Miss Americana & the Least Deserving Queer Idiot at the Eras Tour
It's me, hi, I'm the queer idiot, it's me.
I did not deserve free tickets to the Eras tour.
They could’ve gone to any of the die-hard Swifties congregated outside Soldier Field any night of Taylor’s 3-day Chicago run. There must’ve been thousands of white women gathered in that lawn, like a sorority bid day south of the Mason-Dixon. They could’ve been sold for markably more than their original price, probably to some stockbroker dad, much like Taylor’s father, who would’ve gifted them to his daughters and collected his title as Father of the Year. Hoards of people nationwide who tried and failed to get tickets and thousands more who couldn’t even afford to consider it would’ve begged for a chance to stand in the crowd for just a single era. So when two tickets fell into my lap serendipitously, I couldn’t help but wonder if they might’ve chosen a worthier lap.
But they didn't, and I went to the Eras Tour, although no one deserved it less than me.
"Do you like Taylor Swift?" is a complicated question. Do I think Taylor Swift is talented? Yes. Do I know all the words to "Our Song?" Also yes. Do I think she is, as so many people claim, relatable? This is where I get hung up.
“Taylor Swift is relatable” is, I think, a truncated version of the full truth: Taylor Swift is relatable to straight white women who have lived mostly comfortable lives while enduring a few brutal breakups. We can overlay her lyrics on the darkest corners of our own heartache. It lines up perfectly with our teenage years into our early twenties and all the thick emotion every aspect of our lives seemed soaked in back then. Music holds a unique power to usher us back to our hurt, just close enough that we can remember, but not too close that it swallows us whole. Taylor’s music is uniquely equipped for this job, but it could never quite cut it for me.
I, too, am a white woman with a comfortable life, and true, 16 year old me belted out “We are Never Ever Getting Back Together” with the fervor of someone who had actually endured a breakup before. Still, having come out to most of my friends before my 10th birthday, I grew up in a darkness of a slightly darker shade. I had dead queer friends—plural—before I turned 18. I had living queer friends with brothers who told us they wished me and my friends were dead, too. I would never masquerade as someone who had a difficult childhood (I didn’t), and I would never argue that my tough times were worse than yours (they weren’t), but I don’t think I need to explain to you why scrubbing “dyke” off my locker after I brought a girl to homecoming had me reaching for “Born this Way,” not “Teardrops on my Guitar.”
It shouldn’t come as a shock that I, young and queer in middle America, imprinted on Lady Gaga the second I laid eyes on her. Her first album, The Fame, was barely out six months when I used up an entire iTunes gift card to buy it, and halfway through my freshman year of high school, the first leg of her Monster Ball tour was my very first concert. I went with my friend Michael, one of my two living queer friends at the time, and we agonized over our outfits for weeks. Michael wore his rainbow feather boa while I zipped up my knee-high Converse, and my parents drove us out to Rosemont, Illinois, where Lady Gaga was set to perform for a sold out venue of less than 5,000 people. I was giddy—no, vibrating—with excitement.
Michael and I were both a little fat in a way that made us extra bully-able, and while I was a little quieter about my queerness, Michael was Gay with a capital G, but we were normies compared to the crowd at the Monster Ball. Gaga fans were all rhinestones, leather, and mesh back then, long before the straights got their hands on her, and I remember wishing I could swap my teal Old Navy v-neck for something cooler so these people would know I was a real fan. After the openers (Semi Precious Weapons and, you’ll never believe: Jason Derulo), Michael and I were approached by a couple who wanted to give up their seats near the front for something a bit farther back where the bass wasn’t so loud. We couldn’t believe our luck—seventh row seats? For free?! We swapped tickets in a hurry and sprinted up front just in time for Gaga’s first song, “Dance in the Dark.” I can still hear the intro matched with the screams of the crowd.
The show was holy and grimy and gay, orchestrated by Mother Monster herself, and Michael and I both lost our voices screaming every song. We were hoarse and raspy as we climbed into the back seat of my parents’ car, wiping our sweaty foreheads with our XL t-shirts from the merch booth and declaring it the best night of our lives. I practically floated home on the proof that there were places out there where I truly belonged, places I could be as fat and weird and queer as I wanted. Safe places. Gaga and her music were the antidote I needed to survive.
