Taylor’s Rainbow F**k-Cloud

Everything is political and everything we do is political. Who you vote for is political. Not voting is political. Recycling, not-recycling. Buying food or fishing it from a vegan, gluten-free bin.

The shoes I buy and where I buy them from. That’s political. These all have socioeconomic and political leanings, and the result is pretty much that fucking everything has an impact that butterflies outwards into eventual politics.

There are things that I even have no choice in that are political, like the fact that I’m white, trans and gay.

Mere fucking existence and the void itself have impact in the cloud of post-structural, intersectional discourse. It's the way of the wind, man. And nothing is safe from critique (nor should it be).

So when Taylor Swift’s new pop-anthem-love-chant dropped with more camp than the Met, of course I was shocked like everybody else. Just fucking kidding, everything is political.

One of the major critiques that I’ve seen repped from fellow queers is its sanitisation of the LGBT experience. It’s important to keep in mind that this thing has dropped in the middle of pride month—a time when the rainbows among us are often targeted by commercial enterprise for our precious gay dollars. We are hyper-aware of feel-good sell-stuffs around us spraying the cologne of solidarity all over their shitty merch, products and services. So it’s no wonder that the first round of internet critique and revisionism have centred around the pastel sweetness and closed-mouth, Sesame Street-approved sanitisation of the gay experience. But I’d actually like to argue this as a good thing.

Taylor Swift has a long history of mass-fucking appeal. World tours, household name, a god damned pop star in the most basic sense. And when god damned pop stars do something overtly political (as opposed to the implicitly aforementioned), it's going to get even more eyes on it than usual.

In my experience, the centre and soft-right (see; mainstream media) have a long history of reducing LGBTQIA+ people to their junk and where they like to put it. They see pride parades, two-dimensional television portrayals and badly written accounts of the hypersexualised queers who just wanna break free from their rainbow closets, snap and party loudly, proudly and publicly.

It’s not a bad thing, in my view, to show the more digestible, fun, wholesome, clean version that Swift has given us in "You need to Calm Down."

Swift’s choice to make this political content even more political by giving the gays a soft focus does two really important things; it takes the focus away from our junk (and where we put it) and it becomes more consumable in the mainstream. Mainstream content gets seen. This is the kind of content that makes it onto MTV and into the living spaces and bedrooms of our almost-allies and the beautiful queer teens that need to see themselves represented. In particular, represented as happy, wholesome, accepted people.

To me, that’s pretty cool in a world where everything is political and nothing is safe (nor should it be) from critique. It's about taking the best parts of things and trying to figure out what spirit it's in. Whether or not this is pinkwashing is a whole other thing, and I won’t come back to it here.

I felt like Swift used her platform to make space for the rainbows and not try to claim the narrative, which is so important and a part of pinkwashing that personally drives me bananas. It can be enough to loudly support the communities who need it. Identify, not bring the narrative back to yourself, and tell the homophobes (who probably just need a hug) to shut the fuck up.

Every choice in the clip of things to include or exclude was considered. These are all political. So is her musical-trash-bag-of-glory with Panic!’s Urie. So was "Shake It Off" and so is what she buys for breakfast. I think accepting the political impact of all things in the fuck-cloud of today is a good first step in furthering a discussion about everything.