“Internet Angels” by Emmeline Clein
Two girls among the green, between trees. Hands on hips, heads tipped back, eyes searching sky. Six years before Taylor Swift announced her eighth studio album by posting a photo of herself standing in a forest, she posted another photo of a forest holding two women, which she has since deleted from her grid. Don’t stress, it’s not gone. It’s just entered the next stage in the celebrity Instagram life cycle, which means that it’s truly ours now, property of the stans with the prescience to preserve.
Your braids like a pattern
I love you to the moon and Saturn
Passed down like folk songs
Our love lasts so long
It’s gay, the girl I love texts me, minutes after the album hits the Internet, and then she says more, before I can respond, even though I’m already typing, i know i know i know. We are typing too fast to reply to each other’s points.
Straight love doesn’t need to be passed down by folk songs. . . also it doesn’t last lol, I write. Straight ppl don’t sing about braids and gardens and Saturn, she spits back, and she’s right, and when I open TikTok and Twitter and Tumblr I find queer girls typing even faster than we are, agreeing with us in the ether. This conversation rubber-bands across days, stretching thin until it’s barely visible, until it might break. But we’ll never run out of unearthed paparazzi photos and de-archived Instagrams or re-listens that spark epiphanies.
Kaylor is the fan-created couple name for Taylor Swift and the supermodel Karlie Kloss, the other girl in the forest photos. Taylor and Karlie fostered a very public best friendship between 2013 and 2016, complete with road trips, matching outfits, birthday posts that bubble over with emojis, and simply too many longing glances, flirty touches, cheek kisses, and intertwined fingers for Taylor’s queer fanbase, young and yearnful, not to draw some connections and start some conspiracy blogs. The Kaylor hashtag has 20.7 million views on TikTok, 56.6 thousand posts on Instagram, and a seemingly infinite scroll of hashtagged gifs, images, and posts on Tumblr.
I’m conflicted, unsure how to convey the combination of daydream, pink-edged and soft-focus, and conspiracy theory, with reams of research and hard evidence, and a sense of surety, that thinking about this maybe couple gives a group of e-girls. Get me going on the references to hiding, the words like gorgeous that just can’t apply to a guy named Joe, and I start to feel drunk on possibility until the tipsy tilts me into shame. Did I say too much—I mean, shall I go on?
In high school, my best friend asked me to take her headshot. She showed me photos of Karlie Kloss in Teen Vogue, and said she wanted to look like her. We were in ninth grade, still naive but certain that we were cynical, jaded by middle school. It was the Fearless era, and we wanted to be wrongly overlooked, so that one day we could be discovered.
She wears short skirts, I wear T-shirts
She’s cheer captain and I’m on the bleachers
In the video for this song, Taylor plays the girl listening to the type of music the other girl doesn’t like. She wears oversized hoodies and rims her eyes in black, dances alone in her room. She plays the other girl too, the one who pulls up in a top-down convertible wearing baby pink lipstick and steals the boy. But it’s not really about him; she kisses him quick, stares down alt-Taylor over his shoulder. Their eyes lock longer than lips ever do in this video.
We sometimes stared like that at the popular girls cooing in the corner, and felt the hot shock of shame down our spines when they shot us judgmental glances. My friend shook it off, but then she started shrinking. I took a photography class and begged her to be my muse. I took photos of her using lighting schemes I’d just learned, trying to tell her that she didn’t need to slim her body into a sliver of itself, that I wanted her to fill any frame I was looking at. I think I freaked her out; she stopped seeking me out in the halls soon after I turned in my final portfolio, all glossy images of her. I didn’t have the words to write a love letter yet.
Later, when someone I felt too strongly for dropped me abruptly, I turned to food and alcohol. A shot of vodka or a French fry could make me forget her for a second. Burning my tongue or my throat was the only sensation that felt as extreme as her holding my hand, pulling me somewhere, anywhere. I get drunk but it’s not enough.
