![]() There’s no greater example of the campy veneration of heterosexual artists on Tumblr than One Direction. “ Hozier is a lesbian” is currently an active tag on the site. The Irish “Take Me to Church” singer espouses a particularly sapphic kind of yearning, according to his queer fanbase on Tumblr. This is also, bewilderingly, the case for Hozier. right?!? rt if u agree,” she recently tweeted). like it’s in the top 10 best songs of the year FOR SURE. In return, she often echoes the language of her queer fanbase, rooting for herself via the excessively punctuated enthusiasm and multiple letter cases of a Tumblr post (“i really feel like Gone is one of the best songs that has been released this year. This is the case for Charli XCX, once a very active Tumblr user herself. ![]() It’s now increasingly common for queer fans on Tumblr to bolster the popularity of musicians who are thought to be heterosexual. “‘Cause shade never made anybody less gay,” sings Swift, who recently came out as straight, on “You Need To Calm Down.” Queer people will find themselves represented (or appropriated) in pop music now more than ever-they’re even beginning to share a common language. At the same time as this industry-wide shift, says McCracken, “the last 10 years has really seen what is considered by fan studies scholars as the mainstreaming of fandom by the corporate media.” That’s also meant that queer fans, who rely on “transformative works” (fan-created and fan-centered art) in order to serve their own interests, have been targeted more directly. The intense level of engagement that Tumblr inspires from its queer users is an especially valuable currency now that most musicians make more money from their tours and merchandise than their actual music. This itself is not so surprising: In addition to courting a queer audience with her rainbow-colored, LGBTQ-icon-featuring video for “You Need to Calm Down,” Swift’s most active social media presence is on Tumblr, where she regularly interacts with fans, often reblogging their praise and referring to them by their first names. She sees some of the trends found within Tumblr’s LGBT+ tags-“positivity, self-empowerment, vivid colors”-reflected within the visual world of Swift’s seventh album. Brennan points to Taylor Swift’s use of “Tumblr vibes” on her new album Lover, whose cover resembles the kind of fan art you’d find on the platform, all butterflies and millennial pink. This doesn’t mean the artist has to actually be queer, though. “dreamy and thoughtful and super, super queer.” At this point, these album covers might be described as giving off “Tumblr vibes,” Brennan says, i.e. For musicians who came of art and age on the website, the music become inseparable from its same-sex, pastel-colored imagery: the orange of Ocean’s summer of love, the pink-aquamarine of Halsey’s Badlands, the candy-floss backdrop of Troye Sivan’s Blue Neighourhood. ![]() People can share their desires not just with the clumsiness of words, but with the impossible romance of a highly edited image, an endless loop of two people kissing. Users’ dashboards are filled mostly with visual mediums-GIFs, photos, screenshots, and videos, all capable of evoking strong feelings. That image-based ephemera is part of what makes Tumblr resonate with such immediacy. “It had me on the edge of tears, and it makes me so upset b/c to me finding content like that 5 minuet video is so rare.” “I watched Hayley Kiyoko’s 5 minuet music video about two girls,” one user posted, after seeing their desires refracted into ceaseless GIF form for perhaps the first time. In a formative example of this trend, back in 2015, Kiyoko found her music career bolstered by queer Tumblr fandom after releasing “Girls Like Girls.” While she’d already accrued a small following thanks to her role in Wizards of Waverly Place, Kiyoko’s popularity grew exponentially after Tumblr caught wind of her ode to other girls. The same happened for Lil Nas X when he revealed this summer that he isn’t straight. Meme librarian Amanda Brennan, who works on Tumblr’s Fandometrics project to chart fan trends across the site, says she noticed a large spike in popularity for Panic! At The Disco among Tumblr users when the band’s singer Brendon Urie began identifying as pansexual in July 2018. With the rise of queer acceptance came the monetization of it.
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