Perhaps Emotional Dependence on Celebrities Has Gone Too Far

and maybe wishcasting someone to be queer can't be a healthy impulse

Book review contest winners announced and prizes distributed next week!

Recently the Times published this… unique essay by editor Anna Marks, on Taylor Swift’s sexual tastes, real or imagined. The piece operates by conceding that Swift is known to have exclusively dated men and has never made a single statement suggesting that she’s anything other than heterosexual, then goes on to insist that she’s queer, whatever the fuck that term means in 2024. Marks does this in part by sketching some unconvincing readings of Swift’s lyrics and by laying out conspiracy theoris that remind me of QAnon. But more, Marks simply insists that LGTBQ people need this, that the palpable longing for Swift to be gay among some queer people (the “Gaylors”) can somehow will Swift’s homosexuality into being. It’s essentially a kind of prayer, predicated on the belief that if you want something badly enough, if you’re willing to let go of any concept of privacy or self-definition or human autonomy or basic respect entirely, then the divine might make your wish come true. It’s the Tinkerbell effect for people who desperately want Taylor Swift to be horny for other girls. This would be understandable if it was expressed in the journal of a 14-year-old. Putting it in the page of the biggest newspaper in the world is just…. Well, it’s one of those “the internet was a mistake” moments.

Conversation about the piece has generally been driven by the notion that Marks’s piece was offensive and Swift treated poorly. Swift’s “camp” - I wonder how rich you have to be, to have a camp - is reportedly furious. I don’t really get offended, in that way, but I certainly understand why Swift would find the essay upsetting and invasive. With other people holding down the offense front, though, I’m free to focus on how fucking weird the piece is, and how genuinely bizarre it is that the staid New York Times, the paper of record, decided to publish it. As many people have said, it brings to mind nothing so much as a Livejournal rant from a depressed teenager, perhaps one on a Vyvanse binge. There’s this layer of the story that’s about Swift’s privacy and her autonomy, which I get. But then there’s also the fact that the Grey Lady, which will fact check the claim that the sky is blue, published a piece of what is really just speculative fanfiction. I often write about how over time, internet niches that seem marginal and unimportant subtly become mainstreamed, and suddenly the practices that define those niches are considered unremarkable. Tumblr culture (as distinct from the platform itself, which is unobjectionable) represents the intersection of social justice branding, fandom, and a total lack of boundaries or restraint, and it continues its pitiless march across our cultural institutions. Next week, The Paris Review is running a piece about how Dr. Melfi and AJ Soprano are the OTP that we should all ship, or so I’ve been told.

One interesting element of the essay is that it bucks the usual trend in our culture, which is to act as though the world owes Taylor Swift something that it has refused to give her. (Remember, the notion that Taylor Swift could ever receive adequate payment for existing is wicked.) I think this is part of the reason Marks’s essay has generated such ire - not just the righteous argument that it’s creepy and unfair to make someone the subject of sexual wishcasting in the fucking New York Times, but simply the sense that something is being asked of Taylor Swift. Anyone who reads pretty much anything on the internet knows that that isn’t how it works; the only thing we should ask of Taylor Swift is forgiveness, for surely we have failed to give her all that she deserves.

I’ve already written what I really need to say about the current fervor for Taylor Swift. I would never begrudge Swift’s success as a pop star, in the terms ordinary to pop stars, in the sensible space of normal human love for music and appreciation for the musicians who make it. It’s great that she sells so many records, gets so many streams, wins so many awards, and is beloved by both fans and the media. That’s all to the good, that’s how music works, and she has been rewarded for playing that role beyond the dreams of Croesus. What I find distressing about our current moment is this palpable feeling that no matter how much our culture celebrates and lionizes her, it’s never enough; this constant sense that no matter how much acclaim and riches we give her, we have somehow failed her. She is one of the most richly rewarded and privileged people to ever walk the face of this planet, and the ambient attitude in our culture industry is that we should be ashamed that we haven’t done more to exalt her. It is madness. And yet no one seems to want to point that madness out, I strongly suspect because they don’t want to find themselves on the hitlist of those unfathomably passionate fans. But someone needs to point out that waiting in a line for five months to get concert tickets is not a charming human interest story, but rather a record of deranged and deeply unhealthy behavior. Putting a second mortgage on your house to buy concert tickets isn’t a cute sign of devotion, it’s evidence of a parasitic attachment that can only lead to long-term unhappiness. And I’m willing to guess that many other people feel the same way but are afraid to say so.

