← The Devil You Know with Sarah Marshall
The Devil You Know with Sarah Marshall
One more helping, for good measure: Satan (Taylor’s Version)
00:42:23
<p>In this bonus episode, Sarah talks to Yvonne Eadon, a professor at the University of Kentucky who specializes in conspiracy theory and online misinformation, about GAYLOR — the online fan theory that claims Taylor Swift is a closeted queer woman. </p>
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- [00:00]
VRBO Announcer
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CBC Announcer
This is a CBC podcast.
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Sarah Marshall
Welcome to your bonus episode, Sarah. I'm Sarah Marshall and this is the Devil youe Know. Today we're talking to Yvonne Eden, assistant professor at the University of Kentucky's School of Information Science, whose research focuses on knowledge production within fringe conspiratorial research cultures. These cultures include UFO followers and JFK assassination investigators, and for our purposes today, Taylor Swift and One Direction conspiracy theorists. This conversation with Yvonne Eden was a chance to look at conspiracy culture and what conspiracy theories and conspiracy culture can offer in a way that may actually be harmless or even constructive, especially to the lonely queer teenagers who are being isolated partly by the conspiracy theories about them. Things are getting a little bit heavy in our show and this conversation is beautiful and light and joyful and is talking about people in a fandom who are finding joy for themselves and building.
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Interviewer / Host
It for each other.
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Sarah Marshall
It is also worth noting that Yvonne and I had this conversation before Taylor Swift announced her engagement to Travis Kelce. But if there's one thing history has shown us, it's that conspiracy theories will somehow find a way to explain away even the information that would seem to disprove them. Hi Yvonne, nice to meet you.
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Interviewer / Host
I'm so excited to talk about the most important topic of our time. So you talk in this article about studying fringe conspiratorial research culture. And I mean, to start off just like, what is that? How do you define those terms and those terms working together?
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Yvonne Eden
Yeah, there are a lot of terms there, as you pointed to.
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Interviewer / Host
It's a beautiful term sandwich. Yeah.
- [02:31]
Yvonne Eden
And listen, in academia, we love a term, we love a term, we love a definition and we like to put them together. But I think the thing to start out with is what is a conspiracy? Even before we get into conspiracy theory or like what something being conspiratorial means. And so there's a definition that I like to use that comes from a philosopher, Matthew Dentith, and it basically says that a conspiracy has three elements. First element is a set of agents that are working together. So it can't be one person can't carry out a conspiracy. Second is secrecy. They have to be working towards keeping their activities out of the public eye. And third is that they have to have a goal so they have something that they're trying to accomplish. And so a conspiracy theory is, you know, any kind of speculation theory, evidence, statement that alleges that these activities are taking place, that these conditions are being met. So that means that anything from thinking that your significant other is planning a surprise party for you to thinking that there's one world government is a conspiracy theory. Right? It's a highly flexible definition. And so when it comes to gaylorism, you know, which is this theory that Taylor Swift is queer and closeted, a lot of people, when they hear me talk about it as a conspiracy theory, they say, like, okay, well, who are the conspirators? Like, it's just her, but it can't just be her, because in this theory, it alleges that she's had relationships with other people. And so the conspirators would be her PR team and her friends and family and people that she's dated. And then they're working to keep it secret. They're working to keep her in the closet. That's their goal. In terms of research cultures, what I think is really interesting about conspiratorial research cultures is, like, a lot of the time, people will talk about conspiracy theorists and conspiracy communities as though they don't have any concept of evidence or expertise or knowledge, that they just eschew those concepts altogether. But there's been research going on in the last 10 years that's showing that that's really not the case. They just sort of build these structures in an alternative way and in a kind of a separate, siloed way. Um, so Emma A. Jane and Chris Fleming call this, like, folk sociology. Alice Marwick has called it populist expertise. Right? When. When a conspiracy culture forms its own kind of expertise in like, a populist way that is defines itself against a mainstream perspective, mainstream consensus, the mainstream media, and that's also really instrumental to a conspiratorial culture, is there needs to be, like, a mainstream against which they define themselves and against which they're kind of developing and scaffolding their own mountains of evidence and knowledge cultures. Because a lot of the time, these conspiracy theories really hinge on kind of building repositories almost of evidence for the theory.
