the bilor blender

Spend your time on joy. We only get so much of either. Time, especially, we can’t get back. Believe me. Instead of crusading for the honor of a celebrity who is absolutely not ever going to see my blog and therefore cannot be harmed by it unless you send it to her, text a friend you’ve been meaning to reconnect with. Take ten minutes to lie down in a sunbeam without your phone. Go wash one of the plates by the sink and imagine my face in the food you’re scrubbing away.

Playing her little Jigsaw games—having a little fun—it doesn’t hurt anyone. I promise. I promise. It’s not that important. I am a cat and Taylor has tossed me a puzzle ball full of treats. I am playing. Breathe. If you believe her on the podcast, she is not reading these posts. There is no harm.

The Chely Wright blender speech + quotes from her book? Docuseries clips?

Symbols like hairpins dropping? A full rundown of the sparkling summer?

I made a burner account on youtube to upload an updated version of that video I mentioned. It’s unlisted so you need the link to find it. Feel free to share or even to reupload it, edit it, etc.

Here’s a description of it…

In order:

-Jack Antonoff podcast

-ME! Out now (on lesbian visibility day)

-One of these things is not like the others/like a rainbow with all of the colors/babydoll, when it comes to a lover—

-(Sunshine on the street at the parade—)

-Cut to the scene Taylor calls a parade in ME!

-Montage of a bazillion rainbows in ME! MV

-Scene where she explains the MV concept (parade, gay pride makes me me)

-Ends with ‘what would you see if you cracked my head open and looked inside’

-Clip of Taylor on a rainbow uni-cat. “Good question! Come on.”

-Shade never made anyone less gay

-“You’re being too loud” “thank you” commercial (I added a bi pride flag for reference)

-A slide from—oh shit where is the link, it’s from the gaylorswift subreddit—a slide about her failed coming out with “I’d be a fearless leader” playing

-“Forgive me, Peter, my lost fearless leader…” A montage of visuals where she uses glass closets and cages with lyrics on the same theme behind them

-Tried to highlight how the lights in the Eras Tour LWYMMD look like gold cage bars

-Closet dance from 1989 Tour “They got the cages…” (I Know Places)

-ATT commercial clips about hiding in a closet then getting locked in it

-The Lavender Haze closet sweater with matching visuals and the closet line from imgonnagetyouback

-Behind the scenes of LWYMMD’s birdcage + overlays of The Birdcage + more lyrics lol

-Articles talking about her Alice in Wonderland/Peter Pan themed apartment (‘what it would look like if you looked in my head’) plus the literal birdcage in her apartment

-A few interview examples I found interesting

-The infamous Vogue article quote placed in context

-The Red Era “going out with him, going out with her, being single” interview

-Tegan and Sara talking about closets and Taylor Swift

-“An actual fantasy”

-LWYMMD clips that are uh. Sure, very straight, right (with pronoun change examples behind them)

-Interview from Harry era where she’s described as having a beard

-Calvin Harris beard tweets with “I want her midnights, but I’ll be cleaning up bottles with you on NYD” behind them

-That iHeartRadio IKYWT performance with ‘she’ (included video because you can see her lips SO clearly)

-The rep tour pride speech behind a more detailed pride bracelet post and Taylor Nation reposts

-Annotated pride bracelet photo

-Revisiting the Vogue article quotes now that more context has been offered

-Slides about Booplor (from prev slideshow)

Slide showing The Ladder beside Lavender Haze visuals (from same slideshow as others above but I lost the link)

-the GLAAD speech where she uses ‘us’ language

-Then a spoken “look what you just made me do” over that scene of her lying in a pile of women and then going OH with an o-face from the LYMMD MV

-And finally the reaction image we all seem to use around here with “I deadass thought I made it obvious”

***

I wanted to add the “everybody’s watching her, but I don’t like a gold rush” mashup, except uh. I mashed up so many songs I was worried they’d parse it as me stitching song fragments together to artificially force her to sound queer. Same with the friend of dorothea mashup. Both could be sent as followups, though?

