Hi, do you have any gay takes on King of my heart that you would like to share? I can't stop seeing the references to *** ***** and I hate it. Thanks!
Honestly I don’t really see any references to him beyond the extremely surface-level “king” (lmao) and i guess maybe a sort of british use of “fancy” as in “to like someone” but… everything else about that song is pretty explicitly about karlie imo and just full of extremely literal and not at all subtle references to their relationship.
Like even in the very first verse, “I’m perfectly fine, I live on my own / I made up my mind, I’m better off bein’ alone” makes zero sense with the established hetero timeline, given it’s well known that she supposedly met j*e at the 2016 met gala that she attended while she was still with c*lvin h*rris but where she also met and danced with t*m h*ddleston… honestly that whole timeline is such a mess especially considering she’d spent all of the previous few years emphasizing the fact that she didn’t need to always be in a romantic relationship and she never wanted to be the girl who jumped from boyfriend to boyfriend. i mean i have no moral judgments about that, it just makes no sense for her in that moment, but anyways the point is that first line of the song makes zero sense if we’re meant to believe the official het narrative
And that’s not even mentioning the fact that she was in the studio recording the track the literal same day she and karlie had their romantic skype date in the middle of a field overlooking a sunset with a vase of flowers for karlie’s 24th birthday on august 3, 2016, and given the fact that she didn’t ‘break up’ with t*m until september 2016 like… when did she have time to fall in love with and write this song about j*e huh??? literally WHEN. even the earliest possible time she and j*e could have potentially started dating was in october of that year, and at what point before she supposedly got together with j*e did she have time to make up her mind that she’s better off being alone? (after her breakup with dianna and before she met karlie, that’s when)
Anyways moving on. “We met a few weeks ago / Now you try on callin’ me ‘baby’ like tryin’ on clothes” — karlie is a literal supermodel whose job is trying on clothes. They met at the vsfs in 2013 where karlie was at that very moment doing her job of trying on different outfits, and 3 months after they met they were going on their road trip to big sur, and during that time taylor wrote and recorded you are in love and added it to 1989 and played it for karlie as they drove and they captioned a photo of them together with a line from it like… they literally met and a few weeks later were falling in love so like. yeah.
“Salute to me, I’m your American queen” seems like a reference to j*e because he’s british (and that’s probably the intention) but the original line that we heard in the making of a song video was “salute to me, like the american dream” and when karlie was interviewed backstage at the vsfs where they first met, she said, “taylor is this all-american girl. she’s the american dream.” (tbh to me the fact that the line was changed is the most telling part of all of this).
“And you move to me like I’m a Motown beat” — taylor posted a photo of the two of them prepping for the 2014 met gala together with the caption “motown dance party.” “And we rule the kingdom inside my room” — i mean the only place they can really openly be together is in private, this line has strong closeted gay energy. The “all the boys” line is i think meant to contrast ~boys~ to A Real Man (like how she explained “boys only want love if it’s torture” in blank space) but lbr it’s about a woman.
“Late in the night, the city’s asleep / Your love is a secret I’m hoping, dreaming, dying to keep. / Change my priorities / The taste of your lips is my idea of luxury.” this is about being closeted and prioritization of career security vs coming out and being able to love openly full stop, that’s the facts. she crafted and presented her relationship with j*e the way she did in order for this line to make sense (but like… she’s literally been singing about love being secret and forbidden since the beginning of her career. it’s always been about being gay and closeted.)
“Up on the roof with a school girl crush / drinking beer out of plastic cups.” girl crush………… because they’re both girls. also karlie and taylor had a date courtside at a knicks game where they drank beer out of plastic cups and it was cute.
“Baby, all at once, this is enough” — I just made this gifset and imo the idea of this being enough reads as fundamentally gay. like if she’s writing about being in love with a man it just doesn’t make any sense to me for her to be talking about how it’s enough. “enough” implies that there is some kind of inherent conflict between this (i.e. love) and everything else in her life, and even if she truly is worried about public scrutiny ruining her relationship with a man, as we’re meant to believe wrt “your love is a secret i’m hoping, dreaming, dying to keep,” no amount of public scrutiny of her relationships with men could potentially cost her everything in her life. this is a very fundamentally gay fear — we see this in her response to k*ssgate and the continuing aftermath of that moment, i.e. in dwoht (which she has described as being about “a combination of love and fear”) and the archer. the idea of “this is enough” reads very much to me like evelyn hugo talking about “the daily peace of loving plainly” and contrasting the grandeur of her life of fame vs the smallest freedoms and everyday ordinary moments she desperately wants but cannot have with her lover. it’s very the lucky one dot mp3, very chely wright talking about how closeted gays often convince themselves that their careers will have to be enough because they can’t conceive of a world or a version of themselves where they could even have the option of wanting anything else, but there comes a point in your life where you can no longer stand to live like that, and you realize that what will really be enough is being free — coming out despite the potential repercussions just so you can live and love openly and honestly as who you truly are.
anyways tl;dr i really don’t see anything explicitly about j*e in this song aside from ‘king’ and ‘fancy’, and basically all of it is not only filled with explicit references to karlie but also driven by deeply gay emotions and fears and desires so. that’s that on that.
Agreed. Very nicely put, Badcode. Seems like words are your thing too...yes, that’s a reference to Taylor telling Karlie that words are her thing. I appreciate that you look to her entire catalog for not only the secret love motif but also the idea that there is an inherent disconnect and internal conflict that comes with being painfully closeted. When Chely Wright spoke about the music industry as being a “big machine”, it’s hard not to think of the irony of her former label’s name. It’s poetic, as is her way of writing that rings “more true” when given the proper, or better yet, the more likely alternative non-het context.
