Nolte: NY Times Spends 5,000 Words Speculating About Taylor Swift’s Sexuality

Travis Kelce and Taylor Swift arrive at SNL Afterparty on October 15, 2023 in New York Cit
Gotham/GC Images via Getty

A weekend New York Times essay spends some 5,000 words speculating about if Taylor Swift is gay/queer/bisexual/whatever the New Thing is these days.

Although the 33-year-old Swift has worn out more boyfriends than I have socks, here’s the Times outing a woman who has never shown any sign of being in the closet.

New York Times Opinion Editor Anna Marks, who obviously has a lot of free time, writes:

 In 2019, she was set to release a new album, “Lover,” the first since she left Big Machine Records, her old Nashville-based label, which she has since said limited her creative freedom. The aesthetic of what would be known as the “Lover Era” emerged as rainbows, butterflies and pastel shades of blue, purple and pink, colors that subtly evoke the bisexual pride flag.

Here’s proof you can rise to the position of “editor” at the New York Times without knowing the difference between “queerness” and “pandering.”

But on and on this article goes digging into Taylor Swift’s personal life and wishcasting her into something other than an apparently plain ol’ regular heterosexual woman who’s had an unending string of highly publicized romances with apparently plain ol’ regular heterosexual men. Honestly, it reads more like a 14-year-old lesbian’s journal than something a sane newspaper would touch.

“The first time I viewed ‘Lover’ through the prism of queerness, I felt delirious, almost insane,” writes Marks in a fit of honesty. “I kept wondering whether what I was perceiving in her work was truly there or if it was merely a mirage, born of earnest projection.”

Basically, what we have here is a 5,000 word mash note shamelessly published by a once-respected newspaper in the hope Swift will “friend” Marks on Facebook. Hey, I know what those 5,000 word notes look like. Back in 1975, I wrote one to Farrah Fawcett-Majors. Of course, I was nine at the time and I’m pretty sure my mom lied about mailing the letter. That’s why Farrah never wrote back with the promise to drop the Six-Million Dollar Man and wait for me to come of age. What else could explain the lack of response? Huh? What else!?

Where was I?

Anyway, as the Times piece rolls on, it somehow gets dumber:

“Sometimes, Ms. Swift communicates through explicit sartorial choices — hair the colors of the bisexual pride flag or a recurring motif of rainbow dresses.”

Good grief, now bisexuals have their own flag?

How’s this for desperate…

“She drops hairpins on tour as well,” writes Marks, “paying tribute to the Serpentine Dance of the lesbian artist Loie Fuller during the Reputation Tour or referencing ‘The Ladder,’ one of the earliest lesbian publications in the United States, in her Eras Tour visuals.”

Has Marks ever watched an interview with Swift? I doubt Taylor’s read anything above the Hunger Games, much less some obscure lesbian publication.

And so, after another three thousand or so words of repetitive and cringe-worthy blahdeeblahdeeblah, we get this rather unsettling image [emphasis original]:

I remember the first time I knew I had seen Taylor Alison Swift break free from the trap of stardom. I wasn’t sitting in a crowded stadium in the pouring rain or cuddled up in a movie theater with a bag of popcorn. I was watching a grainy, crackling livestream of the Eras Tour, captured on a fan’s phone.

I’m no lawyer, but that strikes me as enough evidence for Taylor Swift to get a restraining order.

Overall, this is another example of what’s happened to the corporate media. In order to survive, the media must retain the only audience it has left, which is the far left. In order to retain those weirdoes, all the professional guardrails have been removed to pander to deviants, the mentally ill, and narcissistic sociopaths who believe their identity makes them superior.

Yes, this essay is another example of the New York Times “outing” itself as (as my friend Andrew Klavan puts it) a “former newspaper.”

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