Rumors have frequently surfaced online by fans – or, more usually, trolls – that suspect Taylor Swift is bisexual. Now she’s taken the time with the re-release of her album 1989 (Taylor’s Version) to address the rumors in the prologue. This begins by reflecting what happened when she first released the album when she was only 24-years-old.
As Swift explains, she faced rumors early on for dating her male friends for simply hanging out with them. It created a lot of drama and she “wanted to silence them” for creating such rumors. As you can read below via a copy shared on X:
“The voices that had begun to shame me in new ways for dating like a normal young woman? I wanted to silence them,” Taylor wrote. “You see – in the years preceding this, I had become the target of slut shaming – the intensity and relentlessness of which would be criticized and called out if it happened today. The jokes about my amount of boyfriends. The trivialization of my songwriting as if it were a predatory act of a boy crazy psychopath. The media co-signing of this narrative. I had to make it stop because it was starting to really hurt.”
Swift continued to emphasize the issues that she faced and how she decided to quit hanging out with male friends:
“It became clear to me that for me there was no such thing as casual dating, or even having a male friend who you platonically hang out with. If I was seen with him, it was assumed I was sleeping with him. And so I swore off hanging out with guys, dating, flirting, or anything that could be weaponized against me by a culture that claimed to believe in liberating women but consistently treated me with the harsh moral codes of the Victorian era.”
Ultimately, she decided to “focus only on myself, my music, my growth, and my female friendships.” She added, “If I only hung out with my female friends, people couldn’t sensationalize or sexualize that right? I would learn later on that people could and people would.”
Though she did offer some gratitude for those fans that didn’t buy into the rumors. In fact, she offered a rather simple explanation for choosing to have so many female friends including Selena Gomez:
“Maybe a girl who surrounds herself with female friends in adulthood is making up for a lack of them in childhood.”
Taylor Swift’s prologue for #1989TaylorsVersion
“This moment is a reflection of the woods we’ve wandered through and all this love between us still glowing in the darkest dark.” pic.twitter.com/HGQDTPqKgo
— Taylor Swift Updates (@SwiftNYC) October 27, 2023
Thus it doesn’t look like Taylor Swift is as bisexual as many rumors have suggested over the years. But it’s certainly an interesting insight into the music she’s created and some of the career choices she’s made as a result.