that it was okay to be gay but not to let people push you around for being who you are. Throughout the movie Chiron seems to feel like he is alone and has no one to relate to because all the other boys are talking about girls and seems that heterosexuality is pushed on him.

Chiron got a lot of mixed messages from his environment; on one hand he had the boys at school bullying him because he was different but on the other hand, he had Juan who supported him and created a safe environment for him. The boys bullying him at school led Chiron to lash out and cause problems. At the beginning of the movie Chiron was lost, he did not really know who to believe or who to believe. He had Juan but he also had his mother who was a drug addict and was mentally abusive towards him. While Juan was teaching him and helping take care of him, his mother expected him to be there to take care of her and when she needed have money to support her habit. This living situation led him to follow Juan’s example and become a drug dealer which is shown in part three of the film. Part two of the film showed Chiron in his teen years where he was shown to have a friend named Kevin. Kevin was influenced by the other boys at school in public but when him and Chiron were alone, he treated Chiron like a true friend and supported him. Kevin played an important role in Chiron’s life, as one of the only people that Chiron had romantic feelings for. In part two of the film Kevin, and Chiron kiss while they are sitting on the beach at night in the moonlight. This is symbolic because, this is the first time that it seems like Chiron has really found who he is, and Kevin helped him do that. Chiron seems to feel safe to be himself around, without the fear of being judged. Kevin and Chiron have a falling out and Chiron leaves the area where he lives and moves to where the third part of the film takes place. This leads into the third part of the movie where it shows Chiron grownup. At the end of the movie, Chiron travels to visit Kevin, after receiving a phone call from him. There are a lot of unresolved feelings between Chiron and Kevin because of the way they left things when they were kids. When Chiron goes to visit him, I feel as though it was more to confront Kevin about what happened when they were kids. Chiron seemed to hold on to that because it was one of the biggest betrayals that he faced throughout the film. Overall, Chiron had negative experiences with his mother and the boys at school which possibly made him feel even more lost or what he was feeling was not what normal boys felt. He had Juan and Kevin that helped him find himself, Juan helped guide him even after death and Kevin helped Chiron realize who he was and what the feelings that he was feeling meant.

It seems like at the beginning of the movie Chiron was trying to conform with the normality of things, or what was portrayed as heteronormative. While being bullied, he struggled to find his identity, so it was easier to blend in. As Chiron got older throughout the movie, the audience can see that he is starting to become the man that he was trying to be as a boy. As he got older, it was easier for him to resist his heteronormative identity and be the person that he wanted to be. The ending scene allowed us all to see that Chiron was truly happy with who he had become and with who he was with. The ending scene showed the audience that Kevin was the only true love that Chiron felt throughout his life.

Chiron’s sexual identity was limiting in parts one and two of the movie, because he had a hard time accepting that he was different from the other boys. The other boys made it hard for him to be who he was because of the constant bullying that he received from them. Chiron seemed to feel trapped in the life that he had because there were many people in his life that created a negative environment. With the boys who were bullying him to his mother who expected too much from him as a kid, he felt powerless. He could not even express how he was feeling without some sort of retribution. When he got older, he became a drug dealer to gain status and to feel like he was in control of something in his life even if that was not his sexuality. Kevin calling him was a turning point in his life, when he received the phone call from Kevin, he dropped everything to go visit him. When seeing Kevin again all the feelings he had for him came rushing back and empowered him to tell Kevin what he truly felt. He told Kevin that he was not with anyone since him, and in this moment, Chiron was ready to accept who he really was.

The film Paris is Burning focuses on people’s personal accounts of what it was like to be a performer in drag balls in New York City. Drag balls were used as a way for people of all backgrounds to express who they were. The drag queen culture was big in New York City at this time, and the backgrounds of people in this culture included transgenders black men. The balls were set up so that the participants walked down a runway in a costume of their choosing, while dancing with the style of dance that they chose. Voguing was a very popular move when these balls were taking place. In the movie Paris is Burning it focuses on personal accounts of people who were a part of the LGBTQ community. These balls were a way for the community to get together and have fun in an environment that was safe for them.

The drag balls were uplifting for the people in the LGBTQ community, creating positive a positive environment. Receiving support from other people in this community helped uplift the participants. While receiving positive messages from this environment, they participants had fun and enjoyed doing the balls as it was one of the biggest outlets to show off who they truly were. They did this through their costumes and the way they danced.

The people who were giving the interviews told the stories about how they were empowered by the drag balls that they got to be in. They drag balls were a way for them to resist the heteronormative culture that society creates. Feeling liberated by this drag queen culture they found it harder to submit to the heteronormative state of mind that society has. They were able to dress how they wanted and be who they wanted represented in their dance style walking down the runway. The people were limited by their sexuality because this was one of the only places where they could feel comfortable being themselves. Stepping out in their normal day lives where heteronormative people found it hard to accept who these people were was a challenge for these people to be who they were without fear of retribution solely based off of how they looked and dressed.

References

· Jenkins, B. (Director). (2016, September 2). Moonlight [Film].

· Livingston, J. (Director). (1991, August). Paris is burning [Film].

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belladenuit · 3 years

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Why is Harris Reed’s gender fluid fashion everything our generation needs?

Having graduated from the prestigious Central Saint Martins, Reed is a gender fluid style enthusiast breaking all stereotypes. Be it his millinery conjure that libertine the lecherous sexual attitude of David Bowie and Mick Jagger, or his ruffled blouses or silhouettes that conjure masculine femininity; Reed sure knows how to differentiate himself from other aspiring designers of his generation. Fashioning masculinity has always been a crucial and controversial step in the history of menswear, having every design meet with criticism. Decades ago, ‘androgynous clothing’ was mostly designed by men for women, but in modern day, it’s led by a more feminine spirit. This necessary alteration in the fashion world is much necessary and impactful, linking to the question of ‘Sexy or Sexist?’ and therefore Harris Reed is breaking all gender norms. Let’s take a look!!

“I might wear the same blouse I made for Harry, and I might wear it in a very feminine and sweet and innocent way. Harry’s onstage, chest fully out, sweating, rocking out.” Reed is clear about his intentions towards gender fluid fashion, and this motivates the youth to employ fashion as an element to express and accept themselves, pushing boundaries that are blurred between gender and sexuality. This revolutionary step in the fashion world is sure to inspire young fashion enthusiasts to work for the same and help build a broad-minded, perceptive world.

Thankfully, fashioning menswear and femininity is not the only way Reed is breaking gender norms, he is also an advocate for Mermaids, a UK based organisation that supports trans and gender-nonconforming teenagers. Most importantly, Mermaids provides a hotline to educate families and parents, contributing the “tools to be able to be the best kind of support system they need to be for their children.” Reed states, “I was so lucky to have parents who really loved me and supported me, but I think that even they could have used a bit of guidance and a bit of help. And I know that there are so many families that are not accepting and not supportive, and if someone’s family doesn’t want to reach out to the service, they can and get the tools they need.” Being the face of a brand that resounds the enormous theatricality of British designer, Galliano [who performed infamous costume shows at London’s gay club scenes in the 1980’s], Reed seems nonchalant and poised to take the concept of gender fluidity one step higher in the fashion industry.

Styling Lil Nas in customised white silk Moire flared suit, Harry Styles with his custom made caged ballgown skirt with fitted double breasted suit and dressing Ezra Miller in a feathered top hat and Solange in a portrait hat with a circumference to rival a bird of prey’s wingspan, not just these, people can look at other fashion forerunners like Harry Styles, Miley Cyrus, Pharrell Williams, Billie Eilish, Lil Nas, Timothee Chalamet and Blake Lively as gender-bending inspirations due to their free sexual orientation. Mentioned celebrities having huge number of following due to their immensely successful careers and social media, it makes gender fluid fashion more reachable to a wider audience, and inspiring not just the LGBTQ+ community but also the impressionable gen z. The power of social media is evidently significant and this was proved when Vogue’s December 2020 issue was printed, with Harry Styles wearing Reed’s Comme des Garçons kilt, a Wales Bonner knitted skirt and a Victorian-era crinoline. However, this received criticism from many people, such as writer Candace Owens raising the statement ‘Bring back manly men’ multiple young people and celebrities utilised their platforms and supported the issue and Styles’ statement. And this is exactly what Harris Reed is working on, representing a generation that has completely acquired the notion of freedom and self-expression, one that is free of questions about the non-binaries and sexual identities. Fashion is an art form, revolutionary in all it’s true forms, it plays a huge role in expressing one’s identity and pushes boundaries to pre-conceived fault lines that people create about gender and sexuality.

#harris reed #harry styles #vogue #fashion #celebrities #one direction #lgbtq #miley cyrus #lil nas #billie eilish #timothee chamalet #blake lively #pharellwilliams #style #menswear #gender fluid

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futuregws · 3 years

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Did you see what the fabulous Billy Porter said about vogue/Harry styles? I completely agree with him 👀. How’re you and the little squeakers doing?