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Interviewer / Host
What's a good example of a pre gala or an outside of gaylord theory that kind of. That shows that. Or what's. Do you have kind of an ur example of this that you personally like to use?
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Yvonne Eden
Okay, so one of my favorite examples of this actually is some of the earliest researchers who were poking holes in the official story around the JFK assassination. Were women who were amassing these archives of newspaper clippings, you know, all kinds of coverage, their own notes, their own thoughts about the assassination. And it was multiple women doing this kind of individually. Eventually they found each other and eventually they created this kind of knowledge culture. But as it was unfolding in the mid-60s, they were doing this kind of work, amassing this evidence, putting it together, putting the pieces together, that kind of thing.
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Interviewer / Host
And were these just kind of individual, sort of American women, women in Dallas who just sort of on their own were like, well, I don't. That seems weird.
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Yvonne Eden
Yes.
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Interviewer / Host
And chose to look into it. That's wild.
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Yvonne Eden
Yeah. Some of them weren't even close to Dallas. I think one of them. I forget some of them worked, but one of them was a housewife. And she ended up. This could be an apocryphal story, so, you know, take it with a grain of salt. But she ended up, you know, grabbing her kids and road tripping to Dallas to check out the grassy knoll and like, that kind of thing. So they were distributed all across the US And I think it's really fascinating. And of course there were men doing this too, but I think it's fascinating.
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Interviewer / Host
That there's not an Oliver Stone movie about the women who did it.
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Yvonne Eden
There's not.
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Interviewer / Host
Although Laurie Metcalfe was, you know, great in jfk. But that reminds me, in a funny way, of how. And I bet this is something that, you know with more specificity than I do as kind of a part of fan culture. But isn't it true that Star Trek owed a lot of its early ability to stay on TV to female viewers because it was like a lot of just like housewives who were home in the middle of the day to watch Star Trek when it was put on.
- [08:08]
Yvonne Eden
Absolutely. Yes. That is 100% true. There's a book about how instrumental women were in developing the Star Trek fan culture and how much the way that they perceived and related to the show was not taken seriously and not seen as authentic or adequate fan engagement. Yeah.
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Interviewer / Host
And there's something interesting here, too. I think that is sort of behind a lot of what we're talking about, about, you know, how gender functions within what people are perceiving in the gaylor fandom and within the fandom itself, but also in how fandoms are perceived and sort of the way that fangirls are seen versus just fans.
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Yvonne Eden
Exactly. Yeah. Like Beatlemania, like all that kind of stuff. Yeah. I think you're absolutely right when you say that there's kind of A universalized male subject fan. And then there's the fan girl. And the fan girl is driven entirely by emotion, by desire. She doesn't have any. She's annoying, she's shrill. Like there are all these kinds of like, things that are put on the girl of it all.
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Sarah Marshall
Well, yeah.
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Interviewer / Host
So connecting JFK to the fangirl, I feel like, you know, conspiracy theories about the JFK assassination, despite the history that you're talking about, are coded very masculine. Right. It feels like there's this historical idea that, like, this is an appropriate masculine thing to be obsessed with because it's about, you know, the idea of a conspiracy theory that uncovers what world government is up to. It leads to something that is very important in that sort of mid century, manly, agreed upon way. But then bringing us ahead now to this period we're in of the conspiracy theory online and sort of these cultures that you talk about that are the cultures that form around online conspiracy theories and also what you call knowledge cultures. What does that world look like currently? Because we have gaylor as a conspiracy culture that's situated within that. But what is that bigger space like.
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Yvonne Eden
When you're talking about like an online conspiratorial knowledge culture? I think it's hard not to talk about QAnon because they really did do so much scaffolding around how they did their kind of decoding of messages from the mainstream media, of what Trump said, all these kinds of different things. And how collaborative that decoding was, like very, very collaborative.
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Interviewer / Host
What did that look like for people decoding information and sort of the way that culture formed in the early days.
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Yvonne Eden
I think in earlier days, I mean, the people who are kind of doing this decoding are known as bakers. They're kind of like taking the ingredients of the media messages or the Trump messages, tweets or whatever, putting them together using different kinds of techniques, including numerology. There was a lot of numerology decoding which also shows up in gaylord cultures. And then they would bake the bread and bring the bread back to the community. And QAnon is an interesting one again because it's so highly masculinized. But then there's know, pastel QANON people, so people who are really into yoga culture and all that kind of stuff. So it's such a huge thing, even just in terms of these.
