Angela Weiss / AFP / Getty Images Taylor Swift arrives on the red carpet for the Time 100 Gala at Lincoln Center in New York on April 23.

Set aside, for the moment, the argument that public figures coming out is good for the community: Openly gay and bisexual people can serve as It Gets Better–style role models for all the many LGBT people out there who aren’t able to be open in their own lives quite yet. And the more openly queer people there are, the less stigma we’ll all face. But besides all that: Queer celebrity gossip is fun! (Of course, there’s a difference between friendly questioning about somebody powerful and viciously outing vulnerable, private citizens. Even shipping famous same-sex couples can go off the rails. That’s not the kind of queer gossip I’m talking about. Mostly, I mean shooting the shit with my friends.)

Whenever I’ve been with a bunch of lesbians and the topic of Taylor’s rumored queerness comes up, somebody will inevitably joke that they’d happily trade her in for Rachel Weisz or Cate Blanchett instead. (All of those people today, hearing Taylor didn’t actually come out, are feeling quite relieved indeed.) We argue about whether or not she broke Karlie’s heart, whether she really dated Dianna Agron. Celesbian gossip, like all celebrity gossip, isn’t really about the celebrities. It’s about us, about what we value — in ourselves and in one another. It’s about what we want in our partners and friends and communities. Do we have a responsibility to come out? What makes a good queer, a progressive queer, a hot queer, a likable queer? What kind of language do we use to define who we are? How important is our sexual orientation to the way we structure our lives? Why do we put some queer people on pedestals and not others? What do we want a queer-friendly world to look like? Celesbian gossip is also sort of soothing, because it can mirror the way a lot of us feel in our daily lives, trying to suss out whether or not our crushes might return our feelings. We’re all living in real-life versions of that famous discussion in season one of the L Word, when everybody’s trying to help Dana figure out if her new love interest is gay: Did you look at her fingernails? Did you look at her shoes? What is gay life, after all, if not an endless hunt for other gay people? This time around, I found it quietly remarkable it is that, leading up to Taylor's grand announcement, we could even speculate about her sexual orientation so widely and loudly at all. Just a few short years ago, indicating that a celebrity might be gay or bisexual on social media, in the press, or any other kind of public platform could get you accused of “outing” them without their permission. For a million years, it seems, Kristen Stewart was openly holding hands with her girlfriends but still getting gal-pal’d and straight-washed in the tabloids. Only when Kristen “officially” came out were we, the public, then given permission to name what we’d already been seeing with our own eyes.

Taylor Swift Productions A still from the “Me” music video.