Honestly I see what he means but I don't think its fair for him to act like he created or was the one who started dressing like that bc a lot of people also on the LGBTQ+ community were doing it a long time before, so he's not the creator or anything and also Billy calling Harry a straight man doesn't sit right with me bc Harry has said that he doesn't label himself so for Billy to come and put a label on him it's wrong and Harry being in the cover I don't think its a problem I think it's how some people reacted towards it, bc Harry never tried to make it seem something revolutionary or anything he just wanted to wear a dress thats it, but anyway I'm doing great and my little squeakers are as well they are actually eating right now so, they are living their best life

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bananaofswifts · 5 years

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IT’S A SUNDAY AFTERNOON in Tribeca, and I’m in Taylor Swift’s loft, inside a former printing house that she has restored and fortified into a sanctuary of brick, velvet, and mahogany. The space is warm and cozy and vaguely literary—later, when we pass through her bedroom en route to her garden, 10 percent of my brain will believe her wardrobe might open up to Narnia. Barefoot in a wine-colored floral top and matching flowy pants, Swift is typing passwords into a laptop to show me the video for “You Need to Calm Down,” eight days before she unleashes it on the world. I have a sliver of an idea what to expect. A few weeks earlier, I spent a day at the video shoot, in a dusty field-slash-junkyard north of Los Angeles. Swift had made it a sort of Big Gay Candy Mountain trailer park, a Technicolor happy place. The cast and crew wore heart-shaped sunglasses—living, breathing lovey-eyes emoji—and a mailbox warned, LOVE LETTERS ONLY. Swift and a stream of costars filmed six scenes over about a dozen hours. The singer-songwriter Hayley Kiyoko, known to her fans as “Lesbian Jesus,” shot arrows at a bull’s-eye. The YouTube comedian-chef Hannah Hart danced alongside Dexter Mayfield, the plus-size male model and self-described “big boy in heels.” The Olympic figure skater Adam Rippon served up icy red snow cones. Swift and her close friend Todrick Hall, of Kinky Boots and RuPaul’s Drag Race, sipped tea with the cast of Queer Eye. The mood was joyous and laid-back. But by the end of the day, I wasn’t sure what the vignettes would add up to. There were shoot days and cameos I wouldn’t observe. For security reasons, the song was never played aloud. (The cast wore ear buds.) Even the hero shot, in which Swift and Hall sauntered arm in arm through the dreamscape at golden hour, was filmed in near-total silence. For weeks afterward, I tried to sleuth out a theory. I started casually. There was a “5” on the bull’s-eye, so I did a quick search to figure out what that number might mean. Immediately I was in over my head. Swift has a thing for symbols. I knew she had been embedding secret messages in liner notes and deploying metaphors as refrains since her self-titled debut in 2006—long before her megafame made her into a symbol of pop supremacy. But I hadn’t understood how coded and byzantine her body of work has become; I hadn’t learned, as Swift’s fans have, to see hidden meanings everywhere. For instance: In the 2017 video for “Look What You Made Me Do,” a headstone in a graveyard scene reads NILS SJOBERG, the pseudonym Swift used as her writing credit on Rihanna’s hit “This Is What You Came For,” a Swedish-sounding nod to that country’s pop wizards. After an excessive amount of ad hoc scholarship—a friend joked that I could have learned Mandarin in the time I spent trying to unpack Swift’s oeuvre—I was no closer to a theory. Pop music has become so layered and meta, but the Taylor Swift Universe stands apart. Apprehending it is like grasping quantum physics. My first indication of what her new album, Lover, would be about came just after midnight on June 1, the beginning of Pride Month, when Swift introduced a petition in support of the federal Equality Act. This legislation would amend the Civil Rights Act to outlaw discrimination based on gender identity and sexual orientation. (It has passed the House, but prospects in Mitch McConnell’s Senate are unclear.) Swift also posted a letter to Senator Lamar Alexander, Republican of Tennessee, asking him to vote yes. The request, on her personal letterhead (born in 1989. LOVES CATS.), denounced President Trump for not supporting the Equality Act. “I personally reject the president’s stance,” Swift wrote. Back in the kitchen, Swift hits play. “The first verse is about trolls and cancel culture,” she says. “The second verse is about homophobes and the people picketing outside our concerts. The third verse is about successful women being pitted against each other.” The video is, for erudite Swifties, a rich text. I had followed enough clues to correctly guess some of the other cameos—Ellen DeGeneres, RuPaul, Katy Perry. I felt the satisfaction of a gamer who successfully levels up—achievement unlocked! The video’s final frame sends viewers to Swift’s change.org petition in support of the Equality Act, which has acquired more than 400,000 signatures—including those of Cory Booker, Elizabeth Warren, Beto O’Rourke, and Kirsten Gillibrand—or four times the number required to elicit an official response from the White House. “Maybe a year or two ago, Todrick and I are in the car, and he asked me, What would you do if your son was gay?” We are upstairs in Swift’s secret garden, comfortably ensconced in a human-scale basket that is sort of shaped like a cocoon. Swift has brought up an ornate charcuterie board and is happily slathering triple-cream Brie onto sea-salt crackers. “The fact that he had to ask me … shocked me and made me realize that I had not made my position clear enough or loud enough,” she says. “If my son was gay, he’d be gay. I don’t understand the question.” I have pressed Swift on this topic, and her answers have been direct, not performative or scripted. I do sense that she enjoys talking to me about as much as she’d enjoy a root canal—but she’s unfailingly polite, and when we turn to music, her face will light up and she will add little melodic phrases to her speech, clearly her preferred language. “If he was thinking that, I can’t imagine what my fans in the LGBTQ community might be thinking,” she goes on. “It was kind of devastating to realize that I hadn’t been publicly clear about that.” I understand why she was surprised; she has been sending pro-LGBTQ signals since at least 2011. Many have been subtle, but none insignificant—especially for a young country star coming out of Nashville. In the video for her single “Mean” (from 2010’s Speak Now), we see a boy in a school locker room wearing a lavender sweater and bow tie, surrounded by football players. In “Welcome to New York,” the first track on 1989, she sings, “And you can want who you want. Boys and boys and girls and girls.” Two years later, she donated to a fund for the newly created Stonewall National Monument and presented Ruby Rose with a GLAAD Media Award. Every night of last year’s Reputation tour, she dedicated the song “Dress” to Loie Fuller, the openly gay pioneer of modern dance and theatrical lighting who captured the imagination of fin-de-siècle Paris. Swift, who has been criticized for keeping her politics to herself, first took an explicit stance a month before the 2018 midterms. On Instagram, she endorsed Democrats for the Tennessee Legislature and called out the Republican running for Senate, Marsha Blackburn. “She believes businesses have a right to refuse service to gay couples,” Swift wrote. “She also believes they should not have the right to marry. These are not MY Tennessee values.” Swift says the post was partly to help young fans understand that if they wanted to vote, they had to register. To tell them, as she puts it, “Hey, just so you know, you can’t just roll up.” Some 65,000 new voters registered in the first 24 hours after her post, according to Vote.org. Trump came to Blackburn’s defense the following day. “She’s a tremendous woman,” he told reporters. “I’m sure Taylor Swift doesn’t know anything about her. Let’s say I like Taylor’s music about 25 percent less now, OK?” In April, spurred by a raft of anti-LGBTQ bills in Tennessee, Swift donated $113,000 to the Tennessee Equality Project, which advocates for LGBTQ rights. “Horrendous,” she says of the legislation. “They don’t call it ‘Slate of Hate’ for nothing.” Swift especially liked that the Tennessee Equality Project had organized a petition of faith leaders in opposition. “I loved how smart it was to come at it from a religious perspective.” Meanwhile, the “Calm Down” video provoked a Colorado pastor to call Swift “a sinner in desperate need of a savior” and warn that “God will cut her down.” It also revived heated debate within LGBTQ communities about the politics of allyship and corporatization of Pride. Some critics argued Swift’s pro-LGBTQ imagery and lyrics were overdue and out of the blue—a reaction the new Swift scholar in me found bewildering. Had they not been paying attention? Nor did it strike me as out of character for Swift to leverage her power for a cause. She pulled her catalog from Spotify in 2014 over questions of artist compensation. She stared down Apple in 2015, when the company said it would not pay artists during the launch of its music service. (Apple reversed itself immediately.) As a condition of her record deal with Universal Music Group last year, the company promised that it would distribute proceeds from any sale of its Spotify shares to all of its artists. And this summer, Swift furiously called out Scott Borchetta, founder of Big Machine Label Group, for selling her master recordings to the music manager Scooter Braun. (When I ask Swift if she tried to get her masters from Big Machine, her whole body slumps with a palpable heaviness. “It was either investing in my past or my and other artists’ future, and I chose the future,” she says of the deal she struck with Universal.) Swift’s blunt testimony during her 2017 sexual-assault case against a radio DJ—months before the #MeToo reckoning blew open—felt deeply political to me and, I imagine, many other women. Swift accused the DJ, David Mueller, of groping her under her skirt at a photo session in 2013. Her camp reported the incident to his employer, who fired him. Mueller denied the allegation, sued Swift for $3 million, and his case was thrown out. Swift countersued for a symbolic $1 and won. In a Colorado courtroom, Swift described the incident: “He stayed latched onto my bare ass cheek” as photos were being snapped. Asked why photos of the front of her skirt didn’t show this, she said, “Because my ass is located at the back of my body.” Asked if she felt bad about the DJ’s losing his job, she said, “I’m not going to let you or your client make me feel in any way that this is my fault. Here we are years later, and I’m being blamed for the unfortunate events of his life that are the product of his decisions—not mine.” When Time included Swift on the cover of its “Silence Breakers” issue that year, the magazine asked how she felt during the testimony. “I was angry,” she said. “In that moment, I decided to forgo any courtroom formalities and just answer the questions the way it happened…I’m told it was the most amount of times the word ass has ever been said in Colorado Federal Court.” Mueller has since paid Swift the dollar—with a Sacagawea coin. “He was trolling me, implying that I was self-righteous and hell-bent on angry, vengeful feminism. That’s what I’m inferring from him giving me a Sacagawea coin,” Swift says. “Hey, maybe he was trying to do it in honor of a powerful Native American woman. I didn’t ask.” Where is the coin now? “My lawyer has it.” I ask her, why get louder about LGBTQ rights now? “Rights are being stripped from basically everyone who isn’t a straight white cisgender male,” she says. “I didn’t realize until recently that I could advocate for a community that I’m not a part of. It’s hard to know how to do that without being so fearful of making a mistake that you just freeze. Because my mistakes are very loud. When I make a mistake, it echoes through the canyons of the world. It’s clickbait, and it’s a part of my life story, and it’s a part of my career arc.” I’d argue that no heterosexual woman can listen to “You Need to Calm Down” and hear only a gay anthem. “Calm down” is what controlling men tell women who are angry, contrary, or “hysterical,” or, let’s say, fearing for their physical safety. It is what Panic! at the Disco singer Brendon Urie says to Swift in the beginning of the “ME!” music video, prompting her to scream, “Je suis calme!” I cannot believe it is a coincidence that Swift, a numbers geek with an affinity for dates, dropped the single—whose slow, incessant bass is likely to be bumping in stadiums across the world in 2020 if she goes on tour—on June 14, a certain president’s birthday. It’s enlightening to read 13 years of Taylor Swift coverage—all the big reviews, all the big profiles—in one sitting. You notice things. How quickly Swift went from a “prodigy” (The New Yorker) and a “songwriting savant” (Rolling Stone) to a tabloid fixture, for instance. Or how suspect her ambition is made to seem once she acquires real power. Other plot points simply look different in the light of #MeToo. It is hard to imagine that Swift’s songs about her exes would be reviewed as sensationally today. I wonder if, in 2019, any man would dare grab the microphone out of a young woman’s hands at an awards show. I stared into space for a good long while when I was reminded that Pitchfork did not review Taylor Swift’s 1989 but did review Ryan Adams’s cover album of Taylor Swift’s 1989. I ask Swift if she had always been aware of sexism. “I think about this a lot,” she says. “When I was a teenager, I would hear people talk about sexism in the music industry, and I’d be like, I don’t see it. I don’t understand. Then I realized that was because I was a kid. Men in the industry saw me as a kid. I was a lanky, scrawny, overexcited young girl who reminded them more of their little niece or their daughter than a successful woman in business or a colleague. The second I became a woman, in people’s perception, was when I started seeing it. “It’s fine to infantilize a girl’s success and say, How cute that she’s having some hit songs,” she goes on. “How cute that she’s writing songs. But the second it becomes formidable? As soon as I started playing stadiums—when I started to look like a woman—that wasn’t as cool anymore. It was when I started to have songs from Red come out and cross over, like ‘I Knew You Were Trouble’ and ‘We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together.’ ” Those songs are also more assertive than the ones that came before, I say. “Yeah, the angle was different when I started saying, I knew you were trouble when you walked in. Basically, you emotionally manipulated me and I didn’t love it. That wasn’t fun for me.” I have to wonder if having her songwriting overlooked as her hits were picked apart and scrutinized wasn’t the biggest bummer of all. Swift: “I wanted to say to people, You realize writing songs is an art and a craft and not, like, an easy thing to do? Or to do well? People would act like it was a weapon I was using. Like a cheap dirty trick. Be careful, bro, she’ll write a song about you. Don’t stand near her. First of all, that’s not how it works. Second of all, find me a time when they say that about a male artist: Be careful, girl, he’ll use his experience with you to get—God forbid—inspiration to make art.” Without question the tenor of the Taylor Swift Narrative changed most dramatically in July 2016, when Kim Kardashian West called her a “snake” on Twitter, and released video clips of Swift and Kanye West discussing the lyrics to his song “Famous.” (No need to rehash the details here. Suffice it to say that Swift’s version of events hasn’t changed: She knew about some of the lyrics but not others; specifically, the words that bitch.) The posts sparked several hashtags, including #TaylorSwiftIsASnake and #TaylorSwiftIsCanceled, which quickly escalated into a months-long campaign to “cancel” Swift. To this day Swift doesn’t think people grasp the repercussions of that term. “A mass public shaming, with millions of people saying you are quote-unquote canceled, is a very isolating experience,” she says. “I don’t think there are that many people who can actually understand what it’s like to have millions of people hate you very loudly.” She adds: “When you say someone is canceled, it’s not a TV show. It’s a human being. You’re sending mass amounts of messaging to this person to either shut up, disappear, or it could also be perceived as, Kill yourself.” I get a sense of the whiplash Swift experienced when I notice that, a few months into this ordeal, while she was writing the songs that an interpolation of a ’90s camp classic, Right Said Fred’s “I’m Too Sexy.”) Nonetheless, most critics read it as a grenade lobbed in the general direction of Calabasas. One longtime Nashville critic, Brian Mansfield, had a more plausible take: She was writing sarcastically as the “Taylor Swift” portrayed in the media in a bid for privacy. “Yeah, this is the character you created for me, let me just hide behind it,” she says now of the persona she created. “I always used this metaphor when I was younger. I’d say that with every reinvention, I never wanted to tear down my house. ’Cause I built this house. This house being, metaphorically, my body of work, my songwriting, my music, my catalog, my library. I just wanted to redecorate. I think a lot of people, with Reputation, would have perceived that I had torn down the house. Actually, I just built a bunker around it.” In March, the snakes started to morph into butterflies, the vampire color palette into Easter pastels. When a superbloom of wildflowers lured a mesmerizing deluge of Painted Lady butterflies to Los Angeles, Swift marked it with an Instagram post. She attended the iHeartRadio Music Awards that night in a sequin romper and stilettos with shimmery wings attached. Swift announced the single “ME!” a month later, with a large butterfly mural in Nashville. In the music video for the (conspicuously) bubblegum song, a hissing pastel-pink snake explodes into a kaleidoscope of butterflies. One flutters by the window of an apartment, where Swift is arguing in French with Urie. A record player is playing in the background. “It’s an old-timey, 1940s-sounding instrumental version of ‘You Need to Calm Down,’ ’’ Swift says. Later, in the “Calm Down” video, Swift wears a (fake) back tattoo of a snake swarmed by butterflies. We are only two songs in, people. Lover, to be released on August 23, will have a total of 18 songs. “I was compiling ideas for a very long time,” Swift says. “When I started writing, I couldn’t stop.” (We can assume the British actor Joe Alwyn, with whom Swift has been in a relationship for nearly three years, provided some of the inspiration.) Swift thinks Lover might be her favorite album yet. “There are so many ways in which this album feels like a new beginning,” she says. “This album is really a love letter to love, in all of its maddening, passionate, exciting, enchanting, horrific, tragic, wonderful glory.” I have to ask Swift, given how genuinely at peace she seems, if part of her isn’t thankful, if not for the Great Cancellation of 2016, then for the person she now is—knowing who her friends are, knowing what’s what. “When you’re going through loss or embarrassment or shame, it’s a grieving process with so many micro emotions in a day. One of the reasons why I didn’t do interviews for Reputation was that I couldn’t figure out how I felt hour to hour. Sometimes I felt like: All these things taught me something that I never could have learned in a way that didn’t hurt as much. Five minutes later, I’d feel like: That was horrible. Why did that have to happen? What am I supposed to take from this other than mass amounts of humiliation? And then five minutes later I’d think: I think I might be happier than I’ve ever been.” She goes on: “It’s so strange trying to be self-aware when you’ve been cast as this always smiling, always happy ‘America’s sweetheart’ thing, and then having that taken away and realizing that it’s actually a great thing that it was taken away, because that’s extremely limiting.” Swift leans back in the cocoon and smiles: “We’re not going to go straight to gratitude with it. Ever. But we’re going to find positive aspects to it. We’re never going to write a thank-you note.” Though people will take the Perry-Swift burger-and-fries embrace in the “You Need to Calm Down” video as a press release that the two have mended fences, Swift says it’s actually a comment on how the media pits female pop stars against one another. After Perry sent Swift an (actual) olive branch last year, Swift asked her to be in the video: “She wrote back, This makes me so emotional. I’m so up for this. I want us to be that example. But let’s spend some time together. Because I want it to be real. So she came over and we talked for hours. “We decided the metaphor for what happens in the media,” Swift explains, “is they pick two people and it’s like they’re pouring gasoline all over the floor. All that needs to happen is one false move, one false word, one misunderstanding, and a match is lit and dropped. That’s what happened with us. It was: Who’s better? Katy or Taylor? Katy or Taylor? Katy or Taylor? Katy or Taylor? The tension is so high that it becomes impossible for you to not think that the other person has something against you.“ Meanwhile, the protesters in the video reference a real-life religious group that pickets outside Swift’s concerts, not the white working class in general, as some have assumed. “So many artists have them at their shows, and it’s such a confounding, confusing, infuriating thing to have outside of joyful concerts,” she tells me. “Obviously I don’t want to mention the actual entity, because they would get excited about that. Giving them press is not on my list of priorities.” At one point, Swift asks if I would like to hear two other songs off the new album. (Duh.) First she plays “Lover,” the title track, coproduced by Jack Antonoff. “This has one of my favorite bridges,” she says. “I love a bridge, and I was really able to go to Bridge City.” It’s a romantic, haunting, waltzy, singer-songwritery nugget: classic Swift. “My heart’s been borrowed and yours has been blue,” she sings. “All’s well that ends well to end up with you.” Next, Swift cues up a track that “plays with the idea of perception.” She has often wondered how she would be written and spoken about if she were a man, “so I wrote a song called ‘The Man.’ ” It’s a thought experiment of sorts: “If I had made all the same choices, all the same mistakes, all the same accomplishments, how would it read?” Seconds later, Swift’s earpods are pumping a synth-pop earworm into my head: “I’d be a fearless leader. I’d be an alpha type. When everyone believes ya: What’s that like?” Swift wrote the first two singles with Joel Little, best known as one of Lorde’s go-to producers. (“From a pop-songwriting point of view, she’s the pinnacle,” Little says of Swift.) The album is likely to include more marquee names. A portrait of the Dixie Chicks in the background of the “ME!” video almost certainly portends a collaboration. If fans are correctly reading a button affixed to her denim jacket in a recent magazine cover, we can expect one with Drake, too. Lover. “We met at one of her shows,” says McCartney, “and then we had a girls’ night and kind of jumped straight in. In London we’ll go on walks and talk about everything—life and love.” (Swift has no further fashion ambitions at the moment. “I really love my job right now,” she tells me. “My focus is on music.”) Oh, and that “5” on the bullseye? Track five is called “The Archer.” Yet something tells me the most illuminating clue for reading both Lover and Reputationmay be Loie Fuller, the dancer to whom Swift paid homage on tour. As Swift noted on a Jumbotron, Fuller “fought for artists to own their work.” Fuller also used swirling fabric and colored lights to metamorphose onstage, playing a “hide-and-seek illusionist game” with her audience, as one writer has put it. She became a muse to the Symbolists in Paris, where Jean Cocteau wrote that she created “the phantom of an era.” The effect, said the poet Stéphane Mallarmé, was a “dizziness of soul made visible by an artifice.” Fuller’s most famous piece was “Serpentine Dance.” Another was “Butterfly Dance.” Swift has had almost no downtime since late 2017, but what little she does have is divided among New York, Nashville, Los Angeles, and Rhode Island, where she keeps homes—plus London. In an essay earlier this year, she revealed that her mother, Andrea Swift, is fighting cancer for a second time. “There was a relapse that happened,” Swift says, declining to go into detail. “It’s something that my family is going through.” Later this year, she will star in a film adaptation of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Cats as Bombalurina, the flirtatious red cat. “They made us the size of cats by making the furniture bigger,” she says. “You’d be standing there and you could barely reach the seat of a chair. It was phenomenal. It made you feel like a little kid.” But first, she will spend much of the summer holding “secret sessions”—a tradition wherein Swift invites hundreds of fans to her various homes to preview her new music. “They’ve never given me a reason to stop doing it,” she says. “Not a single one.” Speaking of: Inquiring fans will want to know if Swift dropped any more clues about how to decode Lover during this interview. For you I reviewed the audio again, and there were a few things that made my newly acquired Swifty sense tingle. At one point she compared superstardom in the digital age to life in a dollhouse, one where voyeurs “can ‘ship’ you with who they want to ‘ship’ you with, and they can ‘favorite’ friends that you have, and they can know where you are all the time.” The metaphor was precise and vivid and, well, a little too intricately rendered to be off the cuff. (Also, the “ME!” lyric: “Baby doll, when it comes to a lover. I promise that you’ll never find another like me.”) Then there was the balloon—a giant gold balloon in the shape of a numeral seven that happened to float by while we were on her roof, on this, the occasion of her seventh album. “Is it an L’?” I say. “No, because look, the string is hanging from the bottom,” she says. It might seem an obvious symbolic gesture, deployed for this interview, except for how impossible that seems. Swift let me control the timing of nearly everything. Moreover, the gold seven wasn’t floating up from the sidewalk below. It was already high in the sky, drifting slowly toward us from down the street. She would have had to control the wind, or at least to have studied it. Would Taylor Swift really go to such elaborate lengths for her fans? This much I know: Yes, she would.