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Interviewer / Host
I wonder if we can build a bridge between qanon and gaylor. And right in the middle, put Larry Shipping, can you tell us about that conspiracy fandom?
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Yvonne Eden
Yes. So Larry is The portmanteau ship name of Louis Tomlinson and Harry Styles. And it refers to the theory that they were in a romantic relationship. While One Direction was a thing, it really was a thing on Tumblr. It was very big, obviously on Tumblr, and very. In the same way that Gaylord has kind of splintered some Swifty communities, it definitely splintered the One Direction fandom. But one of my interviewees, one of my first interviewees that I Talked to in 2022, I think she said that she got into Gaylor through Larry. So she was a Larry on Tumblr, and then she kind of found out about Gaylor. So I think for some people it's definitely a gateway theory. And I think it is especially, especially for Larry. It's like, it's hard to keep up with those theories these days because it's kind of, you know, One Direction isn't together anymore. There are of course, like quote unquote, late stage Larry's who think that they're still together. But the other aspect of that, which I also want to talk about with Kaler, if it's interesting, is because a lot of the time people who are theorizing in this way have a very parasocial kind of relationship with the celebrities they're theorizing about. They do take it seriously when they make a statement. On the other hand, some people hear that statement and they say, oh, well, it's just his team who's making him say that to quiet us, to make us not. So it's that thing that happens with conspiracy theories where everything can get folded in to the narrative, no matter what it is. But it depends on the person. It depends on the individual.
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Interviewer / Host
Yeah. And this kind of the distance that you at a certain point have to travel to sort of deal with emerging information feels like a theme. I suspect that a lot of sticky conspiracy theories are ones that sort of pull in a lot of people or have a culture built around them. Start with a basically like, generally believable premise. Like in a general way, it's makes sense or at least seems plausible, but then it's in the specifics that things perhaps get weird.
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Yvonne Eden
Yes, absolutely.
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Interviewer / Host
Yeah. How do you define Galar? I feel like the deeper you get into something in a way, the harder it is to define it generally. But sort of what is. Is Gaylor a conspiracy? Is it a fandom? Is it a community? Like, how would you define it? Even in that way, it's all of the above.
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Yvonne Eden
It's everything. I think I spoke earlier about kind of how in a conspiratorial knowledge culture, you have to have a mainstream against which to define yourself. And so a lot of Galers talk about how they find Swifties to be scary, to be threatening, to be homophobic, to be harassing, all this kind of stuff. And then it is a community as well. So in this community you have people who, one of my interviewees said that they feel. She feels trauma bonded with other gaylords because of the harassment they received from mainstream Swifties. And other people I talked to say that they have found they've learned so much about queer history through gaylor that they've learned a lot about themselves and their identities through gaylor. They've sort of realized their own degree of queerness. They've realized, you know, something about their gender, about something like that. There's also, I want to mention, like a micro, micro theory called Zahler that posits that she's non binary. So, you know, there's kinds of theories within theories. In the gaylor universe, there's a lot happening. But I do think that it can absolutely be considered a conspiracy theory. A community and, and a fan culture or a fandom all at once.
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CBC Announcer
Nicole Ernest Pate was 21 years old when a predator assaulted her in her own home. Kind of the Boogeyman. In the night, she went straight to the cops.
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Interviewer / Host
She said this sounds like some sort of movie plot.
- [16:26]
CBC Announcer
But no one believed her until Detective Paul Holz helped figure out this serial predator's pattern. This is a serious offender from Sony Music Entertainment and Perfect Cadence. This is Hunting the Boogeyman, available now on the binge listen wherever you get your podcast.
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Interviewer / Host
When does this become. What are the first crucial moments? When does the long Gaylor decade begin?
