“There’s nothing I hate more than what I can’t have,” Taylor Swift sings through gritted teeth on “Gorgeous,” the third single from her forthcoming album, Reputation. It’s a welcome bit of vintage Taylor, particularly refreshing after the antagonistic misfire “Look What You Made Me Do.” But to buy into the emotional world of “Gorgeous”—a yearning, agonizing, vaguely self-loathing tale of forbidden love—the listener has to accept that there exists something, or someone, that Pop Overlord Taylor Swift cannot immediately command with the snap of a beautifully manicured finger. In 2017, this requires some skepticism, if not outright suspension of disbelief.
But look deep enough into the internet and you’ll find that there exists a fan community, thousands strong, that likes to imagine and in some cases believe that Taylor Swift has for years been tortured by a secret love she cannot confess. “Gorgeous” makes perfect sense to them. They are the Kaylor Shippers, or, if you do not speak Tumblr, “people who write romantic fan fiction about Taylor Swift and Karlie Kloss.” This is a story of how I accidentally came to understand them, and perhaps even become one of them.
Like the other lovestruck Reputation singles, most people believe that “Gorgeous” is about Swift’s current boyfriend, Joe Alwyn. She’s hinted as much to her fans. I don’t believe her. There’s something about the song’s cataclysmic agony that isn’t properly scaled to a legitimately famous person, let alone someone as anonymous as Joe Alwyn. It’s difficult for me to imagine Taylor Swift in a state of anguish because she “can’t have” the 26-year-old star of a bombed Ang Lee movie that approximately seven people saw. (I was one of them! It was bad.) Taylor Swift’s face was lacquered on the most recent UPS truck that delivered a package to my apartment. Joe Alwyn is someone whose name it took me three tries and a Google search to spell correctly in this sentence. It took me a single listen to decide that “Gorgeous” is not about him.
After a few more plays, I had an only semi-ridiculous thought: Doesn’t “Gorgeous” sound like it’s about having a crush … on a woman? Wouldn’t that be the only kind of love forbidden to Taylor “I’d Never Alienate My Republican Fan Base” Swift? I quickly learned that I was not alone in this theory. “I’ve decided ‘Gorgeous’ is about Taylor lusting after a woman while dating a man, and feeling guilt/shame because of it,” tweeted Bobby Finger, the cohost of the popular podcast Who? Weekly (and, by extension, an expert in Joe Alwyn). “Despite the playfulness, it can easily be read as a song that’s filled with self-loathing.” Yep! But I also hear something more specific in the song’s familiar, gently mocking, teasing-your-BFF tone. And in the title, which sounds not like a compliment you’d give one of the straighter-than-straight, sentient loaves of Wonder Bread that Taylor Swift has been known to date. No, I reasoned, it sounds more like a word you’d use to describe a certain gazelle-like Victoria’s Secret model with cheekbones like heaven’s ski slopes. A light bulb went off. And like most ideas I have not completely thought through, I tweeted about it.
Within minutes—and consistently for the past few weeks—my mentions were inundated with replies and RTs from members of the Kaylor community, the existence of which I was previously unaware. My life before then was black-and-white. Now it is in screaming color.
“I happened to discover kaylor on wattpad in 2015 when I was just bored and looking for some good reads,” one Kaylor shipper tells me via Twitter DM, referring to the wildly popular fanfic hub. She was surprised by how well written some of the Kaylor stories were (a search turns up more than 4,700 pieces of fanfic tagged “kaylor”), and was particularly intrigued by a tale called “Lilies {kaylor},” which imagines Swift and Kloss as forbidden lovers in the “big south” coming of age right after the Great Depression. It has been read almost 90,000 times.
But that’s nothing compared with the most popular Kaylor story on Wattpad, which has 1.3 million reads. “3rd time,” commented one user. “There isnt any book [that] Ive read 3 times.”
The desire to queer Taylor Swift makes sense. Her vision of romance is more traditional, nostalgic, and, well, gender conforming than almost anything else on the radio. Her latest singles feel particularly hermetic, closed off from the rapidly changing world around her. (“My baby’s fly like a jet stream, high above the whole scene, loves me like I’m brand new,” she sings on her latest single, “Call It What You Want.” Many Kaylor shippers believe this song is also about Kloss, and a good deal of them have changed their Twitter display names to “Karlie What You Want” in solidarity.)
Swift’s earliest songs are all about the power of the feminine imagination, and she’s primed fans from day one to look for hidden clues in her music; since her 2006 self-titled album, she’s been tucking secret messages into her liner notes and thus stoking her listeners’ semi-obsessive amateur-detective impulse. As her fans have grown—and, just as crucially, as ideas about queerness and gender fluidity have become more visible in our culture—the romantic script Swift has offered in her songs has begun to feel limited. The internet is a perfect place to fantasize about alternatives. (It should be noted that not all people who use the portmanteau “Kaylor” mean to suggest or imagine that the two are romantically linked; to some people, it’s just a way to refer to their friendship. It should also be noted, however, that when I searched “Kaylor” on Wattpad, the first suggested autofill was “Kaylor smut.”)