#taylor swift #vogue #article

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alishablogs · 3 years

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Harry Styles and his image.

In this blog post I will explore and discuss Harry Styles’ Image. Investigating how he has created an image and whether it’s true to him. It is no secret that every artist has a persona they like to portray, but the question we should be asking is, Is that persona genuinely real? So, what is Harry Styles’ image? From what’s put out into mainstream media I’d say Harry’s image is that he’s a progressive artist who bends the gender norms and doesn’t care about what people think about him.

When Harry was in one direction it seems as though this wasn’t a persona he took on, so why the sudden change? Maybe it’s because he feels as though he can be himself now or maybe it’s because he knows he can get a bigger response by doing things that are considered controversial and aren’t the ‘norm’ for boyband members.

Recently, Styles was made the cover star of Vogue this was a monumental moment as he was the first male to grace the front page. However, looking at this with a critical eye makes me wonder if it should have gone to someone a little more deserving, as at the end of the day Styles is a straight cis white man (to public knowledge) perhaps a bigger, better statement could have been made if it was a person of colour who is part of the LGBTQ+ community, because every other magazine cover seems be graced by a white straight man therefore it could have been more beneficial to give the space to someone who gets pushed aside more often than not. I also think it’s important to note that people who are non-binary and dress how they went are a lot of the time picked on and taunted for being themselves, but when a successful popstar does it, they get nothing but praised. This double standard needs to be eradicated. How can it be one way for Styles but not others?

Although I don’t agree with Styles being put on the cover of vogue as the first male star, I do think Styles and his team have cultivated a strong unquestionable image. Because when you think of Harry Styles, one of the first things that would probably enter your head is his flamboyant print suits this alone makes his image stand out from the crowd, as we can picture instantly what it looks like. This is extremely important when you’re a pop star as having people recognise you and know who you are is part of the fame.

Harry has a large fanbase mainly made up of young enthusiastic girls, this means that when he wears a skirt or paints his nails his fans go crazy, congratulating him on not conforming to stereotypes and being proudly himself. Taking a further look into this I haven’t found anything Styles has done to support the LGBTQ community in terms of awareness of financially. Styles also refuses to disclose his sexuality which is okay, unless he is just queerbaiting a demographic who desperately a role model and positive representation, which is incredibly sad if Styles and his team a perpetuating a false image and being praised for progression but aren’t doing anything positive in support of that.

Harry Styles and his team are extremely smart as they’ve created a unique image for him, if you go see him live you know to expect dancing, colourful clothes and a guy that doesn’t fit into the binary ideals. So, for that I praise them, because at the end of the day it’s all about the performance when you’re a pop star and an artist without a definable image just isn’t going to be as successful.

#harry styles #harry #styles #one direction #cultivating an image

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krashlynandthekids · 4 years

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Inside the Miami Wedding of Soccer Stars Ali Krieger and Ashlyn Harris

By Alexandra Macon : Vogue

Orlando Pride and U.S. Women’s National Team goalkeeper Ashlyn Harris and defender Ali Krieger are one of sport’s most beloved couples. They first met in 2010 at USWNT training camp, where they became fast friends. “I just found her to be so captivating and always wanted to be around her,” Ali says. “She’s someone who seemed so confident and comfortable with herself, and I was so attracted to that.” The two began a romantic relationship, which they kept secret for a long time out of fear of losing endorsement deals, despite the fact that hardcore soccer fans suspected they were a couple long before they ultimately decided to go public. After almost 10 years of dating, they tied the knot over the holidays in a wedding that was a non-stop, weekend-long party and served as a reunion for many of the USWNT team members. It also capped off a World Cup winning season in which these athletes made front-page headlines for their powerful stances off the field as well as their talent on it.

Ashlyn and Ali’s official move toward marriage started when Ashlyn asked Ali to marry her in Clearwater, Florida. They were enjoying a weekend away after a long season. Just before dinner, “we headed down to the beach to watch the sunset and take in the beautiful scenery,” Ali remembers. “We had a glass of champagne and then wanted to take photos to capture the moment. I proceeded to take a selfie and Ashlyn’s arm was in the back of the photo. I asked her to put it down and stop being silly, only to realize she had actually been holding the engagement ring the entire time I had been snapping photos. She pulled it around in front of me, and then asked the big question! I was in shock but so happy and excited at the same time. It was an incredible sunset, and just a perfect moment.”

Wedding planning kicked off soon after. From the start, the goal was to create a classic, clean environment. “Vizcaya Museum and Gardens [in Miami] is this kind of Mediterranean Castle-like vibe right on the water,” Ali says. “It has this European feel that we were going for, so right when we walked into the venue for the first time, we were like, ‘Oh my God! It’s breathtaking. This is it!’”

The couple worked with Sara Lowell from Sara Renee Events to bring their vision to life. “She’s so badass and beautiful and just absolutely crushed it for us,” Ali says. “We’re so grateful for her and her incredible team of fantastic people working to make our dreams a reality.”

“Ali and I really wanted to align ourselves with people and brands that spoke to our soul and were really about nonconforming and understood the same vision we were going for,” Ashlyn adds. “I just wanted to feel like we could fully express ourselves, our sexuality, and our community.”

To that end, Ashlyn wore Thom Browne, the designer she turns to for all of her red carpet events, and a TAG Heuer Monaco watch. Thom Browne dresses the Barcelona soccer team, which is how Ashlyn first became acquainted with the brand. “Honestly, I love that it’s all very gender neutral, very fluid, there are women in dresses and men in dress, and men and women in skirts. I can really feel how he expresses himself through clothes. It’s just so nonconforming and so far out. I’ve been wearing his stuff ever since.” She and the Thom Browne team created a custom tuxedo with a beaded argyle pattern for the wedding day.