I understand that this sort of thing is not unprecedented; Beatlemania springs immediately to mind. But then, the Beatles themselves have always said that Beatlemania was toxic. There’s this incredible moment in the Beatles Anthology documentary series where they show a clip from local news footage during the height of Beatlemania. This teenager guy is standing there with a bunch of angry and weeping friends. When asked by the reporter how he felt, the teenager says that they’re all mad because they were prevented from getting into physical proximity with the Beatles, when “we just wanted to get a piece of ‘em! All we wanted was a little piece of ‘em!” It never seems to occur to him that a bunch of fans wanting to get physically close to you, in order to “get a piece of you,” sounds very scary. Clearly, overinvested fans have always existed. I mean, John Hinckley did his thing more than 40 years ago. (Respect.) And the lines between passionate devotion and pathological parasociality can be very fine. When I was in elementary school, there was a kid who had come from somewhere in eastern Europe who would be brought to tears at the mere mention of Michael Jackson. While I find something very sweet and romantic about that, I do think that there are limits past which public affection becomes something dark and disordered.

The trouble is that the internet is a giant machine which sometimes appears to have the sole purpose of compelling people to take their interests too far. Any internet community dedicated to a particular topic inevitably ends up rewarding those users who take the most extreme position possible in relation to that topic. You can see the incredible rise of artistic populism in the past two decades for a great example. Once upon a time, there was a communal sense that being too invested in children’s media as an adult was a mark of arrested development and something to be embarrassed about; the world’s nerds spent many years developing a persecution complex because of this belief. But it turns out that such social conditioning plays an important role. Once the internet became a mass phenomenon, the nerds all found each other and rebelled against any sense of obligation that they should ever engage with art on any level more sophisticated than “Is this badass???” The media companies eagerly worked to exploit the IPs they already owned, and the ancillary industries that make merch quickly got in on the action too. With the concept of adult tastes having died the same death that befell the concept of adulthood writ large, and the money flowing in, very quickly all culture became children’s culture. The kinds of adult dramas that had once routinely gone to number one at the box office became relegated to arthouse cinemas and, eventually, streaming services; the superheroes had elbowed them all out. Anyone who argued that this all represented a culture that was unwilling to grow up was quickly accused (under whichever shameless terms) of racism or sexism or similar and dismissed.

In 1989, you had a lot of adults who could go and watch Batman and enjoy it and maybe pick up a couple of the commemorative cups from Taco Bell, mere weeks after being one of the many millions who made a hit out of Dead Poet’s Society, a movie about killing yourself over a poem Robin Williams told you to read. You could enjoy the kid stuff while keeping it in perspective. Nowadays, the financial engine behind movies featuring characters like Batman are 35-year-olds whose houses are stuffed full of FunkoPop, who listen to podcasts and watch YouTube channels devoted to these properties, and who can be relied on only to come out to those movies that are based on a preexisting franchise featuring some sort of magic or other types of unreality and which are rated PG-13. There was a cultural expectation that you had to engage with adult art and culture as an adult, a motivated minority of people resented this notion, the internet brought them together in spaces where they could grouse about it, and soon the cultural narrative flipped such that the previous belief that adults should sometimes engage with adult media was considered a kind of bigotry. The really committed nerds, meanwhile, just got busy crafting their next persecution narrative.

