In June 2015, two days before same-sex marriage was federally recognized, Hayley Kiyoko released her song “Girls Like Girls.”
At the time, Kiyoko was 24 and had built a fan base from her acting roles in Disney Channel fare. But she was now putting out an explicitly Sapphic song when she had come out as a lesbian only privately, to a few people in her life.
“I grew up seeing Ellen on the magazine cover, then getting her show canceled and the backlash,” Kiyoko said of Ellen DeGeneres’s 1997 “Yep, I’m Gay” Time cover. “My examples of being authentic meant not being successful in your career. That was one-to-one to me, so it was very scary.”
In the 11 years since, however, Kiyoko has become a queer icon — her fans refer to her as Lesbian Jesus — and she has expanded “Girls Like Girls” into a multifaceted universe: first, by writing a 2023 young-adult novel based on the anthem’s music video, which became a No. 1 New York Times best seller; and now, by directing and co-writing its feature film adaptation.
The movie (in theaters) is a dreamy drama that follows Coley (played by Maya da Costa), the new girl in a small town who is grappling with her developing feelings for Sonya (Myra Molloy). Neither teenager is out, and their coming-of-age in the 2000s coincides with their coming to terms with their sexuality. Zach Braff plays a supporting role as Coley’s father.
“I have been driven to tell this story because I knew it needed to be told, and I knew that I was the one to do it,” Kiyoko, 35, said. “It felt like my purpose in life was to get this movie made.”
For a late May interview, Kiyoko suggested meeting at Daichan, a small Japanese eatery near her home in the Studio City neighborhood of Los Angeles. Kiyoko visits the restaurant often, she said, and the owner knows not only Kiyoko’s name but also about her gluten, garlic and onion intolerances.
“It reminds me of my grandma’s house,” Kiyoko said over edamame, fried tofu and salmon sashimi. “Anytime I’m stressed or need a home-cooked meal, I come here.”
The restaurant is about a half-hour east of where Kiyoko grew up in the Agoura Hills area. There, Kiyoko fell in love with performing at an early age. Her mother, Sarah Kawahara, is a former professional figure skater and a choreographer, and her father, Jamie Alcroft, is a comedian and voice actor.
As a kid, Kiyoko played the drums and dreamed of joining “Stomp” or the Blue Man Group. Then, when she went to an ’N Sync concert in 2000, she decided, “I want to be a pop star,” she said. “I was like, ‘I want girls screaming.’”
At school she was involved in a variety of leadership activities, but Kiyoko said she “had to learn how to project confidence to survive” as she spent her teen years hiding her sexuality.
“No one explicitly said, ‘Don’t come out,’ but the world made me feel that way,” she said, her voice catching. “I have a vivid memory of being 14 and being like, ‘I hope I live till 26.’”
She wrote songs about girls but kept them locked away in her room as she began auditioning for commercials and performing at open-mic nights on Hollywood Boulevard. One of her first breaks came in her midteens, when she was chosen to be part of the short-lived girl group the Stunners. (Tinashe was also a member.)
By her late teens, she had starred as Velma in two made-for-TV Scooby Doo movies. She also played a recurring character in the Disney Channel series “Wizards of Waverly Place” and had a prominent role in the network’s musical film “Lemonade Mouth.”
But acting was simply a way for Kiyoko to get closer to being a musician, she said. And in both mediums, she struggled to see a way forward that would allow her to be authentic.
“I was never Asian enough, or I was never white enough” for casting directors, she said. On the music side, she added, “I’m not seeing a half-Japanese lesbian chart on Billboard and sellout arenas.”
So, she said, “sometimes, you have to take matters into your own hands.”
THE EVOLUTION OF “Girls Like Girls” from a self-released song to a novel to a theatrical film is a testament to Kiyoko’s grit, said her fiancée, Becca Tilley, in a video interview.
“She doesn’t take no for an answer,” said Tilley, who appeared as a contestant on “The Bachelor” before meeting Kiyoko. “She’s like: ‘What’s the worst they can say? “No” five times? They’ll eventually say “yes” on the sixth.’”