Like a lot of brides on the hunt for the right dress, Ali took a weekend trip to New York City with her best friend and maid of honor, Elizabeth Mumley, to search for her wedding gown. They found a Pronovias fit and flare dress with long sleeves and a V in the back that was exactly what she wanted. “I tried it on, and I knew it was the one!” she says of the “Helio” gown. “I fell in love and knew I would get married in this dress. It’s simple but sophisticated and elegant at the same time. I have personally always loved Pronovias. It’s a brand with which I think I share a lot of values as they believe in inclusivity and diversity.”

On Saturday, December 28, just three days after Christmas, the couple married in the round so that friends and family could see the ceremony and feel part of it. “We wanted simple white flowers and a rose-petal-strewn aisle,” Ali says. “We also wanted to walk ourselves down the aisle as strong, confident, independent women. We felt like it was right.” Ashlyn’s best friend, USWNT team captain and the World Cup’s MVP, Megan Rapinoe, served as maid of honor; Ali’s brother, Kyle Krieger, was best man; and Orlando Pride player Sydney Leroux was the officiant.

For the reception afterward, guests found their seats at tables named after LGBTQ icons including Marsha P. Johnson—a pioneering activist known for her role in the Stonewall uprising—and Anderson Cooper. Dena Lowell Blauschild and The Cook and the Cork catered a colorful menu with an incredible attention to detail. And just before the party really got started, Ali changed into the Condesa dress, also by Pronovias. “I wanted to make it into a mini dress but keep the train, so I customized the hem to give it a high-low effect,” she says. “It was very nice to be able to dance without worrying!”

Meanwhile, Ashlyn seemed to strip off components of her wedding ensemble as the night went on—her pants were switched out for shorts and her tuxedo jacket was traded in for a sleeveless shirt and vest, also by Thom Browne, which allowed her to dance more freely. The newlyweds cut their rainbow cake and did their first dance to a live, acoustic version of Kina Grannis’s “Stand by Me.” Toasts were given over the course of the evening, with Ali’s brother Kyle voicing the sentiments so many there (and those taking in the festivities from afar via Instagram) were feeling: “Since you went public with your relationship, it has been a gift to watch you grow together. It’s amazing because you guys are like a beacon of light for all young queer LGBTQ women and men who just need someone to look up to, like we get happy endings too. In the media and the movies, so often...you know, queer stories have a devastating ending, but not here. In real life, we get to see you guys live the dream.”

#ali krieger #ashlyn harris #krashlyn #royal wedding #wedding

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greenhatsinthesky · 4 years

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lockdown film no. 13 - Paris Is Burning (1990) dir. Jennie Livingston

09/04/2020

as a queer, this is essential viewing. watched it with a bunch of pals remotely

- this was such a beautiful film

- like in terms of documentary it was one of the best ive seen it was so alive

- I loved how they did do talking heads interviews but not just in a room with a black background they were all in their natural habitat like doing their makeup or smoking in their dressing rooms

- there was a lot I didnt know about drag culture

- and people think they know about it because they’ve seen drag race on iplayer but that is not all it is

- Madonna didnt invent vogueing. Educate your fucking self.

- also I didnt know how much of mainstream society had been impacted by drag culture that people just do not recognise and that makes me really mad - like if you’ve ever talked about realness or throwing shade or told someone to work you are referring to drag culture created by queer people of colour and people need to recognise that because those people did not bring all this culture to society just for people to erase the mark that they made on the world.

- the section where they were talking about how the goal is to pass as your straight counterpart really hit me

- the amount of just bodies in this film was amazing

- the fact that they talked a lot about children who were rejected by their parents and came to drag searching for family to fill the void was really moving. They just want family and ball culture and houses and mothers give the children that

- those two boys drinking Fanta on the street were my favourite. So wise

- “They treat each other like sisters, or brothers… or mothers. You know, like, I say ‘that’s my sister’ because she’s gay too and I’m gay, and she’s a drag queen or whatever.”

- they gave so much justice to people of colour from different backgrounds in drag and that made me really happy. Like obviously those people gave themselves justice but this was in a really mainstream context

- seeing willi ninja vogueing was an ethereal experience

- “But this is a new meaning of family. It wasn’t a question of a man and a woman and children, which we grew up knowing was a family. It’s a question of a group of human beings in a mutual bond.”

- honestly the whole bit where there was drama about if the coat was a men’s or a women’s coat was so intense

- OPULENCE

- “So this is New York City. And this is what the gay life is about, right?”

- I haven’t really acknowledged how brave every person in this film is for simply living as themselves in this time period. I mean, I’m a trans person and I know that if I was living in the same time as this was I would not have had the courage that they did to live as myself. I would have tried, but the extent to which they all were themselves is one of the most inspirational things.

- every person in the lgbtq+ community needs to see this film. It’s our history. And we need to know who came before us to allow us to live with the freedom that we have now

- so many of the cast died before they could ever see the impact they made on society and that is heartbreaking

- and the fact that Venus died before the film was even finished is one of the saddest things. She was 23

- I loved that throughout the film dorian Corey was essentially just monologuing and giving incredible wise gems. Her end monologue was beautiful

- “In a religious community they wanna pray together a lot, right? Well, this gay community… they might wanna be together.”

#paris is burning #jennie livingston #drag #lgbtq #queer cinema #transgender #dorian corey #pepper labeija #venus xtravaganza #octavia st. laurent #willi ninja #angie xtravaganza #junior labeija #vogue #history #lockdown film no. 13 #lockdown films #rob out

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anjalie-95 · 4 years

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Idea development

Ideas began way before summer so have been thinking about it and been in conversation with people about it before the unit began

Idea #1 I am planning to continue my bachelor's final project for my master's project. That was a very personal project that I have created so far that also taught me a lot of things as a photographer. Therefore I wanted to continue it from where I left it and take it to another level. The project talks about real-life stories of people from the LGBTQ community and their life in India. I created a documentary-style film representing everyday challenges faced by the young LGBTQ community, their coming out stories, and how their family and society make it harder for them to be who they are. The project explored only Indians living in India and the U.K but for this M.A level, I want to expand the radius from India to the South Asian community or Asian countries. Asia is home to many homophobic countries where some countries have the death penalty for as an offence. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TiW51pafe0U Idea #2 I enjoy playing the role of a director and creating moving images more than still images. I feel I can do more and can interact with the audience more with audio and moving image. But for the research, I looked up for still images and started with Nan Goldin since her project 'The other side' inspired me a lot for my bachelor's project. The research led to Cindy Sherman's 'Cover Girl' project. From that, I picked up a rough idea to recreate the iconic Vogue images and replace them with LGBTQ. I started exploring the Vogue archives which sadly shows no representation of LGBTQ in the fashion industry or media. There I picked up to do the project to recreate the most iconic fashion images

Idea #3 In continuation of idea 2, I was looking up to a lot of fashion magazines online and physical copies. I spent a good time researching the vogue archive in LCF library. I was unsure with my initial idea of recreating the images since this wouldn't have been an original idea, to begin with. Although the concept was different but the approach was similar. Therefore, I was still debating about this idea. But as it was the very first idea and research I knew it will develop and will foam a different outcome than planned. When I was looking up to the magazines, it bought me back to my research methods topic which was minimal to no inclusion of brown models in regards to diversity. That gave me another idea to build a new project instead of continuing my previous project.

Idea #4 Final idea

I moved on from continuing my B.A level project to creating a new one. I always try to create a project which I can relate to or at least brings a change in my life/enlighten me on a personal level. I started looking up for the representation of South Asian women in the fashion industry. When I was researching around to build up a project, one of the biggest moment against racism took place. #BLM Black Lives Matter George Perry Floyd Jr. was an African-American man killed during an arrest after a store clerk alleged he had passed a counterfeit $20 bill in Minneapolis. A white police officer named Derek Chauvin knelt on Floyd's neck for a period initially reported to be 8 minutes and 46 seconds. (Source Wikipedia) This incident made me very emotional and made me feel very connected. I started sharing the stats and being very active on this issue. I wanted to do something in favour of this. When I was researching and sharing the posts on Instagram I came across a post which talked about Indian celebrities being hypocrite. That was because India has been a place where colourism has existed ever since. People till today priorities white skin over a brown or darker shade.

I used to play volleyball in India at a very young age and I played it professionally on nationals levels. Since it is an outdoor game and the place I lived is a very warm place. The temperature on an average summer day is between 35 C to 48 C. This made my skin very dark and people around me started talking about my skin tone and asked me to quit volleyball cause it made my skin very dark. Not to confuse this with criticism but they all were very caring towards me. It's just that in India if a person is dark it automatically been assumed that this person is lesser than a paler skin person. Everyone around me suggesting skin lightening creams, home remedies to make my skin fairer and I used everything. All this led to quitting volleyball. I still think I could have been a volleyball player today. I always looked upon fair skin people superior to me. I tried bleaching cream on my face which gave me very serious acne and I still have acne scars on my face. Therefore I decided to create a project which talks about the obsession and it's the aftermath. This is a major issue which is always swept under the carpet and people knowingly or unknowingly play a racist role among their own raced people. I want to create a film in a documentary style and interview people of my society with various experience of colourism.

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sociologyucsb2020-blog · 4 years

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Pose. Season 1, Episode 1.

