The gay poets department 🏳️‍🌈

I’ve finally had time to analyze all 31 songs in Taylor Swift's "The Tortured Poets Department" from a queer lens!

Hiiii!!! Kelly here. It’s been almost two weeks since our “The Tortured Poets Department” poetry event with Unwanted Words. So, I’ve FINALLY had time to analyze all 31 songs from a queer lens (as one does) and submit to you, hot poets, my final two hypotheses on the album:

• Either Taylor Swift is a delusional billionaire who genuinely got mad at us for giving her heat for dating a racist (Matty Healy) 💰💰💰

• OR all of the references to Matty, Joe, Travis, etc. are Red Herrings for what the album is truly about - a look back into what has stopped her from coming out so far, a look into the madness it has caused her, and a look ahead at what might be changing in the future… 🌈🌈🌈

Larissa thinks “Taylor Swift hasn’t suffered enough to be a good artist”. Which, fair.

And TBH, I find blondie to be problematic in many ways - her inability to speak up against genocide, the endless private jet usage…

But, I do find it fun to impose a queer lens onto the media we consume. So let’s look at some of the themes in “The Tortured Poets Department” that suggest Taylor may be speaking more to us - the queer fans - than to a few dusty, crusty men… 🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍🌈

Religious Trauma, Closeting, & Secrets ⛪

For a billionaire who has the resources to open almost any door for herself, blondie sure does get stuck in a lot of cages and closets. I mean, in imgonnagetyouback she literally threatens to “pull you into the closet” with her. And in Guilty as Sin she confesses “this cage was once fine” but now she dreams of “cracking locks”.

Not to mention, Fresh Out the Slammer is literally about getting out of (gay) jail, a precursor to Florida!!!, which is the place where people would go to reinvent themselves after committing a crime. (The crime of dating Joe Alwyn or the crime of being gay, Taylor??)

In Taylor’s song, Guilty as Sin she talks about how “there's no such thing as bad thoughts / only your actions talk.” This is a very common saying told to many queer people in the church where it’s iterated to them that it’s okay to “think” gay thoughts, as long as you don’t “act” on them.

There’s also a lot of secret-keeping in this album for someone who’s allegedly being so open about her love life. She sings about,“the secret gardens of her mind”, how “her longings staying unspoken“ and that “they’ll say I’m nuts if I talk about the existence of you.” Kind of a weird thing to say on an album where she’s allegedly talking about the existence of all of her romances with these men, right?

The Unreliable Narrator 🤪

Throughout The Tortured Poets Department, the stark changes in tonality from song to song, as well as the fourth-wall breaking moments where Taylor speaks directly to her listeners (“you should see your faces!!” and “cause I’m miserable (haha) and nobody knows!!”) mimic the feeling of a tortured poet who has lost her grasp on reality and can’t be trusted in what she’s saying to us.

This “unreliable narrator” seems to be on the verge of a psychotic break. You see this immediately in Fortnight (the album-opener) as she paints a picture of a lucid fantasy where somebody is hallucinating a relationship that never happened as she shifts from lyrics like “your wife waters flowers, I want to kill her” to “my husband is cheating, I want to kill him”. 

It’s not lost on me, in this context, that the eponymous track (The Tortured Poets Department) flips the script on us from “who’s gonna hold you?” to “who’s gonna troll you?”

It’s important to note that, the few upbeat songs on the album read more like sarcastic breakdowns than earnest songs about love. But Daddy I Love Him is a reference to a scene in The Little Mermaid where Arielle had to give up her voice to be with the one she loved. This whole song feels like a fever dream satire of a romance with a man than something that’s actually authentic.

So High School does a similar thing where she says “I’m hearing voices like a madman” (as if there’s been a glitch in reality). The entire song reads like a parody of a high school romance, which makes it even more interesting that the following track on the album is… I Hate it Here.

Silence & Betrayal 🗡️

Okay, so now that we know that Taylor Swift actually hates it here in football land, what happened to make her so miserable?? Declaring something like, “in 50 years this will all be declassified” doesn’t seem to line up with a fortnight’s worth of receipts from a situationship with Matty Healy, does it?