The negative consequences of the takeover of media by children’s stories are, I think, in part an expression of what happens when people find themselves in spaces where they can egg each other on and deny the value of restraint. But this is really a story of smaller communities, and there the consequences are more personally severe. Not to again bash a network I used to use and frequently found useful, but Tumblr exemplifies the internet’s tendency to push people into more and more extreme versions of every position that’s popular within their subcultures. You can certainly see this in the competitive social justice posturing that went on to infect Twitter and the world, where the actual righteous purpose of increasing equality and justice became subservient to the demand to express that purpose in an arcane vocabulary and with performative conviction. But I think the fandom world is the purest expression of all of this: what Tumblr consistently does is to take people with normal, deep, passionate attachment to a given movie or show or musician, and transform that into a pathological and parasocial dependence. Tumblr takes people who daydream about the characters in their favorite shows and makes them people who cut themselves in order to contain their emotions about them. I’ve gotten really, really, really into the characters and stories in my favorite books, in my life, and I understand that the impulse is both beguiling and dangerous. All you can do is pull yourself back from it when you can tell you’re in too deep, when you can’t fall asleep at night. What Tumblr and similar communities do is to provide you with someone who will always tell you, “don’t pull back, keep going, go deeper.” The site is littered with people talking about how they have developed attachments to fictional characters that are actively harmful to their regular lives. This drives both their sense that they are truer fans than anyone else and also Tumblr’s business model.

You can see this sort of thing, not just at Tumblr but increasingly everywhere, in the positively violent emotional attachment “fandom” people have to their favorite pairings. They will assert the supremacy of a particular couple - often gleefully unrelated to the actual plot of the source material, like Harry Potter and Snape or whatever - and become incredibly animated when someone denies the legitimacy of that pairing or asserts the superiority of another. The pairing off of of characters unconnected in canon goes back a long way, to the original “slash” communities, and is not at all unhealthy in and of itself. These “one true pairings” are fun and healthy, so long as they’re kept in proper perspective, as all things must be. Similarly, there’s the constant tendency to declare that certain characters are “coded” as gay, or queer, or trans, or similar. This too is unobjectionable, if expressed as a provisional claim. But a lot of these fans don’t want any of this to be considered provisional. The pairing they advance is the right pairing. The character they think is gay is gay, no matter how much or how little evidence there is in the text. And they tend to become very upset if anyone suggests otherwise. In literary terms, a reading that two particular characters would be a great pairing, or that there are subtextual hints that they have a romantic or sexual connection, or that they’re queer, is no more or less valid than any other. But the least valid literary reading is always the one that insists that there are no other valid readings, and this is exactly what predominates in those spaces.

Anna Marks looked at the rules for fictional characters that work on Tumblr, applied them to the most visible human being on the face of the planet, and published what she came up with in The New York Times. What could go wrong!

Marks makes waves at the constant claim that LGBTQ people, like other marginalized groups, lacks representation in arts and media. The entire project of wishcasting Taylor Swift as a lesbian derives its supposed legitimacy from this need - LGBTQ people need this, therefore Taylor Swift is obligated to provide it. Of course, the fundamental objection has to be that, unlike food or clothing or housing or medical care or education, someone’s literal sexual orientation cannot be subject to the expropriative demands of the needy. That is not something that can be given and not something that should be asked for. More to the point, the premise is wrong; LGBTQ people are not only not underrepresented in popular culture these days, in pure numerical terms they’re dramatically overrepresented. That’s not a normative statement, as if I’m suggesting that there are too many, but a reflection of the mere quantitative reality that it simply is not true that lesbian and gay and bi and transgender and queer people do not receive proportional representation in arts and culture relative to their numbers. And, you know, it’s not like gay people haven’t punched well above their weight artistically for a very long time. Of course I believe that there’s still discrimination against LGBTQ people; it’s just that being underrepresented in movies and television simply isn’t a part of that inequality anymore. Liberals are always so resistant to getting new material, even when it’s clear that playing the same old song isn’t addressing the actual needs of marginalized groups. And, you know, the continuing prevalence of homophobia despite all that representation is a pretty clear sign that representation is not in fact such an earth-shattering thing. It’s just something liberals usually control, looking for their keys where the light is.

