Love, Simon: A look at 2018's first gay teen romance

By Robin Dorner
Editor in Chief

A new mainstream teen coming-of-age flick is coming to theatres this March. The twist: the romantic leads are two guys.

Love, Simon is based on Becky Albertalli’s 2015 YA novel Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda. The story follows Simon (Jurassic World‘s Nick Robinson), a teenager who starts an email romance with another closeted classmate.

Robinson stars as Simon, a 17-year-old closeted gay high school student forced to balance his friends, his family, his email pen pal Blue and the boy threatening to reveal his true sexuality to the whole school.

The title is a play on how he ends his correspondences.

From the same studio and producers of The Fault in Our Stars, Simon has all the markings of a classic: football games, drunken parties, school carnivals. It’s funny, sweet, sad and ultimately, ground-breaking, said Entertainment.

Greg Berlanti (Riverdale, The Flash) directs the film.

“There’s this one section of the film where Simon imagines this one boy and imagines them kissing underneath the mistletoe at Christmas,” says Berlanti. “In every other major studio film, it’s always the guy and the girl.

“And there was something so powerful about it being just a guy imagining himself with this other guy in a film again that was going to be marketed and sold as a mainstream romantic comedy.”

Announcing to the world you are gay is a very scary feeling.  

“I think it brings out a lot of good points about homosexuals are treated,” said college student Michael Lane. “At the end, there is a part that talks about ‘why do gay people have to be the ones to come out?’

“Then there is a clip of straight people coming out to their parents, and the parents are crying about their kid being straight. I think they tell the story very well about the feeling of being homosexual without being cheesy.”

The film is scheduled for release on March 16, 2018.

Copyright The Gayly 12/4/2017 @4;56 CST