Around the time that girl stopped speaking to me, Taylor and Karlie got in a car and drove down the coast of California, and I watched through my phone like all the other lonely girls. The road trip is integral to Kaylor lore. Drive out of the city, away from the crowds. I thought heaven can’t help me now. She references sin a lot for a good girl, Miss Americanah. I’m not a bad girl but I do bad things with you and I did something bad /Then why’s it feel so good. What did they do in that car, that cabin? Fodder for our fantasies, forever. Vogue, bastion of body fascism and heteronormativity, felt the need to clarify the nature of their relationship, lest we wonder whether America’s blondest best friends were more than that. America is fine with BFFs, they can sell us necklace sets for that, but America is not ready for its golden girls turning out to be gay girls, so Vogue swooped in to set the record straight. Luckily for us, their best efforts ran a little crooked.
In the magazine’s joint profile of the girls, Taylor tours the author through her apartment, and points out a photo of her and Karlie’s first meeting (I loved you in secret, first sight). Of all the photos accompanying this article, two in particular show up again and again in the fan-made Kaylor collages and video montages. One is a close-up of Taylor and Karlie cheek to cheek, staring somewhere we can’t see, four blue eyes and blond hair brushing together, Taylor’s arms around Karlie’s neck and Karlie’s hand gripping Taylor’s shoulder. It’s too intimate, too touchy; just friends just don’t dangle all over each other like that. The other has Taylor draped across the bed in the back of an RV, Karlie’s hand hidden in her hair.
Female friendship bends borders and rules, teen girls take things too far. As a culture, our fascination with two girls talking to each other too much alternates between fear and fetishization, awe and repulsion. Our obsessive fascination with the bonds forged through the fires of femininity crosses from lowbrow to literature, from Mean Girls to My Brilliant Friend. The books I read in middle and high school were about friendships that ran hot, groups of girls who kept one another’s secrets, committed murders and solved mysteries together, girls who stayed up all night whispering and wept when they fought. Pairs of girls are often more emotionally intimate with each other than the heterosexual couples in the same books and TV shows. We were all re-blogging photos of Nicole and Paris, Brittany and Winona. A baby queer girl can easily get the wrong idea, or the right one.
When you don’t want to disappoint the world, you can convince yourself that your love is the love between the BFFs in the book you’re reading, never mind the jolt you get when she pokes between your ribs, teasing. I thought I was supposed to want to be with her all the time, sit within touching distance, never mind my shaking hands, give her compliments wrapped as carefully as my presents. Lylas, love you like a sister, we wrote to each other when we signed off AIM chat at night, before I got into bed and didn’t think about her like my sister at all.
Simply imagining America’s pop princess confused like this too, finally breaking and kissing Karlie hard, hands on her face, makes me less ashamed of how hard coming to terms with my own queerness has been for me, how mysterious and menacing my own mind has been to me. Fantasies that made me feel good made me feel trapped. Gold cage, hostage to my feelings. In middle school, I used to lie on my back at night, eyes squeezed shut, and pray, asking God to not let me be a lesbian. I just wanted to want the things the girls I spent all my time with wanted, instead of wanting those girls themselves.
A divorcée from St. Louis. disrupts the last great American dynasty, at least in Taylor’s telling. Rebekah isn’t young but she behaves like a girl, laughing too loudly and drinking too much, making her man’s heart race so fast it startles to a stop, and then she won’t even say sorry. She doesn’t mother anyone, and sends her dead husband’s family fortune down the drain of their massive pool, in dumped- out bottles of expensive champagne. There goes the most shameless woman this town has ever seen / She had a marvelous time ruining everything. So did Taylor, when she dated a Kennedy and bought Rebekah Harkness’s moldering old mansion because it was near the Kennedys’, then threw raucous celebutante studded ragers in broad daylight there after they broke up.