The deeper, more uncomfortable question is what the endgame is, exactly, for all of the calls for representation. I find it simply undeniable that Hollywood has gone to great lengths in the past five years to attempt to appease that demand, but you can always argue that they need to do a better job, especially if a better job means making diverse art that doesn’t suck. What’s stickier is the assumption that underlies a lot of the rhetoric: that art can only serve you if it is “for you,” in this case meaning featuring and fronting people who are like you in some reductive way. That’s something you see all the time, the call for diverse art specifically because people from minority backgrounds supposedly can’t draw the right kind or amount of enjoyment from art featuring people who don’t look like them. I think diversifying Hollywood is still a worthy project, even after much progress. But the stated logic, I’m sorry to say, undermines some of my most basic assumption about what narrative art is and is for. This can’t carry much cultural weight because, as a white man, I don’t know what it’s like not to be served in that way, and never will, and trust me when I say that I’m open to the idea that my ignorance precludes understanding. I can’t ignore the fact, though, that one of the most time-honored and essential purposes of all of this storytelling is to produce empathy precisely across those lines of difference. What else is the moral purpose of novels or movies, if not that exact project of making us understand that which society has decided we never can? What better challenge is there than that?

I know some people will find this offensive, but when I watch Malcolm X, I empathize with Denzel Washington’s portrayal, I connect with it, I inhabit it, I understand it, I feel it represents me in exactly the terms of people calling for more representation. I see his plight in mine and mine in his. I understand that this sort of talk results in a lot of unhappy letters to the editor, but let me ask you: would the world be better if I didn’t feel this way, about Black or queer or women or disabled characters? If I didn’t connect with artwork by and about people who don’t “look like me,” what would be the advantage? Yes, I recognize that my complete lack of shame or self-consciousness in slipping into the conditions of others is a form of privilege, white privilege, male privilege. And of course I want those who feel marginalized and ignored in society to find their lives honored and respected in art, and I understand why they would guard “their” representation jealously. But I also want them to have the same ability that I have to slip off their demographic trappings and put on someone else’s costume for awhile. That is yet another of my privileges that I think should be spread, not ended. I assure you, I’m not going to stop listening to Mitski’s gorgeous, evocative “Best American Girl” no matter how much the YouTube comments hate that idea. Why not try and be comfortable everywhere you go? If people could get there, perhaps they wouldn’t need Taylor Swift to save them.

I covet other people’s identities, and I take them as it suits me, ruthlessly and without remorse. You can’t stop me. But you can be like me.

Maybe the more salient question is why the actually, openly queer artists that already exist are insufficient for Marks’s uses. Were kd lang, Melissa Etheridge, Tracy Chapman, Dusty Springfield, Tegan & Sara, Janelle Monáe, the Indigo Girls, Queen Latifah, Brandi Carlile, and so many more insufficient inspiration? Or were they simply not “heroic” enough, which is the only conclusion I can draw from the following paragraph?

What if someone had already tried, at least once, to change the culture by becoming such a hero? What if, because our culture had yet to come to terms with homophobia, it wasn’t ready for her?

What if that hero’s name was Taylor Alison Swift?

It’s true - nobody ever tried to change the culture of homophobia. Not even once!

This is what feels cruel in Marks, to me, the overpowering sense that past gay musicians just don’t impress her enough. And the actual claims here read like a parodic exaggeration of criticisms I’ve made of liberalism in the past - that modern liberals vastly overstate the ability of arts and culture to address structural problems. Homophobia does still exist, but it is a structural problem, not a personality flaw of celebrities, and “Taylor Alison Swift could cure homophobia” is an attitude so embarrassing, so fundamentally adolescent, that it’s incredible that a professional writer could think to publish it. Many people have died in various battles for equal rights. I find it absurd and in fact quite ugly to suggest that the problem can be solved by any hero, including a pop star.