In a 2012 article about the online subculture of One Direction shippers (the blessed community that gave us “Larry Stylinson”), the writer Amanda Hess saw the world of pop star slash fiction as a radically imaginative space, a way for listeners to reject the media narratives that are being sold to them. “You can set a pop hook on permanent repeat,” she wrote, “but gender roles change, and the sexual landscape has shifted dramatically since Justin Timberlake first debuted his frosted-tipped fro. … The false dichotomies of those traditional romantic structures—straight or gay, friend zone or marriage track, sex or love, masculine or feminine—are crumbling.”
The Kaylor shipper with whom I DMed agreed with Hess’s assessment. “Almost everyday you see and hear news on social media about people coming out as bisexual, lesbian and gay. And people nowadays are more open-minded and more likely [to] be able to accept these lesbians and gays as compared to the past… Another thing is that the amount of kaylor fanfics on wattpad definitely increased by a lot!”
Like so many platonic best friends, Taylor Swift and Karlie Kloss first met at the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show—or VSFS 2013, as it’s commonly abbreviated in the Kaylor community. Here is a set of GIFs commonly cited as evidence that Swift was “smitten” from first sight. What followed was a blissful year of friendship between two rich, beautiful, tall people who could often be seen cavorting around New York, going to and from the gym.
“Kaylor” bubbled up into the mainstream for a brief moment in December 2014. Maybe you remember it. Swift and Kloss were spotted at a concert, and a grainy video shot from below seemed (kind of, maybe, if you squinted hard) to depict them kissing. “Is This a Picture of Taylor Swift and Karlie Kloss Making Out?” an Entertainment Tonight headline asked, before answering, “Spoiler Alert: No.”
“Any time Taylor is pictured with a guy, people think they’re dating,” the writer reasoned. “Now apparently whenever she’s pictured with a girl, people think they’re dating too.” But true Kaylor fans would not be swayed by the opinion of an enterprise that previously employed John Tesh. With an air of reverence, Kaylor shippers now refer to this pivotal event as “Kissgate,” and the cellphone video that captured it has been GIFed into infinity and analyzed from every imaginable angle. It is Kaylor’s Zapruder film.
I could give you a rundown of the Kaylor timeline, but any effort to do so would pale in comparison with the painstakingly detailed Tumblr blog Kaylor Evidence, which is run by a user named Erin. She has compiled several masterposts that chronicle the different phases of Kaylor (2013-2014, when they were most active in public; 2015-2016, when they were not seen together quite as much, which Kaylor shippers reason is when they realized people were starting to catch on and worked harder to conceal their relationship). Many in the Kaylor community also believe that Swift once dated Glee actress Dianna Agron; the preferred portmanteau is “Swiftgron.”
“They throw their fake relationships out there for publicity as well so they can make money,” Erin writes in the FAQ section of Kaylor Evidence. “Because of that, in my opinion it’s fair game to speculate and dig.” A version of this logic is not unpopular in more mainstream spaces, too. Plenty of armchair skeptics have questioned the authenticity of Swift’s much-publicized celebrity relationships, so much so that when she first started dating Tom Hiddleston in summer 2016, there was a popular theory that she was merely shooting a music video and had asked him to star as her boyfriend.
Kaylor shippers take this one step further, though, believing that Swift’s previous boyfriends have been “beards.” They both get something out of the arrangement, the fandom’s logic goes, because Swift gets to distract the media while these men get “a boost in fame.” “An example is Calvin Harris,” one Kaylor shipper DM’ed me. “He’s getting so recognized by the public now.”
They refer to Tom Hiddleston, simply, as “Hiddleshit.”
The controversial hashtag #KaylorIsOver has emerged in the wake of a few recent events. First, when the “Look What You Made Me Do” video was released, some viewers noticed that a T-shirt in the video that lists the names of the members of Taylor’s “squad” was conspicuously missing a mention of Karlie. When E! News asked for comment, someone on Swift’s team insisted, “Taylor and Karlie are doing well as friends. They had NO falling out what so ever. They still speak but have been slammed with crazy schedules on both sides.”
Then, in mid-October, when Kloss asked Swift to appear on her forthcoming TV show Movie Night With Karlie Kloss (set to feature “some of her closest friends for an evening of movies, games, baking, and fun”), Swift “politely declined,” citing scheduling issues. It is entirely reasonable to think that someone who is about to release and promote a blockbuster album would not have time to appear on a good friend’s TV show. But in a universe defined by reading melodramatic and potentially catastrophic “hints” in every photo and press release, it is entirely possible to see this as the Kaylorpocalypse.
As I usually do when I emerge from the deep abyss of an internet k-hole, stunned and blinking in the harsh light of day, I do not know what I actually believe. All I know—with the 2013-2014 chapter of the Kaylor masterpost as my evidence—is that Taylor Swift looked very happy and at times even uncharacteristically at ease when she was hanging out with Karlie Kloss. “[W]hen she’s around Karlie … she relaxes and seems genuine,” Erin writes, and I agree. I hope, at least, they’re still friends.