Gay girls disrupt dynasties too, just like girls with new money. Bad, bad boy / Shiny toy with a price / You know that I bought it. In my Taylor folklore, she used her fresh fortune to buy herself a beard, American royalty to boot. Another great American dynasty disrupted is the lineage of Victoria’s Secret Angels, who, as of 2019, no longer strut and stomp their slivers of bodies across an elevated surface wearing wings and barely anything else. The show was permanently canceled, but was once a grand American tradition: an army of starved girls almost baring breasts and butts while blowing kisses on live TV, as men in suits watch, smug and staring, having paid for the whole thing.
Ironically or ideally or both, this is where the Kaylor love story starts. The girls met backstage before Taylor performed at the Victoria’s Secret fashion show in 2013, and by the following year’s show legions of gay girls were breathlessly watching an event they’d once boycotted. A multimillion dollar production by men for men co-opted by gay girls tweeting how horny they were for Kaylor content? And they said “There goes the last great American dynasty . . . / She had a marvelous time ruining everything.”
A girl tweets, “I had a dream that Taylor Swift came out at the Victoria’s Secret fashion show through a projected video of her and Karlie Kloss kissing,” and gets more than six hundred likes. Interviewed backstage by an Angel in a slinky, silky robe, Taylor describes preshow prep for her performance at the fashion show. She says that backstage is chaos, but her trailer is a refuge for the girls. “Every single one of the girls has been in that trailer. And they’re all wearing these robes, by the way. It’s like an actual fantasy.” Taylor’s eyes widen. Maybe she realizes the implications of what she’s just said about what she dreams of in the dark, and she looks at her lap. The camera angle switches and she’s saying something else; we’ve clearly skipped a scene.
In a video I found deep in the Kaylor tag on TikTok, I find interview footage of Karlie calling Taylor the “American Dream” cut with blurry iPhone camera video of Taylor writing one of her songs, which seems to hark back to the show: Like tryin’ on clothes / Salute to me, I’m your American Queen / And you move to me like I’m a Motown beat / And we rule the kingdom inside my room. In the final song, the phrase turned from “American Dream” to “American Queen,” and Karlie shimmying her hips to Taylor’s tunes on the runway plays on a loop in this TikTok video. Comments on the video include “I am over trying to ease the new girl i’m dating into my obsession. Favorited and sent to her lol,” and “kaylor tiktok is where I belong.”
Because Kaylor TikTok is also where I belong, I’ve watched every angle of Taylor’s performances at the VS fashion show. At the 2014 show, when the girls have known each other for a year, they walk down the runway with their fingers twisted together, tilt their faces toward each other, and give what Vogue called “can you believe this? grins.” And this moment does make us believe, as the girls get caught up in the moment, elevated and almost alone. As they stand above the crowds of seated, suited men, we believe in Taylor singing softly to Karlie, all the boys and their expensive cars . . . / Never took me quite where you do. Karlie blows her a kiss and mouths along to the lyrics, every word, saw you there and I thought oh my god, look at that face, you look like, my next mistake... so hey, let’s be friends, I’m dyin' to see how this one ends.
Us too, Taylor. So we dive deep into the lyrics, desperate and determined. On the album she releases after that show, we get our answer: Carve your name into my bedpost / ’Cause I don’t want you like a best friend. Gay girls all over the country get giddy. Someone makes a PowerPoint called “Reputation is about Karlie Kloss: A comprehensive guide to the gayest album of 2017.” The thirty-seven-slide file goes viral, and is linked on Tumblr and Twitter over and over, where girls joke about presenting it to friends and lovers and in high school classes.
