I can’t thank Taylor Swift enough for making The Life of a Showgirl: The Encore. Is it a good album? No. Is the sound original? Certainly not. Are the music videos engaging? They haven’t been since Reputation. But you’re missing the point.
The white-bread, plain-cracker blandness so dear to Swifties everywhere seems to have finally hit its apogee. Even the staunchest of fans can’t deny that the album is worse than bad—it’s boring. Although everyone else knows to expect both from a Taylor Swift song.
Now, Swift is not just facing Basic Blonde allegations, but also critiques of insensitivity and downright homophobia. Her song, ‘Patient Zero’, is under scrutiny by gay men. It doesn’t help that the music video is a rip-off of Olivia Rodrigo’s ‘deja vu’. They’ve even set aside their sheer horror at the lack of colour or life or spectacle in the music video to focus on the title.
For a layperson, the term brings to mind Covid-19. By 2020, ‘patient zero’ had come to denote the first person infected with a disease. But it first came to the forefront of global imagination during the American AIDS epidemic.
Patient Zero myth
The story begins with Gaétan Dugas, a gay flight attendant for Air Canada, who was diagnosed with HIV in the early 1980s. During that first phase of testing, samples would often come from gay men in Southern California, and since Dugas was an exception, his sample was labelled as “Out of California”, shortened to “O”. In his conversation with doctors, Dugas could recount “a trail of sexual partners in cities across the USA”, and many of them were found to be infected with the new disease.
An early network-style graphic showing a map of patients and their sexual partners by the Los Angeles cluster study placed Dugas at the centre. This made it easier for researchers and journalists to misread the ‘O’ as zero, and Dugas was branded Patient Zero.
A headline in the New York Post called him “The man who gave us AIDS”. He was turned into a caricature of a vengeance-filled gay man who knew he carried the lethal virus and chose to have unprotected sex with others. In journalist Randy Shilts’s celebrated book, And the Band Played On, he appeared as a highly sexually active man, with the implication that he was responsible for spreading the virus.
I’m not sure if it is some small comfort that Dugas’ casting as the villain in the AIDS epidemic came some years after his death in 1984. Research over the years showed that the virus came to the US as early as the 1960s, meaning Dugas could not have been the Patient Zero. It is impossible to pin down any one individual as responsible for a disaster that wiped out a generation of gay men. If blame must be placed anywhere, it belongs at the doorstep of the Ronald Reagan administration.
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Should Swift have known?
Is it fair to expect Swift to know this history? Does she not deserve some grace as an artist in a pop culture industry where the term has evolved far from its origin? In 2018, Matt Smith and Natalie Dormer starred in a sci-fi horror movie called Patient Zero. Should audiences have rejected it?
Sometime in the last decade, gay audiences got tired of watching AIDS sob stories. But in our pursuit of queer joy, we developed a historical amnesia. Last week, I took a chance on the series It’s A Sin and was gut-punched by the tragedy that was the AIDS epidemic. Perhaps we need to do more to remember our history.
But Swift is no starry-eyed debutante. She is a billionaire with enough resources to hire a tiny DEI team to take a glance at her much-touted lyrics. And if she’s too stingy to do that—let’s be fair, her kitschy spectacle of a wedding with Travis Kelce probably cost a pretty penny—couldn’t one of her ‘hot gay friends’ have warned her about the title?
I wasn’t always bored by Swift. When ‘Look What You Made Me Do’ and ‘You Need to Calm Down’ played on VH1, I enjoyed them as nice entertainment. I would even spot the snakes and butterflies hidden in her music videos. Either I simply grew up, or Swift refused to evolve as an artist. And now, she’s turned on gays and women (if you don’t agree with the latter, take another look at some lyrics from The Life of a Showgirl).
Is the 20-year-long spell finally breaking? Will the latest album free at least some girlies from the cult of mediocre music by a 36-year-old teenager? I’m more hopeful than I’ve ever been. It’s time to shake her off, guys.
(Edited by Saptak Datta)