In Down Bad she talks about how she was “beamed up in a cloud of sparking dust” just to have “experiments” done on her - almost like how she was being electro-shocked in the Fortnight video (as they used to do on queer people in aversion therapy). But, all of this happened only to “send her back to where she came from”, “call it all off” and “take out all of her teeth”. Sounds pretty rough.

To back this up, there are also numerous lyrics across the album that seem to be referencing a betrayal from somebody with close, familial ties to Taylor (not her past f*boy lovers). Look:

• “Blood’s thick but nothing like a payroll”

• “These people only raise you just to cage you”

• “You’re home’s really only the town you’ll get arrested”

• “You wouldn’t last an hour in the asylum where they raised me”

The song Cassandra really drives this sentiment home when she talks about how “they killed her first” because she “tried to tell the town”.

It’s almost as if Taylor tried to tell us something?? Like, did nobody believe all of the queer flagging she’d put into her past albums? Was she herself starting to “mourn” the straight image built for “Taylor Swift” in the media??

Foreshadowing a “Retiring” of Sorts 🏖️

When Taylor tells us in the opener to The Anthology that “old habits die screaming” she’s making a reference to the upbeat songs I talked about earlier where she’s playing out a fever dream of heteronormative romance rather than true love itself.

The song The Albatross is a reference both to “a struggle with takeoff and landing” (i.e. she has struggled to come out to us) and “a burden or source of distress that prevents you from doing what you want to do” (i.e. something has stopped her from coming out to us).

And what exactly is Taylor’s burden? Well, the song Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me is a reference to the book, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf - whose last line answers the question; “I am.”

Throughout this whole album, Taylor is hinting at some sort of “retirement” to get rid of this “burden” where her “bygone ERAS will fade into gray”.

Like, why do people go to Florida!!!, class? To retire.

And what happened to Clara Bow? She had a sparkling career until she hit her thirties, got institutionalized, and lived alone in a bungalow until her death. She was also bisexual.

In imgonnagetyouback Taylor is literally talking to us - the fans - wondering if she’ll “flip the script” and “leave us like a dumb house party” or “love us till the end”.

And when she says “you needed me but you needed drugs more” sure, she could be talking about Matty Healy, but she could also be talking about the “narcotics” she told us she slipped into all of her songs. We didn’t need “the real/gay” Taylor, we just needed more Easter Eggs!!

The Prophecy foretells a change that needs to happen - straight from Taylor’s mouth. The line “even statues crumble if they’re made to wait” is giving even she can’t handle not being herself anymore (despite the billionaire status). But, she’s afraid she’s “sealed her fate” with how she’s painted herself as the Prom Queen to Travis Kelce’s Grand Theft Auto Playing Prom King…

It’s sad. But not too sad. Because like I said, billionaire status.

Alright, without further Tay-lay, here’s my poem inspired by the track, Clara Bow:

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Crisis-a-Day Clara 🤩

action.
more hands on
than cerebral
touch them 
& they’ll respond 
with a genius incapable 
of playing the game
that profits  
from possibly silent 
bisexuals eased 
into accents
& brought to life 
by lesbian excellence
their right arm 
was quite famous
cut.
press button [cry]
they’ve got it:
smooth 
contralto
eyebrows
kissed
& drop 
slipped
fumbling 
wings
to silver 
solace
is not very easy 
on sensitive ears
picture lock.
jump 
into mother’s grave 
[and scream] 
“good enough!!!!!”
to survive 
your self-imposed 
Hays Codes 
dynamite 
doesn’t frighten them
they’ve been 
in a lot 
of sparsely furnished 
explosions & 
gelatinous scenes
champagne-soaked
& flirting 
in the tracking shot
make sure 
the audience 
understands
their slight 
imperfections 
make enough 
in the margins
for jazz baby
to stay out of it 
until bungalow 
death enforces
a Brooklyn 
intonation into the abyss
they lip,
I do it with a lot of joy
so it must not be so evil
end scene.

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Okay, I promise no more Taylor Swift rants until the next album. Comment your theories below. Byeeee!!!