But back to the show. Actually, I can’t describe the way they look at each other. Google it, see for yourself. Karlie points at Taylor as she sings, grinning wide, proud, and my heart flutters like Karlie’s stupid Angel wings when I watch these videos. There’s something about the notion that these gorgeous girls could be like us––these are the success stories under patriarchy, and for those of us who have felt like failures in it the idea that they could be pulling the wool over the eyes of every man masturbating to the Victoria’s Secret fashion show and every corporate guy paying for it feels something like revenge against the system that’s scorned us, and there is nothing I do better than revenge. I’ll admit that that song is sort of an anthem for internalized misogyny, a rageful rant at a girl who stole Taylor’s boyfriend. But that’s also part of the Kaylor phenomenon––the idea that we can evolve, that we grew up with these paradigms put in our minds by the world around us, but maybe we don’t have to live with them forever.
The girls’ blown kisses and held hands during the fashion show have the same effect on us as that too tender, cheek to cheek photo making it into the Vogue photo shoot, which is that of secret moments in your crowded room, getting away with getting off to something society has taught you is shameful, a light touch that feels like lightning. They got no idea about me and you.
It’s the feeling of knowing something they don’t, the straights. They think they know about love, but they know nothing about hiding, hating yourself, sleepless nights, and reckless hands finally feeling someone under them.
Everyone thinks that they know us
But they know nothing about
All of this silence and patience, pining and anticipation
My hands are shaking from holding back from you
We’re listening to this song on our own road trip, and my friend is laughing. “I mean,” she says, making a hard left on a yellow light, “as someone who has secretly been fucking her best friend, that is what it’s like.”
I’m still on that trapeze / I’m still trying everything / To keep you looking at me
Because I’m a mirrorball . . . / I’ll show you every version of yourself / Tonight
The first girl I fucked had come out in college, and I was jealous, impressed, and trying to impress. I was twenty-three and twisted inside, tired of trying to make men fall in love with me and wired on coffee and coke and self-loathing. With boys, I was bad at saying no and worse in bed, but I’d never been naked next to a girl before. I told myself that the opportunity hadn’t presented itself, but I hadn’t been pressing palms against my boundaries, reaching for the world. Instead, I’d been pulling them closer, sucking in my stomach, and cleaving skin ever closer to bone. I was bad at saying no to boys in bars but good at binging, even better at pretending interest in health and wellness, clean eating being code for not eating.
That night she said hi hi hi and pulled me into a hug immediately, and we kept coming back to each other all night. We snorted white powder in an all-white bathroom, our noses crinkling at the crisp of something in the back of our throat, a strange gasoline smell slinking up our skulls. We sat side by side in the Uber, and when her thigh hit mine I noticed, relieved, that mine wasn’t bigger than hers, and then I felt something unclench in my abdomen. On the dark dance floor, someone turned on a fog machine, and I lost her for a few minutes. The drop in my stomach and the catch in my throat jarred me—what had I been wanting, or waiting for? And then she was back, and I don’t remember who kissed who, and I thought this was like those other college makeouts. Maybe she was avoiding someone or showing off for someone else, but then she was holding my hand and pulling me up the stairs, and we were stumbling onto the sidewalk. In the glow of streetlights and headlights, free of the artificial fog, I couldn’t believe she was still pressing her palm to mine. I continued to barely believe everything all night, her hips against mine and the things she said into my hair.
In the morning, I pulled on her ex-boyfriend’s sweatshirt, and made a joke about how he’d probably never imagined his sweatshirt ending up on me, in her bed. We laughed and felt like we were subverting something.
We go to the beach years later, friends now, and her friend’s bulimia comes up in conversation, and I say something about how hard it’s been to gain the weight that’s come back, plus some, since I recovered physically from my post-college eating-disorder relapse. She shrugs and says not to worry about it, she likes thick girls. Really? I ask, because I was almost my skinniest when we first hooked up, basically her size. She’s abashed then, unsure of what to say. Her abs shouldn’t be an insult and an enticement at the same time, but in our bathing suits now they feel like one.
That same trip, she texted a photo of us to someone we both knew. The girl wrote back immediately: “Do you guys still lick clits?” She read it aloud, voice veering toward a screech before she laughed. “Of course,” she writes back, with a lot of exclamation points, and then, “Just because i’m dating a dude doesn’t mean i’m not GAY.”