It sometimes feels like things would be simpler if I were straighter, thinner, blonder…a little more, I don't know, Taylor?
If we can conjure up an image of 2009 Lady Gaga, we can do the same with 2009 Taylor Swift. For two blonde, millennial pop stars, they couldn’t have been more different, and while I took no issue with Taylor, she seemed like more of the same. I liked Gaga, who was weird and loud and talked about trans rights when hardly anyone in Hollywood would go there. Taylor, on the other hand, reminded me of any of the girls I went to school with. I wasn’t a fan, but I wasn’t a hater, although I would work brief shifts as both in the years that followed.
Through late high school and college, Taylor’s music was only ever really on my radar in the form of radio singles, and it wasn’t until I graduated college and found my first post-grad group of girlfriends (platonic) that it even occurred to me that Taylor had full albums. For the sake of fitting in with my newfound friends, I queued up her most recent album at the time, Reputation, on my commute home from my first job, but I shut it off after just a few songs. The music wasn’t bad, but something about it left me a little off-kilter, and it took the rest of the evening to chase the uneasiness away. When I brought this up to my friends, they insisted it was just the wrong album for me, but as I combed through Taylor’s catalog of albums, the problem never got better.
To this day, most of Taylor’s songs still instill in me a certain queasiness, an unshakable malaise that I recognize (forgive me) all too well. It’s the same feeling I got when, in sixth grade, a pair of popular girls approached my lunch table to confirm the rumor that I was bisexual, then scampered off to report back to a gaggle of tweens far skinnier than me. It’s the feeling I got when my friends in sororities at big state schools talked about recruitment or my coworkers discussed their latest diets. It’s the same feeling I got when, just a few years ago, I was discussing celebrity crushes with my closest girlfriends (platonic), and while they fawned over each other’s choices, they went quiet when I mentioned the woman I’d risk it all for. It’s the feeling of being excluded—not that I even want to be included, but I wish to want to be included. I wish to want to be the type of girl who fits in a little more effortlessly. It sometimes feels like things would be simpler if I were straighter, thinner, blonder…a little more, I don't know, Taylor?
I broke a rule to a game that everyone except me knew how to play. Maybe the instructions were embedded somewhere between the tracks on Lover.
I don’t mean to suggest that I am not like other girls. I’m exactly like other girls. I, too, can polish off my own bottle of white wine and weigh in on the current season of the Bachelor. I, too, can recommend my favorite top coat and ditch my heels to dance barefoot at a wedding reception. I have held a stranger’s hair in a bar bathroom and kept too close of a tab on a friend’s ex. Even so, in large groups of straight women, I often feel alone in a way I can’t quite describe but that other queer people always understand.
After a few years of sanding my edges to try to stay relevant in my post-grad friend group, I eventually misjudged who was mad at who that week and said something shitty to the wrong person, earning me a forced exit that was, in hindsight, for the best. I broke a rule to a game that everyone except me knew how to play. Maybe the instructions were embedded somewhere between the tracks on Lover. In the years since, Taylor Swift and her music became synonymous with my inability to fit in with groups of straight women, so it wasn’t lost on me when a new friend and her wife—two suburban lesbians with whom I instantly felt at home—gifted me a set of tickets to the Eras tour. It’s not like I didn’t know there were queer Swifties, but I’d never met any. If this music was for them, maybe it could be for me, too. It felt, in some weird way, like redemption, and so I went.
At this point, I know I am positioning myself for cancellation by the most powerful army in this or any country: the Swifties. These women are so dedicated, so powerful, that they could trample me in an instant for taking a ticket that could’ve gone to a true fan, and maybe they'd be right to. It wouldn't change the fact that I was standing with them, in the nosebleeds of the third night of the Chicago run of the Eras tour, in a sparkly fuchsia dress that I rented on a whim and disco balls (mirror balls? Am I doing this right?) tied into my hair, referring to the show as "the MUNA concert" just to be a pain in the ass. MUNA—the trio of unstoppable queer talent that was opening for Taylor that show— is unquestionably my favorite band of the last three years, and I sang along to every word, twirling and swaying while the women and smattering of dads around me sat and strategized who would get hard seltzers and who would brave the merch line.
