I'm at the center of a Taylor Swift conspiracy theory
I'm at the center of a Taylor Swift conspiracy theory
How TikTok revived a viral photo I never wanted to see blow up in the first place.
Embedded is your essential guide to what’s good on the internet, from Kate Lindsay and Nick Catucci.🧩
Our free weekday posts are made possible by paying subscribers, who also get exclusive access to our Saturday deep-dives into living better online.
Over the weekend, we published my interview with the founders of the app Herd, who talked about how they’re attempting to create nothing less than a new category of social media. Paying subscribers get access to that and more. Today, everyone gets this cautionary tale about the current forms of social media. It's about how one of my photos went viral years ago on Instagram and Twitter, and has suddenly done so again on TikTok. —Kate
In another life, I worked a job that came with perks like access to meet-and-greets. A female coworker wrote a column about Taylor Swift’s 2018 Reputation tour that Swift herself read, and it earned her a press invite to a performance at MetLife stadium, where I was graciously invited as her plus-one. Before the show, press gathered to meet Swift and get photos. It was there that my coworker and I had the idea.
A week or so before, a series of pictures of Swift reacting to two fans getting engaged at one of her meet-and-greets went viral. When we met Swift, my friend and I floated, in a very “haha just kidding ... unless” way, the concept of recreating that photo. To our surprise, she was game, and took us back to the same photo booth for maximum accuracy. We snapped the pics, laughed, and then had a blast at the show. The next day, I posted the pictures.
This was my bad. As a pop culture writer, I was well aware of the enthusiasm of Swift’s fanbase. I should have known that no matter the original intentions of the photo, once it made its way into the larger Swift universe, I would lose control over its narrative. Her followers quickly swarmed me on Twitter and Instagram. Some, thinking the photo was real, offered their congratulations. Others accused us of queerbaiting when they figured out it wasn’t.
I had tried to be as clear as possible in the captions that we were simply recreating a meme, and emphasized that one of us had a boyfriend. There is no ring or ring box in my coworker’s outstretched hand. The joke is not and never was that we were two women getting engaged. It was just a way to share a memory with Swift that felt a bit more significant than your average side-by-side picture. We did a bit with Taylor Swift! How many people can say that?
The hubbub died down after a day or so. More Reputation memories were made, pushing our picture out of the limelight. After more than two years, I assumed it had left public consciousness—until my old roommate sent me a TikTok last week.
“You need to know this just showed up on my fyp,” she said. “You’re now a part of the Gaylor conspiracy.”
The TikTok, which currently has over 190,000 views, compares how Swift reacted in the photos of the original, seemingly heterosexual couple getting engaged and how she looked in the photos of myself and my coworker pretending to get engaged. The person who made the TikTok notes that Swift appears happier in our photo, and suggests that this supports a long-held fan conspiracy theory that the pop star is actually gay.
If Swift looks happier in my photo, that's because it is staged—in the original meme, she's genuinely shocked by what's happening. I know nothing of Swift’s sexuality and certainly do not think it can be deduced from three photos (or anything other than how she publicly identifies)!
I wonder if that sentiment was shared in the viral TikTok's comments, but I’ll never know because the comments have, unsettlingly, been switched off. This probably means they were a bloodbath of discourse, and I shudder to think about what may have been said about me and my coworker that got so out of hand the whole thing had to be disabled.
“I am gonna have to go into witness protection,” my coworker said when I texted her the TikTok. It’s for this reason that I’ve removed the pictures from my Instagram and Twitter. That the photo endured for three years, staying relevant enough in the Swift chatterverse to be pulled for a TikTok in 2021, feels like something that should be taught in middle schools alongside stranger danger and cyber bullying.
I still love the photos and have them saved on my computer, but for me, the incident revived a sentiment the internet had previously erased: Some memories are more special when they’re not being shared.