The 2018 scripted series “Pose” scripted series created by Steven Canals, Brad Falchuk, and Ryan Murphy was the first of its kind. This show features several trans characters played by trans actors. The show centers the coming of age experiences of queer people of color. Similarly the show takes place in the 1980’s and is focused on the underground ballroom culture. In the first episode, Damon is kicked out of his home due to his parents discovering his sexuality. His love for dance, and the fact that his father alludes to his eccentric behavior hints at the fact that Damon has been living as the most authentic version of himself prior to our introduction to him in this scene. However, once it is explicitly disclosed that Damon is homosexual he loses the full support of his family. This phenomenon characterized in Damon’s life on screen highlights the reality for many Black gay men. Jeffery McCune’s “’Out’ in the Club: The Down Low, Hip-Hop, and the Architecture of Black Masculinity” discusses how although “The DL May offer an alternative to the closet, men actively negotiate issues of race, gandered, class, and sexuality.” Though Damon may not fit into McCune’s definition of the Down Low, his level of discretion around his sexuality with his family is strategic because it is directly connected to the resources he has to survive. As soon as his family finds out that he’s gay they react violently. They physically assault him and Damon is left without food, shelter, and familial support. Here is the complexity of the intersection where Damon’s sexual orientation, gender expression, and class are interlinked. The audience watches these factors play out in his life, as he goes from living comfortably with his parents to being homeless on the streets of New York City. In addition to Damon, we also meet Blanca in the first episode. The relationship that unfolds between the two of them is highly indicative of the familial system that the ballroom community creates for LGBTQ+ folks. Blanca’s own rejection from her biological family for being transgender led to her joining a house, the House of Abundance. Blanca wanted to pay forward all the acceptance and support she had when she entered the scene, and decided to create her own house, the House of Evangelista. Similarly, Damon gets kicked out of his house for coming out as gay, and is also rejected by his biological family. When Blanca see’s Damon dancing on the streets, she takes him to a ball and educates him on the culture. Eventually, Blanca takes Damon into her house, giving him food, a place to stay, and ensuring that he enrolls in dance school. After some time, Blanca has Damon perform in a dancing or voguing category at a ball, where they end up competing as a house. The construction of family and positioning of roles such as “house mother” and “children” or “brothers/sisters,” offers a sense of stability and strength for those who cannot have that with their biological families. Marlon Bailey contends in “Gender/Racial Realness: Theorizing the Gender System in Ballroom Culture” that, “houses are familial structures that are socially rather than biologically configured,” and that they “can serve as homes where members live and congregate” but also as “social configurations that serve as sources of support for the diverse membership of the ballroom community.” Bailey also posits that, “house parents provide guidance and life skills for their children,” alongside this they “recruit, socialize, and prepare their protégés to compete successfully in categories based on the deployment of performative gender and sexual identities, vogue and theatrical performances, and the effective presentation of fashion and physical attributes.” We see these concepts regarding house culture and purpose mirrored in the way that Blanca adopts Damon, and how she begins to care for and shape him not just for ball’s but for his future as well. Blanca, and more house members to come, all work as a support system for Damon when he has nothing and no one.

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makistar2018 · 5 years

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Taylor Swift on Sexism, Scrutiny, and Standing Up for Herself

AUGUST 8, 2019 By ABBY AGUIRRE Photographed by INEZ AND VINOODH

Cover Look Taylor Swift wears a Louis Vuitton jumpsuit. Rings by Cartier and Bvlgari. To get this look, try: Dream Urban Cover in Classic Ivory, Fit Me Blush in Pink, Tattoostudio Sharpenable Gel Pencil Longwear Eyeliner Makeup in Deep Onyx, The Colossal Mascara, Brow Ultra Slim in Blonde, and Shine Compulsion by Color Sensational Lipstick in Undressed Pink. All by Maybelline New York. Hair, Christiaan; makeup, Fulvia Farolfi. Fashion Editor: Tonne Goodman

Photographed by Inez & Vinoodh, Vogue, September 2019

I have a sliver of an idea what to expect. A few weeks earlier, I spent a day at the video shoot, in a dusty field-slash-junkyard north of Los Angeles. Swift had made it a sort of Big Gay Candy Mountain trailer park, a Technicolor happy place. The cast and crew wore heart-shaped sunglasses—living, breathing lovey-eyes emoji—and a mailbox warned, LOVE LETTERS ONLY.

Swift and a stream of costars filmed six scenes over about a dozen hours. The singer-songwriter Hayley Kiyoko, known to her fans as “Lesbian Jesus,” shot arrows at a bull’s-eye. The YouTube comedian-chef Hannah Hart danced alongside Dexter Mayfield, the plus-size male model and self-described “big boy in heels.” The Olympic figure skater Adam Rippon served up icy red snow cones. Swift and her close friend Todrick Hall, of Kinky Boots and RuPaul’s Drag Race, sipped tea with the cast of Queer Eye.

Speak Now “Rights are being stripped from basically everyone who isn’t a straight white cisgender male,” Swift says. Celine coat. Dior shoes. Fashion Editor: Tonne Goodman. Photographed by Inez & Vinoodh, Vogue, September 2019

The mood was joyous and laid-back. But by the end of the day, I wasn’t sure what the vignettes would add up to. There were shoot days and cameos I wouldn’t observe. For security reasons, the song was never played aloud. (The cast wore ear buds.) Even the hero shot, in which Swift and Hall sauntered arm in arm through the dreamscape at golden hour, was filmed in near-total silence.

For weeks afterward, I tried to sleuth out a theory. I started casually. There was a “5” on the bull’s-eye, so I did a quick search to figure out what that number might mean. Immediately I was in over my head.

Swift has a thing for symbols. I knew she had been embedding secret messages in liner notes and deploying metaphors as refrains since her self-titled debut in 2006—long before her megafame made her into a symbol of pop supremacy. But I hadn’t understood how coded and byzantine her body of work has become; I hadn’t learned, as Swift’s fans have, to see hidden meanings everywhere. For instance: In the 2017 video for “Look What You Made Me Do,” a headstone in a graveyard scene reads NILS SJOBERG, the pseudonym Swift used as her writing credit on Rihanna’s hit “This Is What You Came For,” a Swedish-sounding nod to that country’s pop wizards.

After an excessive amount of ad hoc scholarship—a friend joked that I could have learned Mandarin in the time I spent trying to unpack Swift’s oeuvre—I was no closer to a theory. Pop music has become so layered and meta, but the Taylor Swift Universe stands apart. Apprehending it is like grasping quantum physics.

My first indication of what her new album, Lover, would be about came just after midnight on June 1, the beginning of Pride Month, when Swift introduced a petition in support of the federal Equality Act. This legislation would amend the Civil Rights Act to outlaw discrimination based on gender identity and sexual orientation. (It has passed the House, but prospects in Mitch McConnell’s Senate are unclear.) Swift also posted a letter to Senator Lamar Alexander, Republican of Tennessee, asking him to vote yes. The request, on her personal letterhead (born in 1989. LOVES CATS.), denounced President Trump for not supporting the Equality Act. “I personally reject the president’s stance,” Swift wrote.

Back in the kitchen, Swift hits play. “The first verse is about trolls and cancel culture,” she says. “The second verse is about homophobes and the people picketing outside our concerts. The third verse is about successful women being pitted against each other.”

The video is, for erudite Swifties, a rich text. I had followed enough clues to correctly guess some of the other cameos—Ellen DeGeneres, RuPaul, Katy Perry. I felt the satisfaction of a gamer who successfully levels up—achievement unlocked!The video’s final frame sends viewers to Swift’s change.org petition in support of the Equality Act, which has acquired more than 400,000 signatures—including those of Cory Booker, Elizabeth Warren, Beto O’Rourke, and Kirsten Gillibrand—or four times the number required to elicit an official response from the White House.

“MAYBE A YEAR OR TWO AGO, Todrick and I are in the car, and he asked me, What would you do if your son was gay?”

We are upstairs in Swift’s secret garden, comfortably ensconced in a human-scale basket that is sort of shaped like a cocoon. Swift has brought up an ornate charcuterie board and is happily slathering triple-cream Brie onto sea-salt crackers. “The fact that he had to ask me . . . shocked me and made me realize that I had not made my position clear enough or loud enough,” she says. “If my son was gay, he’d be gay. I don’t understand the question.”

I have pressed Swift on this topic, and her answers have been direct, not performative or scripted. I do sense that she enjoys talking to me about as much as she’d enjoy a root canal—but she’s unfailingly polite, and when we turn to music, her face will light up and she will add little melodic phrases to her speech, clearly her preferred language.

Balancing Act Later this year, Swift will appear in the film adaptation of Cats—as the flirtatious Bombalurina. Givenchy dress. Bracelets by John Hardy, David Yurman, and Hoorsenbuhs. Photographed by Inez & Vinoodh, Vogue, September 2019

“If he was thinking that, I can’t imagine what my fans in the LGBTQ community might be thinking,” she goes on. “It was kind of devastating to realize that I hadn’t been publicly clear about that.”

I understand why she was surprised; she has been sending pro-LGBTQ signals since at least 2011. Many have been subtle, but none insignificant—especially for a young country star coming out of Nashville.

In the video for her single “Mean” (from 2010’s Speak Now), we see a boy in a school locker room wearing a lavender sweater and bow tie, surrounded by football players. In “Welcome to New York,” the first track on 1989, she sings, “And you can want who you want. Boys and boys and girls and girls.” Two years later, she donated to a fund for the newly created Stonewall National Monument and presented Ruby Rose with a GLAAD Media Award. Every night of last year’s Reputation tour, she dedicated the song “Dress” to Loie Fuller, the openly gay pioneer of modern dance and theatrical lighting who captured the imagination of fin-de-siècle Paris.

Swift, who has been criticized for keeping her politics to herself, first took an explicit stance a month before the 2018 midterms. On Instagram, she endorsed Democrats for the Tennessee Legislature and called out the Republican running for Senate, Marsha Blackburn. “She believes businesses have a right to refuse service to gay couples,” Swift wrote. “She also believes they should not have the right to marry. These are not MY Tennessee values.”