After MUNA came the pre-show music, and the queasy feeling came with it as I realized I was part of the single largest group of predominantly straight women I will ever belong to. I looked around the stadium at a congregation of white faces. Was it too late to pass the tickets along to someone who wanted this? Who would appreciate it? And then, right on time, I saw two high school age girls trade some brightly colored friendship bracelets made just for the occasion, and it occurred to me that I was one of them, once—a young girl in the crowd, waiting for her favorite artist, ready to scream-sing through the songs that held me together at my worst. I crossed my fingers that “You Need to Calm Down” did that for one queer white teen in this crowd, even if it never would’ve been enough for me.
When the countdown to Taylor began, the high-pitched screech of over 60,000 voices pinned me in place, and in my head, all I could hear was Lady Gaga at the beginning of “A-YO” drawling “heeeere we go!” Wrong concert, Becca. I turned toward the screen (nosebleeds, remember?) and prepared to be in this woman’s grip for the next three and a half hours.
I enjoy Taylor’s music a little more now, but in the same way that I enjoy romance novels and chai lattes. They're good, but more often than not, something deep in my chest is desperate for something more substantial, something I can actually relate to.
It only took a few eras for me to realize I know the words to more Taylor Swift songs than I thought. The magic of the Eras Tour is Lover gets the same play as Red, and hearing "We are Never Getting Back Together" performed live is as cathartic as it was blaring out of my shitty car speakers at 16. The highlight of the set was undoubtedly Taylor's performance of "All Too Well (10 Minute Version)," a song I knew only by the trending snippets of it from TikTok and the occasional background audio of an Instagram story. Hearing it for the first time live, I sunk into the storytelling, admitting, without a doubt, that Taylor Swift is a good writer. The production was otherworldly, and so was the hot pretzel I spent the entire Evermore era hunting down. The show flew by way faster than I had anticipated, and when we reunited with our friends in the good seats, we walked along the lake in the glow of city lights, dodging pedicabs playing the same songs we had just heard live. I hardly remember what we talked about, but I know I felt the opposite of alone.
I haven’t undergone a Swiftie conversion as a result of the Eras Tour. To me, Taylor is still the forewoman for whiteness, positioned to be as agreeable as possible to the audience with the most capital, dipping into social justice issues just enough to garner buy-in, but never enough to make a real statement. Still, I enjoy Taylor’s music a little more now, but in the same way that I enjoy romance novels and chai lattes. They're good, but more often than not, something deep in my chest is desperate for something more substantial, something I can actually relate to. I need music that reminds me of who I am and what I’ve been through, same as anyone else. I’m thrilled that Taylor’s music can do that for some people—someone has to make music for the heartbroken white women of the world, the young girls struggling to find their place, the lightly bicurious wives of republican men, and I’ll happily admit that Taylor does it well, and she puts on a hell of a show.
In the weeks that have followed, I’ve listened to “All Too Well (10 minute version)” four or five times, and I’m worried about what it’s going to do to my Spotify Wrapped, but a good song is a good song. I’ll save you any more of the whole music is a time machine malarky, but when I hit the last two minutes of that song, I’m right back in the crowd at Soldier Field, feeling a little like I’m in the middle of someone else’s perfect night, but happy to be a part of it just the same. And then, for balance, I’ll queue up Gaga’s “Dance in the Dark” right after, the same way I did every night of my senior year of high school after a heroin overdose excluded Michael from my list of living queer friends. Every night, I’d grab my headphones and my iPod Touch and squeeze my eyes tight until I was back in the seventh row of the Monster Ball or the passenger’s seat of Michael’s car on our way back from our weekly LGTBQ teen group. After thousands of listens, the bridge still gets to me. Gaga invokes the names of those who have died young beneath the weight of the standards placed upon them—Marilyn Monroe, Judy Garland, Sylvia Plath, Jon Benet Ramsay, Princess Di. How often did my younger self want to be included amongst them? How completely torturous is it that I have a list of friends who have joined their ranks? And, of course, how lucky to have the music that can escort me to the lip of that pain and hold me there, over the edge, so I can see it all again without having to touch it.