Our friend is shocked by our shock. Of course she wasn’t asking whether we were still bisexual. “I wanted to know if you’re currently licking each other’s clits, duh,” eye-rolling emoji. Now we’re embarrassed by our reactions, but our first interpretation made perfect sense. When people are constantly implying that your sexuality is a phase, you stop being surprised when they ask whether the phase is over. When you are young, they assume you know nothing.
Recently, one of my best friends told me that her latest ex has her almost swearing off men. She told me not to be surprised if she goes on a date with a woman soon, and then sends a bunch of cry-laughing emojis. Another bisexual friend’s mom asked her if she thinks a friend of hers dates women because she couldn’t get a man to fall for her. This is a pervasive myth, one that makes queer women, especially, the butt of a joke, as though female sexual attraction were actually just a case of two women rejected by boys crying into each other’s arms, so desperate that a platonic embrace turns sexual. Who cares whether the fluids are coming out of our eyes or our vaginas?
But we were something, don’t you think so?
Roaring 20s, tossing pennies in the pool
And if my wishes came true
It would’ve been you
In the photo by Taylor’s pool, the girls are wearing different bathing suits in the same colors, caught mid-laugh, slippery and glistening on an inflatable slide. Karlie’s hand is bent at an unnatural angle, so that she can wrap it around Taylor’s wrist, tender. Taylor’s then-boyfriend isn’t in the picture but he was at the party, wearing an “I <3 TS” T-shirt despite the fact that he’d been dating Taylor for only two months, as any responsible beard would. Taylor and Karlie in love, stealing touches in daylight and savoring them at night, attracting the type of men who make People’s Handsomest list but choosing each other instead? Definitive proof that a woman’s romantic love for another woman isn’t a last resort after a series of rejections but a destination, a paradise they’re wishing for even once the summer heat has cooled into fall, and they’re telling folktales by a fire.
In that Vogue interview, Taylor recalls a makeup artist saying of her and Karlie, “They’re the same. Karlie’s such a good girl.” That’s another thing Kaylor gives gay girls—that is, good girls in love with each other. So many of the bisexual and lesbian characters in movies and TV are cast as villains, breaking up fan-favorite heterosexual couples or dragging a bicurious protagonist into a drug den. In celebrity culture, too, gay girls are often reported on as “bad girls,” rebels with wild tastes. Miley Cyrus, Lindsay Lohan, and Bella Thorne are all former Disney darlings whose “good girl gone bad” journeys involved romantic dalliances with women. Cara Delevigne, the first VS Angel to be given her wings while out of the closet—and, incidentally, caught on video slapping Taylor’s ass backstage in 2013—has been called “fashion’s favorite rebel” in W, Vogue, and Fashion.com. If Karlie and Taylor really are gay, they give gay girls who don’t want to “go bad” a vision board of queerness that isn’t part of a walk on the wild side, a trendy deviance. Of course, if they are gay they’re still in the closet, which makes my mood board imperfect, but I’ve got so few girls to glom on to, let me have these.
Closeted Kaylor also offers another avenue for gay-girl catharsis through its potential to play out like a spy movie, Taylor and Karlie hidden agents in the tower of heterosexuality. This dream sequence lets us imagine handsome, hard-to-get men with the wool pulled over their eyes, Taylor toyin’ with them older guys, just playthings for me to use. This scenario inverts the power structure, making the straight man the butt of the joke for once.
One of my favorite TikToks, one that gets me giggling every time, shows only the top half of its creator’s face, a deadpan stare. A short section of the song “Dress” plays, Say my name and everything just stops. I don’t want you like a best friend. Above her head, the girl has written, “The fact that some of yall think anyone would write a song like this about ed sheeran is concerning.”
