Queer Taylor Swift Fans Raised Money For an LGBTQ Community Center to Outdo Her Ex, Matty Healey

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Many queer Taylor Swift fans were distraught when the singer was publicly linked to Matty Healy, the frontman for the band The 1975, earlier this year. The controversial Brit is known for making comments that many found offensive. While Swift and Healy’s relationship was short-lived, its impact on the fan community can still be felt. And so when Gaylors — fans who read Swift’s art, and sometimes life, through a queer lens — saw an opportunity to stick it to Healy while also doing something good for the LGBTQ+ community, they jumped on it.

Last week, The 1975 was pictured holding an oversized check for $500, a donation to benefit the The San Diego Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Community Center (the donation had been made in the band’s name by Pechanga Arena). The photo made its way to Gaylor X (formerly Twitter) and began to get a lot of attention.

“Seeing a well-known band do a photo opp with one of those giant checks for only $500 was comical, but also a bit insulting,” says Marki, a member of the Gaylor community from Dallas-Fort Worth. Marki had seen the photo on an X post from a fellow Gaylor named Bre and commented that it would be a good idea to start a fundraiser of their own.

“It was an opportunity to harness the Gaylor community’s frustration [with Healy] into something positive,” Marki tells Teen Vogue. “I think both queer culture and internet culture love a bit of snark, and if you aim spite in the right direction you can make it productive instead of destructive—and get a giggle out of it along the way.”

Bre, a 20-year-old from Ohio, launched a fundraiser; the response was immediate. In just two days, and in small amounts of money raised by mostly queer young people, the total donations were nearly seven times as much as the original $500 that inspired the campaign. The final number, $4,886, was over 10 times their original goal of $501 and helped The Center reach their $100,000 fundraising goal.

“I decided to start this fundraiser because it got under my skin that someone who has been so harmful and awful to marginalized communities happily posed with a giant check for only $500 (as a multi-millionaire) donated in his honor,” Bre says. “It felt insulting and disingenuous.”

During Healy’s brief romance with Swift, many of Swift’s queer fans felt betrayed and alienated by her decision to align herself with someone who had made comments some perceived as racist (Healy has addressed the comments and apologized for offending fans), and has been called antisemitic after seeming to do a Nazi salute onstage. Some longtime people in the Gaylor community left altogether, having viewed Swift as an ally and feeling disheartened by the relationship. While the two were linked, Healy made several appearances at Swift’s Eras Tour, including as a surprise guest during opener Phoebe Bridgers’s set. Some Gaylors and other marginalized Swifties felt uncomfortable sitting through a surprise performance of an artist they not only didn’t support, but found to be harmful.

“When it came to her general fan base of cishet white women, I’m sure … they know so many people in their real life to act that way,” says Madyson, a 23-year-old Gaylor who helped organize GayloreFest, a virtual conference and in-person camp. They also host a Gaylor podcast, Is It Cool That I Said All That? “But to queer people that live our lives every day as very openly queer people, someone like that is dangerous to have in our lives. I think it was a wake up call that Gaylors have values and care about each other.”

In fact, while GayloreFest was being planned, the Healy relationship motivated the organizing team to issue a statement and launch a rebrand, adding the ‘E’ to the end of “Gaylor” in all their branding. The team acknowledged that GayloreFest 2023 was “coming at a time when many of us have no desire to engage with Taylor’s art or presence, or have a dramatically decreased desire than we might once have,” naming the conflict that so many in the community were facing.

“As Taylor warned us on the buried 3am Edition closer of Midnights, ‘Dear Reader,’ she is an impossibly bright light that, while illuminating, was never meant to guide us,” the statement read. “The team behind GayloreFest and Gaylore.org were able to find each other in no small part because of Taylor’s influence and impact… But when it comes to moving forward, to building community, to empowering each other and queer people as a whole, we are each other’s guiding lights.”

Presentation topics were expanded to go beyond just Swift and her music, and some presenters shifted the focus of their workshops to allow space for attendees to acknowledge their complicated feelings. The virtual conference opened with a session called “Unpacking Parasocial Relationships: A Conversation in Favor of Imagination & Community.” The workshop was about parasocial relationships in fandoms and communities and providing people with a toolkit on how to manage those relationships — especially when they end up causing distress, like Swift’s relationship with Healy did for so many in the community.

Swifties as a whole are often stereotyped as more politically conservative, though that’s not necessarily the case. (Swift herself came out in support of Democratic candidates in 2018.) The Gaylor community itself tends to skew more progressive, likely because the majority of community members are marginalized in some way.

“We kind of wondered if the support Taylor has shown for marginalized communities was disingenuous,” Bre says, of the Gaylor community’s feelings about the Healy relationship. “As a community I think we realized that, although we loved her music and we loved her, she was ultimately still a privileged white woman who we couldn’t rely on to be the activist we had hoped for following the Lover era and [the] Miss Americana [documentary].”

Gaylors are a small fraction of the larger Swiftie universe; a 2022 report by Graphika estimated that they were approximately 9% of Swift-related fan accounts. Despite being a small minority of the fandom, the report found that they often experience some of the highest rates of online abuse, harassment, and doxxing. That homophobia and backlash has been evident in some of the responses to the fundraiser.

“The reaction from Swifties and fans of The 1975 has been indifferent or largely negative. Both groups hate the Gaylor community and anything we touch is hated by proxy,” says Marki. “There’s been a lot of criticism about [us] not doing it for the ‘right reasons’ or doing it out of spite. But… the LGBTQ+ community sees a lot of unreliable and performative allyship so we’re sensitive to that.”

As a result of the consistent harassment they face as a group, Gaylors tend to be a tightly-knit fan community. “In terms of connectedness, the Gaylor group is particularly dense, representing high rates of mutual followership,” the Graphika report reads. It’s members also “have a higher affinity for each other than for accounts in other [Swiftie] groups.”

For Bre and Marki, the success of the fundraiser underscores the way that the Gaylor community — and queer people, more generally — show up for each other. “Gaylors frequently crowdfund… to help each other,” says Bre. “Whether it was helping a member of our community get a new wheelchair, or helping them with medical bills for their sick pet, it’s queer people supporting queer people.”

Marki has been really heartened by it all: “When we come together it really is something magical.”

Originally Appeared on Teen Vogue