To add when less sick:

Screenshot of her spray-painted bi pride hair from YNTCD

Screenshot of how she announced “ME!” (and the fact it was lesbian visibility day)

Screenshots of Calvin Harris’s twitter rant about beards

Video compiling the following:

Red Era interview where she says her 20s are for going out with him, going out with her, or trying being single

The Lily Aldridge interview where she says having Victoria’s Secret models in their robes in her trailer was an ‘actual fantasy’

Clips of all the times people have accidentally outed her (Jack Antonoff, Tegan & Sara, that football player, anyone else I remember when less sick)

Assorted clips of her changing pronouns when singing live (Time 100 “New Years Day”, etc)

The mashup of “This Is What You Came For” and “gold rush” that goes, “Everybody’s watching her, but I don’t like a gold rush.”

If you have any clips or videos that involve zero interpretation, just ‘Taylor being direct about being bi’ stuff like the above, please add them to this post! But I mean zero interpretation. No metaphors that require thinking. I want this post to require only basic reading comprehension (ie, ‘able to read something and understand context from a couple paragraphs earlier’, not critical thinking skills or simple media analysis like ‘this is what hairpin dropping means; these are visual references to The Ladder; this is a Friend of Dorothy reference; this song would rhyme better with she/her pronouns’ and so forth.)

The target audience of this post isn’t ready for a compilation of glass closets and closet lyrics. I mean THE most ‘she basically came out and somehow everyone ignored it’ stuff.

If only I could articulate everything… how do people do podcasts? Could I just record my voice and put it somewhere for people to call me crazy? It would be long. Really long. So long that I couldn’t type it up myself due to joint pain, probably.

I feel like the most efficient way to do it would be to like. Take clips of interviews and performances and lyrics and just make a video that puts all the evidence in order. And if you can look at it all and come to different conclusions, so be it, I guess? But how do I GET downloads of like. Literally all her interviews and stuff since. Well. As far back as possible.

Until then, all I have to say is:

“I’m Coming Out” vs “Wood”

“I Will Survive” vs “Elizabeth Taylor (Cabaret)”

And also that I still don’t understand people who think the album is bad. It has layers. It has so many layers. Everything she DOES has layers right now.

Okay, and a teaser for my overarching theory—muse-lite analysis PLUS performance artlor PLUS stuff that will piss absolutely everyone off:

The Braid:

Strand 1: Showgirl / Straightest Woman in the World kayfabe narrative / surface level readings

Strand 2: Elephant in the Room / Gold Star Lesbian subtext narrative / allegorical readings

Strand 3: ‘Everyone Will Betray You’—scared and haunted / Biromantic lesbian with an identity many exclusionists hate. Trauma from comphet (yes, bi people can experience comphet—I did!) and being forced into boxes and roles. Gathering queer people under her protection but just sharing the queer umbrella doesn’t guarantee you’ll get along. Explorations with nonmonogamy, the messiness of friendships. Can a person be bad representation? (I am, or so I’ve been told!) Does she actually help when she tries to, or does she make it worse? She has power—or does she, really? / undercurrent, subtext, tone, sound—and every attempt to speak out loud ignored or distorted.

Two narratives that will require satisfying conclusions if she hopes to move on with her life, and a muse-free terror that touches everything she does. Overachieving because if she stops for one breath she’s so far underwater she’ll drown instead. Honing her powers in the glass closet until she can save herself from the fate of Ophelia AND ‘protect the family’.

Is anything in the showgirl’s strand real? Is anything in the big Taylor’s strand real? Is anything in that vulnerability real, or is it the lies anxiety tells her all the way down? Are all three real in the way that a Rorschach blot can be everything we project on it at once? Is she here to be our mirrorball and show us ourselves, hiding in her broken glass orb, or is she giving us her glass heart to shatter over and over and turning those shards into something beautiful, a mosaic of our stories and her own, because she once struggled as much with parasocial feelings toward her fans as vice versa?

I have to work toward a Big Bang deadline and I want to have a treat for myself to look forward to at the end. Help me pick which one to do.

* Muse-lite: No naming of names, just collating traits and songs that seem to be about the same person. I intend to completely ignore fanon consensus when making my analysis and go solely based on lyrics and sound.

** Summary: I think she is simultaneously setting up two kayfabe canons; one gay and one straight. I think we’re supposed to engage with both stories. This theory will not concern itself with what’s ‘true’—it’s just an analysis of the interwoven stories I think she’s telling.

*** Theories I think no one but me will enjoy but I find compelling. Would involve muses. Less of a monolith, more like ‘this is the most compelling interpretation of xyz songs for me’. Hetlors get mad at me for these. Historically, so have gaylors. They really just piss everyone off.