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Yvonne Eden
Yes. So in the Galar community, the women that she has allegedly dated, allegedly allegedly, are known as her muses. So some of the earliest knowledge production around this was happening when she was being seen around with Diana Agron a lot. Diana Agron of the series Glee. You know, they were seen together a lot within the Galar community. There's a lot of kind of triangulation of lyrics and imagery and music videos with events and people in Swift's life. So a lot of that was happening with Diana Agron, I think before, you know, people have now thought that she was dating one of her, like her fiddle player in the early days, you know, the Diana Agron stuff was happening on Tumblr when Swift herself was an active Tumblr user. So she was on there. She was being a little bit, I Don't know if I want to call her messy, but like a little bit less cautious because she wasn't a huge brand yet. Right. She was still very, very young. And so she would like certain things, like certain gaylor posts and kind of just like be. Be a normal person on the Internet. Be a freak on the Internet. Right after Diana Agron, we have Karlie Kloss. Karlie Kloss and Taylor Swift. This is the thing that I think convinces a lot of people and brings a lot of people into gaylor because they were very public about the closeness of their friendship. Just extraordinarily affectionate with each other in photos. They had a photo shoot together with Vogue that was very engagement photoshoot coded. You know, there was a moment at a 1975 concert where they were caught videotaped by a fan and it looks like they're kissing. These moments known as kissgate within the community. So there are all these kinds of moments and timelines. Like if you look into a lot of this lore, there are these detailed timelines of different events, I guess, one.
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Interviewer / Host
And all the presidents, men about these. These researchers. Is it possible to the point when the culture really begins coalescing around this?
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Yvonne Eden
It seemed to me like the kissgate was really compelling to a lot of people and brought a lot of people in and, you know, they seemed to be really affectionate. And then they seemed to have a breakup. Like they seemed to have a very, I mean, friend breakup, whatever, however you want to. However that was, we don't know. That's the other thing I think that I come back to a lot is the profound unknowability of her sexuality. Like, there is no way that we know that we could ever know unless she tells us. That's also just a thing. Right.
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Interviewer / Host
Well. And so that leads us into a question that I think applies to maybe any kind of conspiracy culture fandom, but applying it to this one kind of. This seems like a big subculture, a big method of engagement that people share and have and something that you talk about as fulfilling seemingly a lot of needs and desires for people. And so what do you think people are getting out of the gaylor world?
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Yvonne Eden
I think they're getting a lot, honestly. The most obvious one being community and queer community. I have straight cis gaylords exist, but most of them are queer. And so being able to not only find queer community, but find queer community of people who are reading her texts in the same way that you are or in a similar way that you are, I think is really is really impactful for people. And so that's one benefit that I think is really central for a lot of the people that I've spoken to. I spoke to one person who is a Latin American galer, and she started off by joining Swifty groups in her home country, and she felt really like she didn't belong in those groups because she was a gaylor and she was kind of. People were mean to her. You know, she didn't. She didn't enjoy it. And so she ended up joining a group that was mostly North American gaylors, and she felt so much more at home in that group. And I think that's the other benefit that comes for a lot of gaylors. A lot of gaylors can be really young, and so they love Taylor Swift. They're figuring out their identity, and they're maybe using some of her lyrics and interpretations of her lyrics to do so. That's another big benefit.
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Interviewer / Host
And unlike analyzing Trump tweets, you have, like. It feels like analyzing poetry in many ways, where there's a lot of possibilities within a text. And therefore, I mean, in a way, they're creating an academy as well.
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Yvonne Eden
Absolutely, absolutely. They're creating their own little sort of insular knowledge community. And they also. Yeah, in my work, I call this folk literary criticism. Like, exactly what you said. It is like, it's a sort of an analytical project. And you have people with different specialties, too. So some people will brand themselves as. They'll say, you know, I'm a lyrics person. I love lyrical analysis. I don't really do the, you know, analyzing her outfits, analyzing her music, video imagery. I like lyrics. So you'll have people like that. Then you'll have people who like to analyze her fashion, like to analyze paparazzi photos and, you know, pick apart things in her life. So you do. It is very similar to an academic.
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Interviewer / Host
Research culture, the deconstructionist gaylor.
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Yvonne Eden
Exactly. Exactly like it is. And then the other path is bringing it into more of a. My colleague Olivia Stoll at the University of Michigan, she calls gaylor a micro conspiracy theory because it's, you know, it's small. It doesn't have these big implications, implications like QAnon or One World Government or whatever. But these people kind of take it from the micro and make it just a little bit more macro by saying there's going to be a mass coming out. You know, Harry Styles, Louis Tomlinson, Taylor Swift. All of these people known as, like, the New Romantics, they call them, are going to have a mass coming out and so there's, you know, you have one direction that goes a little bit less conspiratorial, and then the other that's been going a little bit more.