I’m forever battling people in the comments here who insist that nothing that ever happens on the internet can ever have any real-world impact. This always strikes me as wishful thinking. Well, look - Tumblr has begun its colonization of the New York Times. If you’d like to find an answer to the question of why so many adolescents are now struggling with emotional problems, the conditions I’m discussing here speak to broader, fundamentally unhealthy dynamics of the internet that definitely matter. I think you could explore the internet history of many school shooters, including Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, and see some of these behaviors at play, the lack of boundaries and of perspective, the self-mythologizing, marinating in communities that always push people to go deeper and more intense. Yes, I think this stuff matters.

Marks ends her piece saying

For a moment, Ms. Swift was out of the woods she had created for herself as a teenager, floating above the trees. The future was within reach; she would, and will, soon take back the rest of her words, her reputation, her name. Maybe the world would see her, maybe it wouldn’t.

But on that stage, she found herself. I was there. Through a fuzzy fancam, I saw it.

And somehow, that was everything.

This is a string of vague faux-profundities of a type that a lot of bad writers reach for when they’re trying to express the operatic heights of their soul. I have no idea how one would go about defining where “her future,” “her words,” “her reputation,” and “her name” begin and end, what constitutes one but not another, and this is a failure of precision that is forgivable in an overwrought Instagram caption but not in the New York Times. I don’t, in fact, think that Marks is a bad writer, although there is a whole other conversation to be had about who the industry elevates and why. No, I think she made the understandable mistake of getting caught up in a kind of reverie that, because it felt intense and personal and true to her, she mistook for being intense and personal and true in fact, in the wider world, in the hearts of us all. But as the saying goes, our guts have shit for brains. I heard that Marks felt compelled to delete her Instagram due to the backlash to the piece, and well, I would offer her words of support if I knew her personally, but I’d also tell her the truth - there is a grace only we can bestow; this is the price that you pay for a loss of control. And I think her editors at the NYT failed her. Their job is to save writers from themselves, and they abdicated that responsibility in the pursuit of the great trinity, buzz, shares, and clicks.

This level of fervor I see all around me, not just for Swift but for celebrities in general, is toxic and not sustainable. When people wake up every day and thank millionaires for bestowing on them an Instagram post shilling weight-loss tea, shouting a lusty “YES MOTHER” to someone who will never know they exist and would not care if they did, something has gone wrong. People are looking in the wrong place, and sacrificing one’s dignity is now so normalized that I don’t know if people even notice that they’ve lost something in the transaction. I think, fundamentally, that people are just desperate to feel something transcendent. But you can’t pull transcendence out of a smartphone. Art moves us to almost impossible emotions, and it’s natural to want to lavish an equal amount of emotion on the artists that make it. But it’s like everything else in life; you should be as absolutely devoted and passionate as you should be, but not an ounce more.

I’m sorry to repeat myself, but I think Swift would do herself a big favor by taking time off and actively working to create distance with her fanbase. There are no more rewards to be earned for her, now, no percentage in trying to become even bigger; the returns have all already diminished. She’s in a place very few human beings have ever been before, and I think that it’s a can’t-lose position where, strangely, a lot of the available moves ahead of her look no-win. Personally, I’d take a year off, and then maybe try to piss my fans off a little bit, to remind them that they owe nothing to each other; they have each thrown their payment in the cup, both Taylor Swift and her fans, and received more than they asked for. Telling them to grow up a little, suggesting that they move on, gently reminding them that they will never know her and that they shouldn’t want to that bad, angrily insisting to them that Fiona Apple was right…. I suspect that approach would be the best thing for both them and her. And anyway people like Marks need that. I’m always telling people that they should worry just as much about the disappointment that follows wanting and getting as they do about the disappointment that follows wanting and not. Anna, what if your dreams are true, your prophecy real, your wishes granted, and Taylor Swift comes out, and you look around and find that you’re still sad and lonely in a sad and lonely world?