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How many times have you heard the name Travis Kelce in the last week? Personally, I’ve lost count. To be completely honest, I was hoping that the hype around the football player’s rumored relationship with Taylor Swift would only be an object of media obsession for about a week before we all moved onto something else. Is it really that interesting when celebrities are romantically linked to each other? Famous person dates other famous person, news at 11!
But we’re talking about the storied love life of a pop star who sold out stadiums around the world and is currently threatening to turn your local AMC into a decibel-shattering sing-along. Of course people are going to be … a bit obsessively invested in all of this, especially given the raging internet debate about whether Swift is secretly lesbian or bisexual, as the “Gaylors” believe.
The point is: If you’re feeling left out of the monoculture lately, I don’t blame you. The Taylor Swift-Travis Kelce relationship feels like a perfect storm designed to consume American civilization. It hits every quadrant of our society: pop girlies, internet-poisoned posters, red-blooded sports fans, and suburban tabloid readers. If we’re not careful, this dyad will be all anyone discusses until the inevitable breakup song gets released in 2025. And that’s a long time to sit silent.
Which is why I regret to inform you that we all have to learn who Travis Kelce is. As a community, we have more or less adopted Taylor Swift already (though opinions on her music differ), but if you’re like me, you’re unfamiliar with her alleged beau. So I present to you my best possible explanation of Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce, tailored for the queer community.
To the untrained eye, football is about throngs of men in padding running into each other over and over again. But there is in fact order beneath the chaos.
In American football, two teams of eleven players try to move an oval-shaped spheroid past their opponents into an “end zone” to score points. They can accomplish this by throwing the spheroid to a teammate (“passing”) or by sprinting it down the field (“running”). It’s hard to move the ball 100 yards in one go, so teams try to do it 10 yards at a time (“getting a first down.”) If the team that currently has the ball doesn’t hit that “first down” after four attempts, the other team gets the ball (“takes possession.”) There are hundreds of other rules, but unless you’re planning on getting into the sport, you don’t need to know much more than the basics: big boys move the ball.
The National Football League is the most popular professional sports organization in the country, boasting a revenue of nearly $12 billion. While LGBTQ+ football fans certainly exist, it’s fair to say that most queer people know football as the thing their dads, brothers, and uncles watch on Sundays. Generally speaking, we do not “stan” football. Only one NFL player, Carl Nassib, has ever been out while actively playing in the league. The league dragged its feet on racial justice, only rarely hosts Pride nights, and the sport quite literally hurts people’s brains.
No, he does not. Travis Kelce is a tight end for the Kansas City Chiefs, meaning he typically either catches the ball or helps block for someone running the ball, depending on what the quarterback (the guy who throws the ball) tells him to do.
Yes, he has won two Super Bowls. This is a major slay. He’s set a bunch of records, too. Some people think he’s one of the best tight ends to ever play the game. The tightest end, if you will. Yes, people have made lots of dirty jokes about the phrase “tight end” before. You’re not the first to make the connection.
You may have seen him hosting Saturday Night Live earlier this year, or on a 2016 dating reality show called Catching Kelce. He has been in commercials for Pfizer, Experian, and more. There are over 1,000 players in the NFL and very few achieve this kind of crossover success. He was already kind of a household name before all this, but he is certainly ubiquitous now.
Probably not? He was in a recent ad for the COVID-19 booster shot which sadly suggests a certain political leaning in our era of right-wing anti-vax brainworms. He also did a Bud Light ad after the whole Dylan Mulvaney controversy broke out, which suggests he’s no Kid Rock. Kelce hasn’t publicly shared any political affiliations, but one would certainly hope that an increasingly liberal, pro-LGBTQ+ pop star wouldn’t date someone with completely terrible opinions. For his part, Trump is not optimistic about the duration of Kelce’s relationship with Swift, telling a conservative news outlet, “I hope they enjoy their life, maybe together, maybe not — most likely not.”
Eh. Not really. Look, everything the guy has ever said is currently under scrutiny, so something may pop up eventually. (He hosts a podcast called New Heights so there’s quite a lot of tape to review.) So far, people have discovered that he once said something to Andy Cohen about it being a “dealbreaker” if a woman doesn’t like to give oral sex, and wanting to have sex by the third date. Some Kelce haters are trying to make a mountain out of that molehill, but if we’re keeping it real here, it just sounds like the dude knows what he’s looking for.
Your mileage may vary. I like him without the beard but with a mustache because he looks a bit too much like a young, non-purple Thanos when he grows out the facial hair on his chin. He is very tall — 6’5” — which I am told is something that straight women find especially attractive. And he has a kinder face than many football players I have seen. He does not look like he’d call me slurs, which is always a plus. Kelce has drip, as the kids say, though I could do without this bucket hat moment. Short answer: Sure! He’d clean up in a gay bar if he were batting for the other team, and he’d probably find plenty of people willing to give him oral sex before the third date. Just saying!
He’s a Libra, a.k.a. a notorious flirt. Taylor Swift is a Sagittarius. That makes this an air sign / fire sign relationship, which … well, good luck. We all know what oxygen does to flames.
Not great, Bob! I do not recommend reading the Gaylor subreddit right now. Many proponents of the theory that Taylor Swift is privately queer are convinced this is solely a PR move that will precede an inevitable coming out. But let’s remember that if Taylor Swift is a bisexual woman, she wouldn’t be the first to date men! That’s kind of baked into the name of the sexual orientation.
He sure has! Earlier this year, he gave Biden a Chiefs Jersey to mark the most recent Super Bowl win. He pretended to start giving a speech at the ceremony, only for Patrick Mahomes (the quarterback, a.k.a. the guy who throws the ball) to shoo him off. This is the kind of thing that passes for a joke in straight society, but he’ll have to up his comedy game if he wants irony-pilled queers to like him, though I don’t know why he would especially care about that.
A natural question! Of course you’d ask this. Yes, he is. He is a very big fan of the song “(You Gotta) Fight For Your Right (to Party!)” and even performed it on The Tonight Show.
I suppose not. You’re free to go about your life, unbothered. But you will read his name and see his face multiple times a day every day until such time as Taylor Swift deems fit to exile him from her life. But who knows? Boyfriend number sixteen might be the one! And then they’d probably be the closest thing America has to a royal couple, which means we’ll read about them until we die.
It’s hard to use the phrase “break up” because they haven’t confirmed they’re dating, despite Swift’s appearances at Kelce’s games. But if they do go separate ways, expect the Gaylors to get some wind in their sails and Chiefs game viewership numbers to dip as they lose the Swiftie bump. And then we as a community can forget that we ever knew someone named Travis Kelce.
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