Taylor Swift says she felt compelled to publicly champion LGBTQ causes in recent months because rights are being “stripped from basically everyone who isn’t a straight white cisgender male” in the US today.

The singer, who has been criticised in the past for not speaking up on political issues, particularly during the 2016 US presidential election campaign, discussed her recent shift to advocacy in a rare interview with Vogue magazine.

“Rights are being stripped from basically everyone who isn’t a straight white cisgender male,” she says in the September issue.

“I didn’t realise until recently that I could advocate for a community that I’m not a part of.”

Swift’s latest music video, You Need to Calm Down, featured some of the US’s most prominent queer celebrities and ended with a direct plea for fans to sign a petition in support of the Equality Act, to protect LGBTQ people from discrimination in their places of work, homes, schools and other public accommodations.

It followed a social media post in the lead-up to the 2018 midterms condemning the Republican senator for Tennessee, Marsha Blackburn, over her record on gay rights, which drew a rebuke from president Donald Trump.

The music video, and her recent conversion to prominent LGBTQ ally, have drawn praise as well as criticism – with some accusing Swift of “queerbaiting” and performative allyship.

In the magazine, she describes a conversation with friend and fellow singer Todrick Hall which she says left her feeling “devastated” she had not been vocal enough in her support for the LGBTQ community.

“Maybe a year or two ago, Todrick and I are in the car, and he asked me, ‘What would you do if your son was gay?’” she says.

“The fact that he had to ask me … shocked me and made me realise that I had not made my position clear enough or loud enough,” she says.

“If he was thinking that, I can’t imagine what my fans in the LGBTQ community might be thinking,” she goes on. “It was kind of devastating to realise that I hadn’t been publicly clear about that.”

Swift also discusses the toll a public feud with Kim Kardashian West in 2016 took on her wellbeing.

“A mass public shaming, with millions of people saying you are quote-unquote canceled, is a very isolating experience,” she says.

“I don’t think there are that many people who can actually understand what it’s like to have millions of people hate you very loudly.”

“When you say someone is canceled, it’s not a TV show. It’s a human being. You’re sending mass amounts of messaging to this person to either shut up, disappear, or it could also be perceived as, ‘kill yourself’.”

She goes on to say that making music was the only way she could preserve her mental health at the time.

The singer’s latest album, Lover, is due to be released on 23 August. In Vogue, she teased two forthcoming songs from the album – the title track Lover, and The Man, which she describes as a “thought experiment” of what her life would have been like if she were male.