Swift says the post was partly to help young fans understand that if they wanted to vote, they had to register. To tell them, as she puts it, “Hey, just so you know, you can’t just roll up.” Some 65,000 new voters registered in the first 24 hours after her post, according to Vote.org.

Trump came to Blackburn’s defense the following day. “She’s a tremendous woman,” he told reporters. “I’m sure Taylor Swift doesn’t know anything about her. Let’s say I like Taylor’s music about 25 percent less now, OK?”

In April, spurred by a raft of anti-LGBTQ bills in Tennessee, Swift donated $113,000 to the Tennessee Equality Project, which advocates for LGBTQ rights. “Horrendous,” she says of the legislation. “They don’t call it ‘Slate of Hate’ for nothing.” Swift especially liked that the Tennessee Equality Project had organized a petition of faith leaders in opposition. “I loved how smart it was to come at it from a religious perspective.”

Meanwhile, the “Calm Down” video provoked a Colorado pastor to call Swift “a sinner in desperate need of a savior” and warn that “God will cut her down.” It also revived heated debate within LGBTQ communities about the politics of allyship and corporatization of Pride. Some critics argued Swift’s pro-LGBTQ imagery and lyrics were overdue and out of the blue—a reaction the new Swift scholar in me found bewildering. Had they not been paying attention?

Nor did it strike me as out of character for Swift to leverage her power for a cause. She pulled her catalog from Spotify in 2014 over questions of artist compensation. She stared down Apple in 2015, when the company said it would not pay artists during the launch of its music service. (Apple reversed itself immediately.) As a condition of her record deal with Universal Music Group last year, the company promised that it would distribute proceeds from any sale of its Spotify shares to all of its artists. And this summer, Swift furiously called out Scott Borchetta, founder of Big Machine Label Group, for selling her master recordings to the music manager Scooter Braun. (When I ask Swift if she tried to get her masters from Big Machine, her whole body slumps with a palpable heaviness. “It was either investing in my past or my and other artists’ future, and I chose the future,” she says of the deal she struck with Universal.)

Swift’s blunt testimony during her 2017 sexual-assault case against a radio DJ—months before the #MeToo reckoning blew open—felt deeply political to me and, I imagine, many other women. Swift accused the DJ, David Mueller, of groping her under her skirt at a photo session in 2013. Her camp reported the incident to his employer, who fired him. Mueller denied the allegation, sued Swift for $3 million, and his case was thrown out. Swift countersued for a symbolic $1 and won.

Watch Taylor Swift Take Over Go Ask Anna:

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In a Colorado courtroom, Swift described the incident: “He stayed latched onto my bare ass cheek” as photos were being snapped. Asked why photos of the front of her skirt didn’t show this, she said, “Because my ass is located at the back of my body.” Asked if she felt bad about the DJ’s losing his job, she said, “I’m not going to let you or your client make me feel in any way that this is my fault. Here we are years later, and I’m being blamed for the unfortunate events of his life that are the product of his decisions—not mine.”

When Time included Swift on the cover of its “Silence Breakers” issue that year, the magazine asked how she felt during the testimony. “I was angry,” she said. “In that moment, I decided to forgo any courtroom formalities and just answer the questions the way it happened...I’m told it was the most amount of times the word ass has ever been said in Colorado Federal Court.”

Mueller has since paid Swift the dollar—with a Sacagawea coin. “He was trolling me, implying that I was self-righteous and hell-bent on angry, vengeful feminism. That’s what I’m inferring from him giving me a Sacagawea coin,” Swift says. “Hey, maybe he was trying to do it in honor of a powerful Native American woman. I didn’t ask.” Where is the coin now? “My lawyer has it.”

I ask her, why get louder about LGBTQ rights now? “Rights are being stripped from basically everyone who isn’t a straight white cisgender male,” she says. “I didn’t realize until recently that I could advocate for a community that I’m not a part of. It’s hard to know how to do that without being so fearful of making a mistake that you just freeze. Because my mistakes are very loud. When I make a mistake, it echoes through the canyons of the world. It’s clickbait, and it’s a part of my life story, and it’s a part of my career arc.”

I’d argue that no heterosexual woman can listen to “You Need to Calm Down” and hear only a gay anthem. “Calm down” is what controlling men tell women who are angry, contrary, or “hysterical,” or, let’s say, fearing for their physical safety. It is what Panic! at the Disco singer Brendon Urie says to Swift in the beginning of the “ME!” music video, prompting her to scream, “Je suis calme!”

I cannot believe it is a coincidence that Swift, a numbers geek with an affinity for dates, dropped the single—whose slow, incessant bass is likely to be bumping in stadiums across the world in 2020 if she goes on tour—on June 14, a certain president’s birthday.

IT'S ENLIGHTENING to read 13 years of Taylor Swift coverage—all the big reviews, all the big profiles—in one sitting. You notice things.

How quickly Swift went from a “prodigy” (The New Yorker) and a “songwriting savant” (Rolling Stone) to a tabloid fixture, for instance. Or how suspect her ambition is made to seem once she acquires real power.

Other plot points simply look different in the light of #MeToo. It is hard to imagine that Swift’s songs about her exes would be reviewed as sensationally today. I wonder if, in 2019, any man would dare grab the microphone out of a young woman’s hands at an awards show. I stared into space for a good long while when I was reminded that Pitchfork did not review Taylor Swift’s 1989 but did review Ryan Adams’s cover album of Taylor Swift’s 1989.

I ask Swift if she had always been aware of sexism. “I think about this a lot,” she says. “When I was a teenager, I would hear people talk about sexism in the music industry, and I’d be like, I don’t see it. I don’t understand. Then I realized that was because I was a kid. Men in the industry saw me as a kid. I was a lanky, scrawny, overexcited young girl who reminded them more of their little niece or their daughter than a successful woman in business or a colleague. The second I became a woman, in people’s perception, was when I started seeing it.

“It’s fine to infantilize a girl’s success and say, How cute that she’s having some hit songs,” she goes on. “How cute that she’s writing songs. But the second it becomes formidable? As soon as I started playing stadiums—when I started to look like a woman—that wasn’t as cool anymore. It was when I started to have songs from Red come out and cross over, like ‘I Knew You Were Trouble’ and ‘We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together.’ ”

Those songs are also more assertive than the ones that came before, I say. “Yeah, the angle was different when I started saying, I knew you were trouble when you walked in. Basically, you emotionally manipulated me and I didn’t love it. That wasn’t fun for me.”

I have to wonder if having her songwriting overlooked as her hits were picked apart and scrutinized wasn’t the biggest bummer of all. Swift: “I wanted to say to people, You realize writing songs is an art and a craft and not, like, an easy thing to do? Or to do well? People would act like it was a weapon I was using. Like a cheap dirty trick. Be careful, bro, she’ll write a song about you. Don’t stand near her. First of all, that’s not how it works. Second of all, find me a time when they say that about a male artist: Be careful, girl, he’ll use his experience with you to get—God forbid—inspiration to make art.”

Without question the tenor of the Taylor Swift Narrative changed most dramatically in July 2016, when Kim Kardashian West called her a “snake” on Twitter, and released video clips of Swift and Kanye West discussing the lyrics to his song “Famous.” (No need to rehash the details here. Suffice it to say that Swift’s version of events hasn’t changed: She knew about some of the lyrics but not others; specifically, the words that bitch.) The posts sparked several hashtags, including #TaylorSwiftIsASnake and #TaylorSwiftIsCanceled, which quickly escalated into a months-long campaign to “cancel” Swift.

To this day Swift doesn’t think people grasp the repercussions of that term. “A mass public shaming, with millions of people saying you are quote-unquote canceled, is a very isolating experience,” she says. “I don’t think there are that many people who can actually understand what it’s like to have millions of people hate you very loudly.” She adds: “When you say someone is canceled, it’s not a TV show. It’s a human being. You’re sending mass amounts of messaging to this person to either shut up, disappear, or it could also be perceived as, Kill yourself.”

An overhaul was in order. “I realized I needed to restructure my life because it felt completely out of control,” Swift says. “I knew immediately I needed to make music about it because I knew it was the only way I could survive it. It was the only way I could preserve my mental health and also tell the story of what it’s like to go through something so humiliating.”

State of Grace Dior bodysuit and skirt. Photographed by Inez & Vinoodh, Vogue, September 2019

I get a sense of the whiplash Swift experienced when I notice that, a few months into this ordeal, while she was writing the songs that would become her album Reputation—and fighting off Mueller’s lawsuit—a portion of the media and internet began demanding to know why she hadn’t un-canceled herself long enough to take a position in the presidential election.

On that: “Unfortunately in the 2016 election you had a political opponent who was weaponizing the idea of the celebrity endorsement. He was going around saying, I’m a man of the people. I’m for you. I care about you. I just knew I wasn’t going to help. Also, you know, the summer before that election, all people were saying was She’s calculated. She’s manipulative. She’s not what she seems. She’s a snake. She’s a liar. These are the same exact insults people were hurling at Hillary. Would I be an endorsement or would I be a liability? Look, snakes of a feather flock together. Look, the two lying women. The two nasty women. Literally millions of people were telling me to disappear. So I disappeared. In many senses.”

