rescuing dorothea
on todd haynes' velvet goldmine, taylor swift, queer fandom & affect...or something
Todd Haynes’ 1998 film Velvet Goldmine opens with a title-card that reads: “Although what you are about to see is a work of fiction, it should nevertheless be played at maximum volume.”
Velvet Goldmine is fiction, a work composed from and of yearning, and yet the film demands we yearn loudly, listening with our full bodies, surrendering to the fiction rather than maintaining our distance. Velvet Goldmine shows us, through its layered subjectivities and dissolve of fantasy and the “real,” the tangled, emotional work of engaging with queer history—and, here, I really mean queer fans, who often act as digital quasi-archivists—as queer historians, particularly when our chosen queer subjects resist our every attempt to assimilate them back into our lineage.
Nothing emerges easily or gently.
This particular tension might be understood as what theorist Heather Love, in her book Feeling Backwards, refers to as queer historians’ desire to “rescue” or “recover” figures of the queer past who don’t necessarily want rescuing, and in doing so, sever queer history from its most taboo substance: shame. It is easier, perhaps, to attempt to forcefully assimilate all historical queerness into a positive trajectory—a narrative we, as queer people, can glue together from the woundedness that we’d like to believe we’ve left behind, for good. And yet, I find that this tension, of history’s resistance and our yearning, bleeds through itself and into the contemporary moment.
I feel it especially bleeds into how I think about one miss Taylor Swift.
(Who else decodes you? Who’s gonna know you if not me?)
The thorny dynamic at work in Velvet Goldmine, a push-and-pull between the queer seeker and the sought figure, reminds me, actually, of “Gaylor.” I know, at this point, the mere mention of this topic will probably annoy plenty of readers away, which…fair. Still: I’m trying to think through what “Gaylor” even is/means/does, less about the theories themselves.
“Gaylor” refers to the theory, generated by diehard fans, that pop icon Taylor Swift is secretly—or not so secretly—queer. Gaylor is a cultural object-in-making that is not traceable to any one text, at least in the conventional sense. “Gaylor” can be reduced to typical celebrity speculation, and yet, it also stretches our understandings of what a queer narrative and history can be in much the same way that Velvet Goldmine does. In Feeling Backwards, Love also contends that, as queer historians, our relationships to queer histories might be partly understood in the form of a “darkened bedroom,” a “site not only of caresses but also of migraines” (39).
Conceptualized this way, intimacy is not defined by an absence of ambivalence or difficulty, but is expanded to enfold multiple, often fraught, often painful meanings that nevertheless persist, clawing at us for attention the second we try to disavow our desire. In the film, the impulse to play savior to a hidden past—to uncover and thus liberate—doesn’t make for a seamless or necessarily comforting narrative. The relationality that emerges between queer historian/fan and queer historical subject(s) dizzies and frustrates. The film engorges the shame and desire of fandom and makes it colorful, hypnotic, and temporally disjointed so that there is no uncrossable line between “real” and “unreal.” Christian Bale’s Arthur is the journalist in search of a queer past, a pursuit that has more to do with him, and his own sense of having vanished, than the rockstar Brian’s disappearance. It’s easy to read Arthur’s quest as mere frenzied parasocial obsession, but Haynes suggests that there’s nothing mere here at all.
Taylor Swift is a complicated figure. To be her fan, to be a “Swiftie,” involves a lot of hand-wringing and frustration, and a certain alienation. For many, Swift constructs a vision of white, girlboss womanhood that is entirely un-radical and non-subversive. Her investment in capitalism, in money and industry, and her carbon emissions, render most of her political statements lukewarm at best. As my friend Sam says, “Swiftieism is a disease and I’m infected.” It feels palpably embarrassing, to claim this specific fandom, which is partly due to internalized misogyny, and half to everything about her, in all her corniness and billionaire detachment. There is no real way to be a Taylor Swift fan, I don’t think—not with critical thinking skills—without disliking a lot of what she is and does, too. Her silence, right now, on the genocide still happening in Gaza is especially reprehensible. I frankly don’t think we should look to popstars as political guides in any world, but it is disingenuous to call yourself a progressive “activist” and not say a word about something as horrific as this.
We don’t know Taylor Swift, even if we feel like we do. We don’t know anything besides what she allows us to know, to see. I think that the parasocial fervor eclipses this reality a lot of the times, especially when people try to excavate her songs and produce, as she’s said, “paternity tests.” It’s exhausting that the most popular level of analysis of her music is all about what men could’ve possibly inspired each song. It’s boring, at least to me, and redundant; I don’t think most of her work is that straightforward.
Despite all her flaws, despite my ambivalence, I am deeply, confusingly attached to Taylor Swift. Swift’s cultural narrative unfolds and shifts endlessly. Her discography is intertextual and self-referential, consuming and undoing her multitude of personas over and over, and I devour it all. I am entangled with her myth, and like Arthur’s (of Velvet Goldmine) attachment to his glam-rock icons, queerness has everything to do with it. It is Love’s “ambivalent identification,” or what I call a sour intimacy, one composed of equal parts salt and sugar, bite and caress; it is not an intimacy that goes both ways, or that is necessarily positive or “good.” Or, as an unnamed narrator murmurs in Velvet Goldmine: a “land where all things are perfect and poisonous.”