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Interviewer / Host
Yeah. So I feel like a question that I have that I could have put more eloquently but decided to just be blunt with is, regardless of the situation, why does Taylor Swift just feel so gay? Doesn't she just seem gay? You know, And I mean that in the sense of just like lyrics about this degree of longing and this amount of feelings and this many interesting feelings about someone who is this important to you. Just doesn't really. Just feels as, you know, feels very sapphic, as you put it in your paper. Yeah. Why does Taylor Swift elicit this response in people, in your opinion?
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Yvonne Eden
There's a lot of value to feeling as though something is sapphic that we often don't admit to. And there's like, a very long history in feminist scholarship of not being able to discern a historical figure's sexuality, an author's sexuality. I'm thinking of Emily Dickinson specifically, except through these really subtle. Well, you know, it doesn't really come off as subtle if you know what you're reading. But. But these things that she's not writing. I am in love with a woman. Right. Neither is Taylor Swift. So you have these kind of traces. And then I think that an embodied queer experience, you're able to feel those traces and operationalize them and sort of understand them in a way that most people who are heterosexual or who are mainstream Swifties aren't going to necessarily understand. And the thing that I always come back to when I'm trying to explain this is I don't want you like a best friend. That lyric in Dress. And to me, that is such a Sapphic lyric because lesbians are often mistaken for best friends, close, affectionate friends or sisters. Right. So I don't want you like a best friend to me is so Sapphic. And I'm. This is personal. I'm not saying this about anyone else, but as someone who has dated men and women and who identifies as a lesbian, I cannot imagine ever saying anything like that about a man. But at the same time, I'm a lesbian, so that makes sense. So it's just one of those things that you have to feel it. And I think that that is devalued deeply, that kind of understanding that comes from feeling like you've known that exact feeling. And I think that Taylor Swift. That's how she relates to her fans. Right. Is so many people will hear her songs and say, how did you know? How did you know exactly how? I like, they feel very seen by her songs. Not just gay people, straight people, like people who've experienced heartbreak. Right. So that's another aspect of it, I think, that is important. Yeah.
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Interviewer / Host
Well, I wonder if there's kind of an element here, I've just been thinking as we've been talking of kind of the love that dare not speak its name. And this idea of sort of this subculture and also a scholastic community, as you've been saying, kind of also coming together in gaylor studies out of the recognition that like you would think that someone this powerful and seemingly independent would be free to come out. But like it's not that far fetched to think that it would seem impossible.
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Yvonne Eden
Absolutely. I think she is so powerful, but she's also so she has so many people involved in her brand and so many people giving her advice. And I think that for a lot of gaylords, they hold onto hope that she'll come out because they can see what a massive impact that would have on the whole world, especially the U.S. but like around the world, like there are gaylords who live, you know, in other countries and in countries where it's harder to come out. And I think for a lot of people too, they hear her songs as songs about being closeted. You know, a lot of her songs are about or seem to be about a relationship that cannot be made public. And so being able to relate to a closeted person feels very emotional, I think, for a lot of them. And she has this way of communicating with her fans that is like through coded messages, through Easter eggs. So people, you know, if there was going to be a conspiracy theory like this, it makes sense that it would be within the Swifty fandom.
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Interviewer / Host
Yeah, yeah. And that idea of kind of starting off her career with this stated preference toward intimacy with her fans and secret messages towards her fans does really make her kind of ideal for that, I think, kind of theorizing as well. But I also wonder, just in your research, what you have seen or what you would hazard to wonder about what kind of a draw this culture is, the subculture, this kind of conspiracy knowledge folklore culture for young people who are themselves learning their sexualities and thinking about coming out and actually doing that. Yeah. What have you been able to surmise about that aspect of it?
