This Pride Month has been contentious as hell, and mostly for good reason. The amount of bloodsucking capitalists that think that their patronizing rainbow logos make up for horrible business and anti-LGBT practices is astounding. There’s continuing debate over intersectionality, experience, expression, activism and even as a member of the queer community myself, it can be exhausting and alienating to have these conversations daily, as important as they can be.

Every morning is a new Twitter battle, controversy, or aggressions both micro and macro and I’m just like, damn… it’s 7am.

Sporadically over the past year or so, businesswoman and occasional singer-songwriter Taylor Swift has taken to the Internet to voice her support for Democrats and progressive political policies to her hundreds of millions of fans via social media.

Decidedly, this was not a platform she used during the 2016 US Presidential Election, and it wasn’t until she was proclaimed an Alt-Right Arian Queen for doing so that she decided that some fans might actually be worth alienating. Between that, and getting caught in some Kardashian-West-related lies, it’s no wonder she leaned into the villian narrative with 2017’s Reputation, but even then the results ranged from annoyingly toothless (“Look What You Made Me Do” was a diss track?) to uncharacteristically tone deaf (the gross gun shots in “I Did Something Bad”). She perhaps, needed to calm down, and if we’re getting upset at Taylor Swift for making a gay pride anthem, maybe we do too.

There are so many worthwhile conversations to be had on these things, but they’re not gonna get done on Twitter. Trust me, I know. As a member of the queer community myself and also Extremely Online, engaging in discourse and fighting for civility seems like the righteous move. Though, the fires that start between friends, colleagues, and internet co-habitors over art and its significance (or lack thereof) and how it could change the world is what politics is, no?

This has always been the conceit of what I admire most about Taylor Swift; the way she paints a personally-branded portrait of her life experiences and shares somehow both deeply and broadly at once. At her and any other songwriter’s best, they’re able to reflect a universally lived experience with the intimate details of a single human soul. That may sound preachy as hell, but in an increasingly Personal BrandTM social media influencer hellscape world, isn’t that the honesty and ‘authenticity’ we’re longing for?

It’s what sells best, at least. Because in a post-”thank u, next” world, the act it takes to be both intimately open star or social media personality is not apolitical. And if you have a social media account at all you know the potential repercussions. Swift knows the ramifications of stirring shit in public, so when she writes a song telling people to “step off his gown” or proclaim that “shade never made anybody less gay”, that may sound vanilla to someone who reads Twitter all damn day, but she’s also joined in shoving the gay agenda down mainstream media’s throat, y’know, everyone else other than the 300mil people on Twitter.