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Taylor Swift’s people shut down speculation about her sexuality – but risked rebuking her LGBTQ fans

The star’s team slammed an editorial that compiled theories about her queerness. But Swift constructs stories about herself – why shouldn’t they compete with other interpretations?

She maintains an unusual level of control in a period when other pop superstars allow themselves to be the subjects of untrammelled interpretation and speculation – Harry Styles thrives on mystery; Beyoncé’s PR strategy appears to be never apologise, never explain – and understand how doing so might satisfy unexpected elements of one’s fanbase, or suggest surprisingly viable commercial paths. The Swift I enjoy is a little vindictive and surprisingly self-lacerating; others may value her loyalty to her friends, her honesty about her experiences with disordered eating, her goofiness, her assiduous capitalist instincts, or may have found in her some other prism through which to understand and appreciate some aspect of their identity – all of them valid parasocial relationships. For many onlookers, that wearying feeling struck again when reading her lone recent interview, for Time’s person of the year cover, which seemed disappointingly uninquiring and intent on validating her version of events – namely that she was “cancelled” in the wake of her feud with Kim Kardashian and Kanye West, when in fact it resulted in one of the most successful albums of her career – rather than pushing deeper into the fertile ground where her self-conception rubs up against public interpretation.

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