“It now has half a million signatures, which is five times the amount it would need to warrant a response from the White House.”
Taylor Swift just shaded the hell out of Tr*mp at the VMAs.
The American singer-songwriter won the coveted award for Best Music Video at this year’s ceremony for her controversial visual for You Need to Calm Down, the second single from her critically-acclaimed seventh studio album Lover.
The video starred numerous queer icons such as RuPaul, Ellen DeGeneres, the Fab Five, Billy Porter, Hayley Kiyoko and Adam Lambert, and ended with the star urging fans to sign her petition for Senate support of the Equality Act on change.org.
It was met with a mixed reception from various queer people and publications who accused Taylor for “appropriating” LGBTQ culture and using it to her advantage. Despite this, it caused a massive surge in donations for GLAAD.
The star accepted the award alongside her best friend and choreographer for the video, Todrick Hall, as well as Drag Race stars such as Tatianna, A’keria C. Davenport and Jade Jolie, who performed the song with her earlier in the night.
“In this video, several points were made, so you voting for this video means that you want a world where we’re all treated equally, regardless of who we love or how we identify,” she said to a cheering audience.
“At the end of this video, there was a petition, and there still is a petition, for the Equality Act which basically just says that we deserve equal rights under the law. I wanna thank everyone who signed that petition.”
She then shaded Tr*mp and his administration because of their lack of recognition for the petition by saying: “It now has half a million signatures, which is five times the amount it would need to warrant a response from the White House.”
Watch her incredible speech below.
Last month, Taylor said – in a conversation with Vogue – that she hadn’t advocated for the LGBTQ community sooner because she “didn’t realise until recently that I could advocate for a community that I’m not a part of.”
“It’s hard to know how to do that without being so fearful of making a mistake that you just freeze. Because my mistakes are very loud. When I make a mistake, it echoes through the canyons of the world,” she said.
“It’s clickbait, and it’s a part of my life story, and it’s a part of my career arc.”
Taylor needed to make her stance on equality clearer after Todrick asked her, ‘What would you do if your son was gay?’
“The fact that he had to ask me… shocked me and made me realize that I had not made my position clear enough or loud enough,” she explained. “If my son was gay, he’d be gay. I don’t understand the question.
“If he was thinking that, I can’t imagine what my fans in the LGBTQ community might be thinking. It was kind of devastating to realize that I hadn’t been publicly clear about that.”
Lover was released last week to universal praise and is projected to debut in the United States with over 800,000 copies; it includes songs such as ME!, You Need to Calm Down, Lover, The Archer and The Man.
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