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Yvonne Eden
Yeah, I think that for a lot of people, a lot of young people, they have a love for Taylor Swift that is so powerful. And the way that Swifties are talked about, a Lot of the time it can be isolating to be a swiftie if you don't have community with other swifties. So I think that's why swifties tend to come together, move in packs, that kind of thing. And I think that as you start to analyze these lyrics, as you start to realize, oh, I feel that way. I have felt that way about my best friend. I don't want her like a best friend. You know, like that kind of thing that draws a lot of people in. And then once you're in the gaylord community, there's a lot to learn about how she may be signaling to queer history. So one of the most pertinent examples is she's in right where you left me. One of the most, in my opinion, most sapphic songs. One of the lyrics is you could hear a hairpin drop. And hairpin drop is kind of an obscure bit of gay slang that's been happening since the 60s that refers to dropping hints about your sexuality. So people really latched onto that and said, why would she say hairpin drop? Why not pin drop? Like, why this specific phrase? It was also the hairpin drop heard round the world was one of the first journalistic accounts of Stonewall. That was the headline. So it's like this pretty obscure but very ingrained aspect of queer history. And so I think that draws people into learning more about queer history. And she's also, in her reputation stadium tour, she dedicated the performance of dress to lesbian Belle Epoque dancer Loi Fuller. You know, these very. Again, like, not just dedication, but dedication of one of the most sapphic sounding songs to this particular dancer. And she's also referenced the latter, one of the earliest, or appeared to reference the latter, one of the earliest lesbian publications in the US So all of these kind of pieces. And she's obliquely referenced Emily Dickinson, which a lot of fans and a lot of gaylords compare her to Emily Dickinson constantly. So there are all these kind of different, you know, queer history cues that she seems to be engaging in. And I think for young people coming to terms with their sexuality, like, learning more about queer history is, I think, one of the most impactful ways to like, come into a community, like, to just realize, oh, like, there's so much here. I mean, for me, like, when I first started to learn about queer history, it was like such an emotional experience for me because I, you know, we have always been here and there has been so much work that's been done to make it possible for us to live as we do. Those of us who live in blue areas in a comfortable way. So I think that can be really impactful and important for young people discovering their sexuality. That kind of doorway through Taylor Swift into queer history, I think, is really important.
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Interviewer / Host
Well, then I guess maybe a better question or a kind of a way to bring in this kind of idea that Jose Munoz writes about, about this ever receding queer utopia that is sort of, you know, ever potential and ever unrealized that you kind of bring into conversation with the gaylor subculture, that it feels like there's some kind of connection to be drawn between gaylorism as, you know, again, just as you said, that you can't generalize about any of it, but that a lot of it seems to be about utopian imagination and kind of longing for the world as it could be. And that if you look at sort of QAnon and, you know, as part of the bigger phenomenon of our ongoing satanic panic, that those conspiracy theories seem focused on not the world we long for, but the world we fear. Right? And this kind of, in a way, maybe like a queer dystopia where it's, you know, straight people have to do constant battle with all the lesbian Satanists who want to kill their children. What do you make of that? Is that a fair analysis to start with?
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Yvonne Eden
Absolutely, yes. I think that's a really, really succinct way of putting it. I talk all the time about how conspiracy theories play on emotions. A lot of the time we think about those emotions as anxiety, fear, anger. And a lot of the time those are the emotions that come up, not just for the people who are theorizing the conspiracies, but for the people who are seeing the conspir. Conspiracies. Theories out in the world. Right? So, like, it's QAnon makes me anxious, right? Like it has sort of an affect or like a valence that is anxious and angry. But there are other emotions that power different conspiracy theories. And I think for, as you said, for Gaylor, it's desire, it's longing, and that's baked into queerness in general. And Munoz talks about this, is that queerness is about desiring. It's about desiring another person that you're quote, unquote, not supposed to. It's about desiring to be accepted broadly, not necessarily in a normative way. And it's about desiring to see yourself reflected in other people and in culture in some way. So I think that understanding that sometimes conspiracy theories can come out of emotions like desire, emotions like love, Also from loneliness, also from wanting to belong is really important too.
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Interviewer / Host
So turning to kind of maybe the flip side of this, we have gaylor culture and conspiracy theorizing. And that's something where, you know, we're certainly using technology that we did not have access to before and are using to theorize at a whole new level. But we're doing it about, you know, in this. But in this case, we're doing it about somebody who is extremely famous and extremely powerful and able to kind of at this point, you know, maintain distance. Yeah, we can look at sort of the culture that forms around gaylorism and sort of see what that looks like when it's about someone who is at a certain amount of fame and money and power. But then, yeah, what happens when it's just about potentially anybody?