The intimacy and identification exist “in the cut,” as Love remarks on Foucault’s preoccupation with a certain archive of “abject others.” I am hinged to Swift’s cultural iconography this way, I think, largely because of how queer everything she does is as I perceive it, and “Gaylor” is just the collective acknowledgment of that queerness, whatever it actually means or entails.
In Velvet Goldmine, Arthur essentially wants to rescue or recuperate these spectral, ambiguous, queer figures—bi rockstars Brian Slade and Curt Wild, ingeniously named—from the recent past and, in doing so, rescue himself.
It is an emotional rescue mission disguised as journalism, but maybe that’s all most research is.
Across subreddits, tweets, dense and meticulously organized Tumblr pages, and, of course, all the fanfiction, the construction of “Gaylor” mirrors this mission (as of January 2024, there are 424 fanfictions tagged under “Karlie Kloss/Taylor Swift” on popular website AO3, and 708 that are tagged as “Taylor Swift” and “F/F”). Yet there is often more self-awareness amongst Gaylor fans, accustomed to homophobia and vitriol for speculating on someone’s sexuality.
The truth is my desire for Gaylor to be true is less about Taylor Swift, less about the reality of her own identification than it is about my own “emotional rescue.” There are plenty of openly, vocally queer pop musicians and celebrities to obsess over (see Chappell Roan, MUNA, Reneé Rapp, etc) . I love a lot of these musicians, too. But it doesn’t seem to matter. The fraught, secretive intimacies that we witness Swift enter and exit, the longing glances and code words, all of it might add up to nothing, but there is something true and difficult in that potential queerness than a self-claimed, “healthy” or fully realized one.
On Swift’s album, 2020’s Evermore, there is a song titled “Dorothea.” The song is tender, pleading, and wistful, and is addressed to someone named Dorothea. In interviews, Swift has said that she’ll sometimes choose to inhabit male characters and perspectives in her songs (see “Betty”), singing through them, but the tendency is also reminiscent of the ways queer people often feel forced to mediate their own desire through a usable, stable and normative object. I think of Oscar Wilde’s emerald brooch in Velvet Goldmine, passed from a baby’s neck to another queer person to another, at one point made into an earring hanging off a queer man’s right ear at a party. The brooch is just a brooch. But through that brooch, queer relationality takes form, however tenuous, however unspoken.
“Dorothea” is that brooch, as are several of Swift’s songs on Evermore and Folklore, specifically. The song is not explicitly gay, but the longing for a childhood love—whatever that might mean—to return, to enter into a new storyline, a new but historical intimacy, certainly feels queer in indelible ways. By “queer” I don’t necessarily or only mean non-het attraction—I mean, to quote bell hooks (emphasis mine): “Queer' not as being about who you're having sex with (that can be a dimension of it); but 'queer' as being about the self that is at odds with everything around it and that has to invent and create and find a place to speak and to thrive and to live.”
(This place is the same as it ever was / But you don’t like it that way)
The song references the speaker and Dorothea’s old high school friendship(?), before Dorothea left their small town to become famous: “Hey Dorothea, do you ever stop and think about me? / When we were younger / Down in the park / Honey, making a lark of the misery.” This song grasps at a recent past and doesn’t quite restore it. Instead, we witness the reaching, that clumsy act of searching itself, with no answer in sight. To rescue Dorothea, this phantom figure of queer possibility, would be to dilute whatever affect it is she instigates and awakens in us in the song.
The only way that the narrator of Dorothea can relate to, and love, Dorothea, now, is through fandom: “A tiny screens’s the only place I see you now.” The only way Dorothea can be known is how, in Haynes’ film, we come to know Brian Slade—through the kaleidoscope of myth, memory, imagination and longing, this glimmering fog full of detritus. (Lavender haze?)
I invent what is not there. You could say that. Or maybe what’s there, in the speculation of “Gaylor,” is what is there in Velvet Goldmine, in a vastly less clearly countercultural, but nonetheless queer, way: a pastiche of references, signs, affects, and glances.
We absorb the queerness of the near-mythological washed-up stars Slade and Wild as Arthur himself seems to, less through some linear and easily-accessed historical timeline and more so through gestures, cadences, tonal shifts, recollections and secrets cut open, released, or maybe not. I am drawn to sour attachments, to the “ambivalent” and ambiguous ones. The “demand and desperation” (38) that characterize the queer historian’s desire for communion with past queer figures is, in a slanted and maybe delusional way, what characterizes this attachment, too.
What if the queer subject doesn’t want to be rescued? To be enfolded like flesh back into the narrative spines of recent queer history, or what it might become? What if our queer subject resists that subjecthood and yet, simultaneously, continuously expresses, through music and persona, the affects born from queer desire, queer experience, queer longing that feel inimitable, unrepresentable otherwise?