Unfortunately, good punch lines are like sugar rushes and the euphoric phase of getting drunk, like being in love in secret, a dwindling mercurial high. Kaylor couldn’t last; the closet gets claustrophobic, even in models’ mansions.
People started talking, putting us through our paces
I knew there was no one in the world who could take it
I had a bad feeling
But we were dancing
Dancing with our hands tied
Almost a decade ago, a fan uploaded blurry iPhone footage of what looked like a Kaylor makeout at a concert. After “kissgate,” magazines and gossip websites fanatically reported on it, and during the next two years the public friendship faltered, then faded. Somethin’ happens when everybody finds out. . . Love’s a fragile little flame, it could burn out.
On the album notes for Folklore, Taylor wrote about the mood she was trying to create with this music, one she described as “hushed tones of ‘let’s run away’ and never doing it. Fairytales and parables. Gossip and legend. Someone’s secrets written in the sky for all to behold.” If we’d been reading lyrics like coded messages, this felt like one she sent on the back of a blimp, in skywriting. The Kaylor Internet went wild. The relationship was mythic, after all, the stuff of our fairy tales.
In my bed, I watch the videos loop in the early morning light that comes through the edges of my still drawn shades, hours after she releases the album notes, pretending it’s still night, an appropriate time to dream. People post videos full of text on top of multicolored backgrounds, deconstructing the lyrics of every song on the album, along with audio of a woman saying, “People get exhausted trying to figure me out, and I just let them,” joking about Taylor talking in convoluted code, but grateful for the gift just the same, and they get to work breaking it down.
Another video just shows a girl with her eyes closed, smiling softly, swaying to “Dress.” The words “this song is so blatantly sapphic like yall are tripping if you don’t hear it” hover above her head. I hit heart on one person’s comment on a video of the two girls hugging, foreheads a few centimeters apart, overlaid with the sound of someone saying, “By far one of the most defining moments of the twenty-first century is this photo, and it’s not even edited.” The commenter wrote, “If I ever get off Kaylor tiktok I will cry.” I get the sentiment: sometimes seeing how badly other people want exactly the same story you want can cut the loneliness of lying in bed with your phone, and all those pastel colors and close-ups of pink lips, soothing music, and sarcastic captions start to look a lot like love. Whether or not Karlie and Taylor were really in love, those of us hearting and posting love each other enough to keep the story spinning.
I understand why Taylor and Karlie couldn’t stay friends after their breakup, if it happened. I have the type of friend Karlie might be to Taylor, too, the type that wanted me but wanted a boyfriend more. The last time we hung out without kissing; we talked about our eating disorders. She tap, tap, tapped through her phone to find the Facebook photos, still there with all those likes, where she looks like a smiling skeleton, teeth too big for a face so gaunt, fingers clutching the edges of a Jacuzzi for what looks like dear life. She told me people liked it when she was as sparse and spiky as her poetry. She told me she got compliments instead of concerned questions.
The next time I saw her, I kissed her or she kissed me. I can’t remember who started it, but I remember the shots we took, the burn in my throat matching the burn all over my body, wanting to touch her neck. In the morning, she made an outfit out of my clothes, which fit her baggily. Lying on our backs, I’d noticed the peaks of her hip bones, the crags of her ribs, and pulled the blanket over my softer self. After she left, I found the pants she’d abandoned halfway under my bed and attempted to pull them on. They wouldn’t button, left my skin red and puckered where I’d tried to force them to fit.
We only hooked up one more time, but we stopped being friends abruptly after that. We smoked cigarettes and she told me her boyfriend was mad, that he’d acerbically said to wish me luck with her. At the party, in the bathroom, she asked if she could kiss me, pushed me against the marble wall.
