"The New York Times is under fire for publishing a piece speculating on Taylor Swift’s sexuality."

"In a 5,000-word opinion piece titled Look What We Made Taylor Swift Do, editor Anna Marks listed references to the LGBTQ+ community overt or perceived in Swift’s music and theorized that the singer was sending coded messages that she was secretly a member of the community.... 'This was the least defensible op-ed I can remember ever seeing the NYT run, made all the worst by the fact that it was written by a staffer, who specializes in these speculations,' Chris Wilman, the chief music critic at Variety, wrote on Twitter. (In 2022, Marks wrote a guest op-ed essay for the Times speculating on Harry Styles’s sexuality, as well.)... Marks argued that since early in her career, Swift has been trying to secretly signal that she identifies as queer.... 'Every time an artist signals queerness and that transmission falls on deaf ears, that signal dies. Recognizing the possibility of queerness – while being conscious of the difference between possibility and certainty – keeps that signal alive.'"

Writes Adrian Horton, in The Guardian.

I clicked over to read the Marks essay. It's really long. Excerpt:

A woman who loves women is most certainly a monster to a society that prizes male power. She can fulfill none of the functions that a traditional culture imagines — wife, mother, maid, mistress, whore — so she has few places in the historical record.... If there is queerness earnestly implied in Ms. Swift’s work, then it’s no wonder that it, like that of so many other artists before her, is so often rendered invisible in the public imagination.... [I]f ever she chooses not to publicly comply with the dominant culture’s fantasy, she will remain uncategorizable, and therefore, unsellable.

Her star — as bright as it is now — would surely dim.... In a culture of compulsory heterosexuality, to stop lying — by omission or otherwise — is to risk everything. American culture still expects that stars are cis and straight until they confess themselves guilty....