- [36:16]
Yvonne Eden
There's a pattern of people conspiracy theorizing around gender and transness. And they've done this with Michelle Obama, which of course she is more protected than some of the people that we're talking about. But I think that theorizing that someone is trans is obviously really messed up and comes frequently from conservative camps or people who are just uncomfortable with the trans community. So I think that that can be just extraordinary. It is extraordinarily harmful in a really, in a different way than theorizing the sexuality of Taylor Swift. Again, because she's so powerful and because it's not. Trans people experience a kind of vulnerability in the world that CIS gay people don't. So I think that that maps onto the kinds of conspiracy theorizing about gender that we see. I also think that, yeah, when it's about an individual, like an individual who does not have the protections of a big celebrity, that's an issue. And we need to take a step back before piling on to somebody just because we're bored. Right. Or just because we're looking for some measure of entertainment and to connect this.
- [37:35]
Interviewer / Host
To, you know, our ongoing trans panic and sort of, you know, its relationship to the satanic panic. There's a satanic panic of like the Satanists are everywhere and implicitly or explicitly throughout. Satanists and queer person has always been sort of interchangeable. Right. Because we're prosecuting low income queer daycare workers some of the time and just going off of what feels right in Reagan's America and that in gaylorism and in these sort of searches, again, as you've talked about, for looking for all these traces in history and in people's outputs today and sort of searching for intimacy and communication that like these Are both conspiracies based on the idea that there are gay people everywhere? You know, it's just that in one case it's celebrated as it should be and in another it's cause for panic.
- [38:40]
Yvonne Eden
Absolutely, I think that's absolutely true. And you know, it's also relevant here that some people attribute Taylor Swift's success to her being a Satanist and a Satan worshiper. I interviewed someone who, this was towards the beginning of the Eras tour and she was like a sort of spiritual person and she said, I just don't understand how she's so successful. I don't think her music is that good. It has to be Satan worship.
- [39:05]
Interviewer / Host
But then, you know, that's. Then you have to wonder how many other artists you don't like worship Satan. It just snowballs so fast. I think it does, it absolutely does. Well, and so you talked about getting gaylor pilled kind of in your capacity as a researcher, which, you know, I just, I love is one of the things that happens when you become interested in a question. You become by definition someone who experiences the thing you wonder about and then you know, you can. And when that changes you, I feel like it can be, you know, it can really make the ride worthwhile. But I mean, what has your experience of getting gaylor pilled been like? And I also guess I'm curious if there are other fandoms that you've been part of or that you've been passionate about in your time consuming media in.
- [39:56]
Yvonne Eden
Terms of like becoming gaylor pilled. It was really interesting because I had that moment where I, I remember being in my car and listening to reputation and listening to dress and dancing with our hands tied and just realizing like, oh, like I get it. And I feel this in my body like as someone who has felt this way before. So that was like my sort of realization moment. But it wasn't until I came across a specific piece of evidence that I really started to believe, oh, maybe this isn't just me reading this as queer, maybe she is. And I still feel that way. And I think that it's possible. This is the other thing that I always come back to in my research is I make a lot of space for possibility and I believe in the unknown and I believe in studying the unknown without making necessarily a conclusion about whether or not it's true. Because I think that's for me at least the least interesting question. But the piece of evidence was that Christian Siriano made this rainbow dress and people theorized that Taylor Swift was supposed to come out in a New York City Pride 2019. But two days before that event, Scooter Braun bought her Masters. And so gaylords theorized that she was supposed to come out then. And she basically it was foiled. And the thing that really convinced me is that Christian Siriano There are more details to this story, but Christian Siriano posted a TikTok of himself sipping tea in front of the rainbow dress. I just don't know what else that could be about. That was the piece that compelled me the most. But there are so many other pieces. It's just, it is like I always say this, it's the evidence is compelling. I'm not willing to make a call on it because it's not my call. But I do understand it deeply.
- [41:55]
Interviewer / Host
Oh yeah. And just, you know, maybe the real gaylor is the gaze we found along the way.
- [42:00]
Yvonne Eden
For me it is absolutely.
- [42:23]
Sarah Marshall
Thank you for listening to the W Know. Our producer is Mary Stephanhagen. Fact checking by Katherine Barner. Production assistants by Nicole Ortiz. I've been your host. Sarah Marshall. Our sound designer is Evan Kelly. Roushni Nair is our coordinating producer. Our senior producer is Jeff Turner. Executive producers are Cecil Fernandez and Chris Oak. Tanya Springer is manager of growth for CBC Podcasts. Arif Nurani is director of CBC Podcasts.
- [43:03]
CBC Announcer
For more cbc podcasts go to cbc ca podcasts.