I got out of the cab that night in tears, licking my lips and tasting snot and salt instead of anticipation. Cried like a baby coming home from the bar. It had been the type of friendship that’s like a fever, getting us flushed and talking a little deliriously, words rushing over each other—me too me too me too no one else has ever put it that way—getting closer and closer on the couch. The type of friendship that moves too fast to last, the type I’d been fostering my whole life without realizing that what I was actually looking for was a different kind of love. I don’t want you like a best friend.
In a 2019 interview, Karlie Kloss says, “The reason I decided to stop working with Victoria’s Secret was I didn’t feel it was an image that was truly reflective of who I am and the kind of message I want to send to young women around the world about what it means to be beautiful.” She had just reached the legal drinking age when she became a Victoria’s Secret Angel, and had been modeling since she was in her teens, internalizing an especially potent version of the fatphobic and homophobic vision of ideal womanhood that all American girls grow up with, one where winning Angel wings indicates that you’ve achieved feminine aesthetic perfection.
Karlie and Taylor have both spoken publicly about the trials and tribulations of striving to be skinny, specifically the struggle associated with realizing that your body isn’t meant to be the way you want it to be, an epiphany that often applies as much to your body’s desires as to its shape. Specifically, both women have anguished over going from a size zero to two and from a size four to six, a journey that jeopardizes careers, despite how ridiculous that sounds. These are conventionally beautiful white girls who just aren’t quite small enough, and something about how close they are to what we’ve been taught is perfection proves just how, in Taylor’s words, fucking impossible the ideals we are taught to aspire to are. Impossibility is the point. These standards are designed to keep us striving forever, sprinting on a treadmill toward something that never gets closer, distracting us from doing other things with our minds, things society might not want us to do, like look over at another girl and notice the way her stomach swells and compliment it, or even reach out and caress it. “My body became more womanly––hips and thighs appeared. I started losing jobs; I wasn’t getting booked for the runway; designers stopped working with me. It felt as if my world had been turned upside down,” Karlie said, of going up a size.
In her documentary, Taylor talks about tabloids that circled her stomach and overlaid it with the words FAT! and PREGNANT, and the way seeing those words or images “would just trigger me to just . . . starve a little bit, just stop eating.” She also talks about reckoning with wearing a size four or six instead of a 00, realizing “that wasn’t how my body was supposed to be,” something that “at the time, I really don’t think I knew.”
In an essay about her own and Taylor’s disordered eating, Anne Helen Petersen wonders if “like me, some part of Swift did know her body wasn’t supposed to be functioning that way—especially when she was praised, in every way imaginable, when her body was like that.” This sentiment hits hard for me, especially when I read it for a double meaning that might not be there but helps me get through the day. I’ve been there, addicted to compliments and aching with hunger, feeling like the caverns of my desire for love and my desire for food were mutually exclusive, but denying that fact to myself, just as I denied other ways that my body worked off engines I thought it shouldn’t, turbines of desire I wanted desperately to turn off, because I was so lauded when I pretended guys got me turned on instead. You’ve got such great game lately, a friend texted me, as I left a party with a guy I knew would earn me accolades, tripping over drunk because I’d barely eaten that day.
Karlie took off her Angel wings in 2015, the year after Taylor’s last performance at the show, and in the documentary Taylor tracks her recovery from her disordered eating to the years between her 1989 and Reputation albums. Both of these timelines also trace the contours of the girls’ relationship, allowing for the possibility that loving each other helped them learn to love themselves, liberated them a little from the beauty ideals that had been wound so tightly around their minds. “You look like an angel,” the girl I love once said to me in the morning, sunlight striking her sheets, and I knew that she didn’t mean like a Victoria’s Secret one, but I’ve never felt more beautiful.
Emmeline Clein is the author of Dead Weight: Essays on Hunger and Harm (Knopf, 2024). Her writing has appeared in publications including The Paris Review, The Nation, The Yale Review, The New York Times Magazine, and The Washington Post, and her chapbook Toxic was published by Choo Choo Press in 2022. She is an editor at Triangle House Review and teaches at Columbia University's School of the Arts.