Back in 2015, most outlets, Kiyoko said, declined to promote the “Girls Like Girls” music video, which the singer directed with Austin S. Winchell and which features its female protagonists kissing.
“They used the words ‘risqué’ and ‘niche,’” she said. “Why do you call lesbians risqué? They’re just kissing.”
But soon after the video was released on YouTube, something unexpected happened — the views skyrocketed.
“I was doing a show in Lansing, Mich., for 15 people in a bar,” Kiyoko said, “and the video hit 500,000 views. Then, it was a million, and we basically went up a million every week.”
“Girls Like Girls” had resonated with young women and girls who saw themselves in its lyrics, which stressed the mundanity of how “girls like girls like boys do, nothing new.” One of those was the singer Gigi Perez (“Sailor Song”), who was 15 years old at the time and still grappling with her queerness in a conservative environment.
“It was overwhelming for me to experience such head-on representation,” Perez, 26, said in a video interview from her hometown, West Palm Beach, Fla. “I look at Hayley with such amazement because she did so much work to give people my age, people like me, the ability to feel comfortable. She let us know you can be yourself and the water is fine.”
Weeks after the song’s release, Kiyoko signed with Atlantic Records, and she has continued to put out music with openly queer messaging.
Kiyoko had initially hoped to expand the “Girls Like Girls” video into a feature film, and she collaborated on a script with the actress Stefanie Scott, who had starred in the “Girls Like Girls” music video. But the original deal fell through, and over the years, Kiyoko struggled to find producers willing to take a chance on her as a first-time feature director.
“The book was my Hail Mary because the movie wasn’t happening,” Kiyoko said. “My whole career has been out of necessity.”
From the outset, Kiyoko had been resolute that a film version should hit on “all the classic tropes” that she had watched in straight coming-of-age stories and also reflect her own experiences as a closeted teenager.
Still, in some pitch meetings, she was met with feedback that “this story doesn’t need to be told because we’re past that,” she said. “We’re past acceptance. Everyone is queer.” But Kiyoko doesn’t buy the notion that society has moved beyond the need to see conflicted coming-out stories.
“That’s been told to me about 100 times,” she said. “I’m like, ‘OK, well, then list 10 that you’ve seen in theaters.’”
After the success of the novel, Focus acquired the film rights to “Girls Like Girls” in 2024. Kiyoko pushed for the film to have an accompanying soundtrack — a rarity for a project of its size. Without the budget to license existing tracks, Kiyoko wrote and collaborated with queer artists, including Tegan and Sara, Snow Wife and Perez.
“Hayley is Wonder Woman,” said da Costa, one of the film’s young stars. “She worked on every area of this movie, from making a whole album, directing, being the voice of the audiobook that I listened to in my ear. She just cared so deeply about making this thing feel real and authentic and be her vision.”
KIYOKO IS ACUTELY AWARE that the box office performance of “Girls Like Girls” could affect the chances that similar films will be made in the future. Americans’ support for L.G.B.T.Q. rights has declined in the past decade, and Kiyoko said she feels “so much pressure to make sure that this is a success.”
“The hope is a queer kid in a red state or someone who has felt alone in their experience, even if they’re not queer, that they’ll feel seen,” she said.
Kiyoko now aims to make a career behind the camera her primary one, directing movies and TV shows and also creating their accompanying soundtracks.
She would like to adapt for the screen her 2025 novel, “Where There’s Room for Us,” which is set in an alternate reality of Victorian England. And she might find a way to give “Girls Like Girls” yet another iteration: “I actually would love it to be a musical,” she said. “That would be a dream.”
As she polished off a tuna avocado roll with brown rice, Kiyoko reflected on what she hoped would be the legacy of “Girls Like Girls.”
“This is not a thing that goes away; this is who we are,” she said. “I think that’s my goal in life: to normalize our experiences.”
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