Swift previewed Reputation in August 2017 with “Look What You Made Me Do.” The single came with a lyric video whose central image was an ouroboros—a snake swallowing its own tail, an ancient symbol for continual renewal. Swift wiped her social-media feeds clean and began posting video snippets of a slithering snake. The song was pure bombast and high camp. (Lest there be any doubt, the chorus was an interpolation of a ’90s camp classic, Right Said Fred’s “I’m Too Sexy.”) Nonetheless, most critics read it as a grenade lobbed in the general direction of Calabasas.

One longtime Nashville critic, Brian Mansfield, had a more plausible take: She was writing sarcastically as the “Taylor Swift” portrayed in the media in a bid for privacy. “Yeah, this is the character you created for me, let me just hide behind it,” she says now of the persona she created. “I always used this metaphor when I was younger. I’d say that with every reinvention, I never wanted to tear down my house. ’Cause I built this house. This house being, metaphorically, my body of work, my songwriting, my music, my catalog, my library. I just wanted to redecorate. I think a lot of people, with Reputation, would have perceived that I had torn down the house. Actually, I just built a bunker around it.”

IN MARCH, the snakes started to morph into butterflies, the vampire color palette into Easter pastels. When a superbloom of wildflowers lured a mesmerizing deluge of Painted Lady butterflies to Los Angeles, Swift marked it with an Instagram post. She attended the iHeartRadio Music Awards that night in a sequin romper and stilettos with shimmery wings attached.

Swift announced the single “ME!” a month later, with a large butterfly mural in Nashville. In the music video for the (conspicuously) bubblegum song, a hissing pastel-pink snake explodes into a kaleidoscope of butterflies. One flutters by the window of an apartment, where Swift is arguing in French with Urie. A record player is playing in the background. “It’s an old-timey, 1940s-sounding instrumental version of ‘You Need to Calm Down,’ ’’ Swift says. Later, in the “Calm Down” video, Swift wears a (fake) back tattoo of a snake swarmed by butterflies.

We are only two songs in, people. Lover, to be released on August 23, will have a total of 18 songs. “I was compiling ideas for a very long time,” Swift says. “When I started writing, I couldn’t stop.” (We can assume the British actor Joe Alwyn, with whom Swift has been in a relationship for nearly three years, provided some of the inspiration.)

Swift thinks Lover might be her favorite album yet. “There are so many ways in which this album feels like a new beginning,” she says. “This album is really a love letter to love, in all of its maddening, passionate, exciting, enchanting, horrific, tragic, wonderful glory.”

In Focus Swift’s new 18-track album, Lover, will be released August 23. Hermès shirt. Chanel pants. Maximum Henry belt. Photographed by Inez & Vinoodh, Vogue, September 2019

I have to ask Swift, given how genuinely at peace she seems, if part of her isn’t thankful, if not for the Great Cancellation of 2016, then for the person she now is—knowing who her friends are, knowing what’s what. “When you’re going through loss or embarrassment or shame, it’s a grieving process with so many micro emotions in a day. One of the reasons why I didn’t do interviews for Reputationwas that I couldn’t figure out how I felt hour to hour. Sometimes I felt like: All these things taught me something that I never could have learned in a way that didn’t hurt as much. Five minutes later, I’d feel like: That was horrible. Why did that have to happen? What am I supposed to take from this other than mass amounts of humiliation? And then five minutes later I’d think: I think I might be happier than I’ve ever been.”

She goes on: “It’s so strange trying to be self-aware when you’ve been cast as this always smiling, always happy ‘America’s sweetheart’ thing, and then having that taken away and realizing that it’s actually a great thing that it was taken away, because that’s extremely limiting.” Swift leans back in the cocoon and smiles: “We’re not going to go straight to gratitude with it. Ever. But we’re going to find positive aspects to it. We’re never going to write a thank-you note.”

Though people will take the Perry-Swift burger-and-fries embrace in the “You Need to Calm Down” video as a press release that the two have mended fences, Swift says it’s actually a comment on how the media pits female pop stars against one another. After Perry sent Swift an (actual) olive branch last year, Swift asked her to be in the video: “She wrote back, This makes me so emotional. I’m so up for this. I want us to be that example. But let’s spend some time together. Because I want it to be real. So she came over and we talked for hours.

“We decided the metaphor for what happens in the media,” Swift explains, “is they pick two people and it’s like they’re pouring gasoline all over the floor. All that needs to happen is one false move, one false word, one misunderstanding, and a match is lit and dropped. That’s what happened with us. It was: Who’s better? Katy or Taylor? Katy or Taylor? Katy or Taylor? Katy or Taylor? The tension is so high that it becomes impossible for you to not think that the other person has something against you."

Meanwhile, the protesters in the video reference a real-life religious group that pickets outside Swift’s concerts, not the white working class in general, as some have assumed. “So many artists have them at their shows, and it’s such a confounding, confusing, infuriating thing to have outside of joyful concerts,” she tells me. “Obviously I don’t want to mention the actual entity, because they would get excited about that. Giving them press is not on my list of priorities.”

At one point, Swift asks if I would like to hear two other songs off the new album. (Duh.) First she plays “Lover,” the title track, coproduced by Jack Antonoff. “This has one of my favorite bridges,” she says. “I love a bridge, and I was really able to go to Bridge City.” It’s a romantic, haunting, waltzy, singer-songwritery nugget: classic Swift. “My heart’s been borrowed and yours has been blue,” she sings. “All’s well that ends well to end up with you.”

Next, Swift cues up a track that “plays with the idea of perception.” She has often wondered how she would be written and spoken about if she were a man, “so I wrote a song called ‘The Man.’ ” It’s a thought experiment of sorts: “If I had made all the same choices, all the same mistakes, all the same accomplishments, how would it read?” Seconds later, Swift’s earpods are pumping a synth-pop earworm into my head: “I’d be a fearless leader. I’d be an alpha type. When everyone believes ya: What’s that like?”

Swift wrote the first two singles with Joel Little, best known as one of Lorde’s go-to producers. (“From a pop-songwriting point of view, she’s the pinnacle,” Little says of Swift.) The album is likely to include more marquee names. A portrait of the Dixie Chicks in the background of the “ME!” video almost certainly portends a collaboration. If fans are correctly reading a button affixed to her denim jacket in a recent magazine cover, we can expect one with Drake, too.

Eyes On Her Designer Stella McCartney on her friendship with Swift: “In London we’ll go on walks and talk about everything—life and love.” Stella McCartney coat. In this story: hair, Christiaan; makeup, Fulvia Farolfi. Photographed by Inez & Vinoodh, Vogue, September 2019

She recently announced a fashion collection with Stella McCartney to coincide with Lover. “We met at one of her shows,” says McCartney, “and then we had a girls’ night and kind of jumped straight in. In London we’ll go on walks and talk about everything—life and love.” (Swift has no further fashion ambitions at the moment. “I really love my job right now,” she tells me. “My focus is on music.”) Oh, and that “5” on the bullseye? Track five is called “The Archer.”

Yet something tells me the most illuminating clue for reading both Lover and Reputation may be Loie Fuller, the dancer to whom Swift paid homage on tour. As Swift noted on a Jumbotron, Fuller “fought for artists to own their work.” Fuller also used swirling fabric and colored lights to metamorphose onstage, playing a “hide-and-seek illusionist game” with her audience, as one writer has put it. She became a muse to the Symbolists in Paris, where Jean Cocteau wrote that she created “the phantom of an era.” The effect, said the poet Stéphane Mallarmé, was a “dizziness of soul made visible by an artifice.” Fuller’s most famous piece was “Serpentine Dance.” Another was “Butterfly Dance.”

SWIFT HAS HAD almost no downtime since late 2017, but what little she does have is divided among New York, Nashville, Los Angeles, and Rhode Island, where she keeps homes—plus London. In an essay earlier this year, she revealed that her mother, Andrea Swift, is fighting cancer for a second time. “There was a relapse that happened,” Swift says, declining to go into detail. “It’s something that my family is going through.”

Later this year, she will star in a film adaptation of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Catsas Bombalurina, the flirtatious red cat. “They made us the size of cats by making the furniture bigger,” she says. “You’d be standing there and you could barely reach the seat of a chair. It was phenomenal. It made you feel like a little kid.”

But first, she will spend much of the summer holding “secret sessions”—a tradition wherein Swift invites hundreds of fans to her various homes to preview her new music. “They’ve never given me a reason to stop doing it,” she says. “Not a single one.”

Speaking of: Inquiring fans will want to know if Swift dropped any more clues about how to decode Lover during this interview. For you I reviewed the audio again, and there were a few things that made my newly acquired Swifty sense tingle.

At one point she compared superstardom in the digital age to life in a dollhouse, one where voyeurs “can ‘ship’ you with who they want to ‘ship’ you with, and they can ‘favorite’ friends that you have, and they can know where you are all the time.” The metaphor was precise and vivid and, well, a little too intricately rendered to be off the cuff. (Also, the “ME!” lyric: “Baby doll, when it comes to a lover. I promise that you’ll never find another like me.”)

Then there was the balloon—a giant gold balloon in the shape of a numeral seven that happened to float by while we were on her roof, on this, the occasion of her seventh album. “Is it an L’?” I say. “No, because look, the string is hanging from the bottom,” she says.

It might seem an obvious symbolic gesture, deployed for this interview, except for how impossible that seems. Swift let me control the timing of nearly everything. Moreover, the gold seven wasn’t floating up from the sidewalk below. It was already high in the sky, drifting slowly toward us from down the street. She would have had to control the wind, or at least to have studied it. Would Taylor Swift really go to such elaborate lengths for her fans? This much I know: Yes, she would.

Taylor Swift Talks Googling Herself, Which Celebrity's Closet She'd Raid, and the Bravest Thing She's Ever Done:

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