In Velvet Goldmine, the camerawork often increases in intensity and melodrama during scenes of the rockstars’ performances. The pivotal scene, in which Slade fakes his own death by shooting mid-concert, flashes from face to face, character to character, and, through this serrated set of expressions, the viewer experiences and indeed becomes complicit in a kind of twisted collectivity that isn’t entirely without pleasure.
We watch these characters react to Slade’s pseudo-death and we, also, partake, watching the “bullet” tear a bloody hole through his stomach, reddening the glitter, spandex, and all. We watch Slade’s self-invented ending and we see the way no one, as panicked as they are, can look away from the spectacle of his “death.” The jolting cinematography here positions the viewer as a voyeur, another onlooker wanting a glimpse of devastation and also coming to understand, later, that this spectacle was deliberately produced by Slade himself. Wild is there, too, watching, despite his and Slade’s tumultuous relationship, and the viewer also recognizes the anguish of the lover’s own terror, as knotted and uneven as that love may be.
The mutual devotion between Slade and Wild is, throughout the film, never simple, never painless, but their intimacy is always resoundingly alive and complex. Still, Slade chooses to reinvent himself, not through the “death” itself but through the scandal of its artifice. He chooses to become someone else, a Reaganite-esque popstar without the transgression or punch of his former self. At the end, Slade has painstakingly made himself palatable to the people he used to profoundly hate, and he doesn’t ask for reabsorption back into Arthur’s narrative of queer rock n’ roll history. He willingly disappears, and the myth is what we’re left with, still.
I don’t think that there’s anything necessarily subversive or even productive in my own desire to identify a queerness in Taylor Swift. Swift clearly presents all the ingredients of normative white femininity, one that is often damaging, but somehow, we, I, latch onto this presentation and interpret it as a performance. Our speculation about celebrity life, as the film shows in all its vivid madness and lore, can become a sort of demand for a specific, legible and self-identified public kind of “queerness” that feels like another form of constriction. We’re drawn to queer “conspiracies” like “Gaylor” like we’re drawn to the blood of a wound. Love reappropriates the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice to visualize this particular draw, and writes:
“Anyone, I want to insist, might be seduced by the figure of Eurydice: she is radiant in her withdrawal. But her specific attraction for queer subjects is an effect, I want to argue, of a historical experience of love as bound up with loss. To recognize Eurydice as desirable in her turn away is a way of identifying through that loss” (51).
I want to be rescued from the loss and I also want to hang onto the loss. I want to take history and mine it for queer inklings and also mourn—without end—what cannot be recovered, that which resists “uncovering” or “discovering” at all. Irresolution, ambivalence. Swift is not the out queer icon so many of us desperately want her to become. She makes more sense that way, but her withdrawal from inhabiting such a role is perhaps what makes the “Gaylor” discourse so compulsively engaging. But that withdrawal is never full or complete, and that branch of ambiguity enables a longing that doesn’t, maybe, align neatly (or at all) with political motivations or queer liberation.
Queerness still is fraught, though, for so many of us, and lives hip-to-hip with shame, alienation, fear, and unrequited longings, and of course none of those negative affects make up the whole of queer experience, but they don’t not exist, either.
It’s uncomfortable to admit that, in much of Swift’s music, I see elements of my own queerness represented in ways that don’t necessarily come through in the out queer musicians’ work I also love. That I still find these ambiguities and adjacencies so resonant is maybe a me-problem, but while I don’t think it’s inherently radical, I don’t know if pathologizing it is useful, either.
In Velvet Goldmine, I see a similar attachment to this difficult complexity, tending to the threadwork of queer history without trying to redeem or heal its blisters. At the end of the film, in the 80s, Curt Wild tries to give Wilde’s brooch to Arthur, who, initially, resists. Wild finds a way to slip the brooch into Arthur’s drink, though, to fish out after he disappears out the door of the bar. This scene is, to me, a Eurydice moment. Arthur cannot “recover” an untangled lineage in Wild, cannot unearth the private moments and feelings exchanged between Wild and Slade (and Jack Fairy), and he is not even, it seems, remembered by Wild though they may have had sex once decades ago.
Still, Arthur watches Wild leave, and he is “radiant” in his “withdrawal,” as much an enigma and ghost as he ever was, more magnetic in his leaving than in the present close-up reality of him.
This moment also reminds me of one of my favorite scenes in Celine Sciamma’s 2019 queer love story Portrait of a Lady On Fire, which is explicitly framed by the Orpheus/Eurydice myth: Marianne leaves Heloise, who will soon marry a man she’s never met, and as Marianne runs down the stairs towards the front door, at the last second, Heloise calls out. Marianne turns around, prolonging the sting, and there is Heloise in her bridal gown, watching her go.
The choice to look back is a choice strewn with deep pain and a strain of longing familiar to me, in my own queerness, visible in Velvet Goldmine, and in Swift herself. The identification lives in the moment of disappearance, of the subject’s resistance to being fully seen or followed, and in that threshold, I see the contours of Dorothea, just out of sight.
(This is part 1 in 2 mini-essays about taylor, but part 2 will be only for paid subscribers, so please consider purchasing a subscription to support an underpaid grad student! It’s very cheap.)