Read: Taylor Swift’s “ME!” is everything wrong with pop

Fifty years since the Stonewall uprising, allyship has become a tricky subject. LGBTQ folks desiring legal protections, cultural inclusion, social services, and all the other items on the gay agenda rightly welcome the help of straight people. Queer people used to mostly stand alone in advocating for those things, and it wasn’t long ago that a video like the one for “You Need to Calm Down” would have been assumed to be a career-ender for a performer banking on wide popularity. But public sentiment, the marketplace, and the dynamics of online communication have given queerness a trendy mainstream component. Big corporations such as Target and Bank of America see an upside in advertising that involves rainbows and same-sex kisses. Big pop stars do, too.

The fear for many queer people is less that allies might profit off them than that allies might change and defang what queerness means. The A in terms such as LGBTQIA+ typically stands for “asexual/aromantic,” but it’s often mistaken for “ally,” which is a sign of the danger here: People with no personal stake, facing no germane struggle of their own, not only join the club but also begin to define it. If heterosexuals become overly important in the gay movement, then it becomes harder to talk, with precision, about what the movement is actually for. The cause becomes more vulnerable to criticisms of faddishness, or of style above substance—of ROYGBIV and sequins as empty aesthetics. Its colors, in a way, grow duller.

Swift has shown some awareness of the risk of over-centering herself. She’s consistently linked her recent Pride-themed performances—including at the Stonewall Inn—with real activist efforts: writing her senator, directing people to a petition, driving donations. After the “Calm Down” video premiered, she tweeted out that fans should support the video’s co-stars, many of whom are queer, including Ellen DeGeneres, the actor Laverne Cox, the YouTuber Hannah Hart, RuPaul, and a group of RuPaul’s drag disciples. When rumors emerged that Swift and Katy Perry would kiss in the video, Swift shut them down, writing on Tumblr that “to be an ally is to understand the difference between advocating and baiting.”

But the Perry flap hints at why queer folks have a right to feel queasy from the song. Just check out the discourse about the video on Twitter. It’s packed with people marveling, maybe more than anything else, at the climax: Swift and Perry, dressed, respectively, as french fries and a hamburger, hugging. The two onetime rivals didn’t do the classic stunt lesbian kiss, but they did splashily end one of the most epic celebrity feuds in recent memory. Thought this video was about gay rights? Nope, it’s primarily narrative management for superstars.