Movie Review: Love, Simon

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Welcome folks! I’m Al and this is the podcast of The Holiday Pride: A Pittsburgh LGBT+ Community Museum.

            I remember Love, Simon coming out in 2018. I was already too old to be the target audience. I was graduating from my Undergraduate college and was then a young adult, not a teenager. Not to say I couldn’t have enjoyed it, I was just at the point in my life where the struggles of teenagers was so outside of the worries I was having it just wasn’t a good match. However! I also remember all of the conversations around Love, Simon. I remember how many people adored it but also had many criticisms of it.

            At the time, and even now, I both understand the criticism, but have some, I think, reasonable push backs against those criticisms. I also, now that I’ve watched it, have a lot of my own criticisms I hadn’t seen before? Maybe I missed them, I wasn’t that invested back in 2018 and that is long enough ago that it makes it a bit harder to find the many detailed and niche reviews of the movie from back then. However, I noted a few things that rubbed me a little wrong and other things that made me raise an eyebrow in confusion, but for the most part, it’s a pretty solid movie…but I will admit now that I skipped through at least three sections of it out of pure secondhand embarrassment. I get secondhand embarrassment really badly and I just couldn’t handle three scenes, and I’ll let you know which ones they are.

            As I talk about the plot of this film, I’ll bring up my thoughts as we move through it. I did not read the book the movie is based on so this will only be a review of the movie, although I may look up a review of the book because I have some questions, but I’ll get to those questions later too. For now, I’ll provide some background on this movie and book.

            Love, Simon is based on the book Simon VS the Homo Sapiens Agenda by Becky Albertalli. The book came out in 2015 and become very popular amongst teenagers who all identified heavily with Simon, a closeted teenaged boy. In fact, this book captures the experience of being a closeted teenager really well, regardless of gender. The desire for community, fearing bullying, fearing rejection, fearing your own identity. At least, that’s what I’ve heard about the book and it’s definitely what I saw in the movie.

            Frequently, books about gay men are written by women. In my experience, the really good ones, the stories about gay men that can be relatable to many queer folks, are often written by queer women. There are a number of books about gay men specifically that are written by straight women, and it shows. Albertalli is a bisexual woman who ended up having to out herself as such after there were some harsh criticisms about her being presumed straight. However! I would not attribute how well this book captures the experience of young queer teens purely to her own queer identity. She worked for a time as a psychologist for queer teens. If anything, she is clearly projecting herself onto Simon’s mother rather than Simon.

            The movie is a pretty historic piece of media. It was the first film that a big company, 20^th Century Fox, put out about a gay teen. It was the first really popular teen movie that was about a queer person. Which is really important, more than most would agree with me about. Now, it’s just another cheesy, little cringy, teen movie. But in 2018? There were so many movies about a teenaged girl or boy falling in love and dealing with the struggles of being a teen. High School Musical was so popular for that exact formula. There were heterosexual teen couples everywhere, but there wasn’t a single film about teenagers for queer teens. Due to the way queerness is seen as very sexual and for adults, most films weren’t appropriate for kids.

            Then Love, Simon comes out and finally, queer teens have a really average and normal movie just for them. I can see why people love it so much. I can also see why it became a little forgettable to others. There are many more things for queer teens to watch now, but back then it was revolutionary.

            With my 2026 eyes, what is the movie like?

            Well, let’s start at the beginning—spoilers ahead!

The film opens with Simon getting ready for school and narrating to the audience about his life, family, and friends. Simon has a loving family, a little sister who likes to cook and they all spoil just a little bit. His mother and father are high school sweethearts who have become great parents. His mother is a psychologist and his father was once the start of the football team and now—I can’t remember his job, but he’s a good family man who adores his children and cries whenever confronted with how much he loves his family. Simon has two best friends from childhood, Leah and Nick (who I named girl space friend and dream boy in my notes—I didn’t catch names for awhile in this film Nick is ‘dream boy’ because he enters Simon’s car in the opening and just starts talking about his dreams for reference). Just recently, Simon and his friends have included another girl into their group. Abby just came to their town after her parents divorced (I called her new girl for a while, but as she shares my wife’s name and it was said perhaps the most in the film, I caught onto it faster).

            The plot important ‘Creekwood Secrets’ website is also introduced. Any student can apparently post to this website with gossip, secrets, or news from the student body. The first post we see from this website is from a mysterious ‘Blue.’ Another closeted gay kid at the school anonymously relating his emotional experience as a closeted gay kid to the high point and low point of a Feris Wheel. That will be important later, and is one of my favorite foreshadowing moments in this movie.

            Desperate for connection, Simon makes a whole new google account to email Blue, relating to him the same narration we received in the opener signing it Jacques which is a play on his own name just in French. That begins email exchanges between the two of them that follow us throughout the movie, that are not obnoxious. You know how sometimes films include text messages and emails into their plot and they have them on screen as text bubbles next to the actor who is pretend typing on something, be that a computer or phone? This movie doesn’t do that. Instead, they zoom way in on Simon’s phone or just show the words appearing in the email with his narration. Personally, I enjoy that method of including texting and emailing into a film.

            Anyway, the four friends get to school and I’m going to talk about this background character now because it’s when I started to get suspicious of some casting and design choices in the film. Now. There is one openly out gay kid at school. He is a young black man with straightened hair, as in, it is either a wig with pin straight hair, or his hair was straightened for this role. He is overly effeminate and is friends with three blond, white, blue eyed girls who would be the ‘mean girls’ in any other film. He is teased and harassed and called a number of things and he always has a very sassy come back that sounds like a drag queen reading someone while also dressing pretty much in skirts the whole movie, or what look like skirts.

            I have…questions. I am white, I am not an authority on this, but I have some questions as someone who has read and interacted with and interviewed some black queer folks. Now, this is a very diverse cast. Nick and Abby are both people of color. Blue is a person of color (we’ll get to who Blue is, I promise). This is a pretty mixed demographics high school. The theatre teacher is a person of color—it’s a really diverse cast, I couldn’t tell you if the production and writing team were. I can say, that I cannot tell how this character is supposed to be taken.

            More than once, gender, especially gender mess that drag queens are well known for, are spoken about in not necessarily a positive way, but could be taken as not negative—let me explain. We are introduced to this gay character, Ethan, we are shown him being bullied and snapping back with sass and then we get a voice over by Simon saying something along the lines of “he shouldn’t make it so easy for the bullies.”

            Then, later, Simon insults another character, Martin before a Halloween party. Martin is the villain, and he does kind of suck, but in this scene, he is wearing a black slip with words on them as he is dressed as a ‘Freudian slip’. The insult is that Martin looks like ‘a drag queen rolled around in magnetic poetry.’

            First, a drag queen would do that, I can see it, so it’s funny. Second—is it supposed to be funny? Is that a bad thing? Martin is in a fake beard—I don’t know. I’m of two minds. Simon is a closeted gay teen, and most closeted gay men are known for being hostile to gay men who look and act how society expects all gay men to act, effeminate. Gay men who don’t identify that way often hold the opinion that effeminate gay men and drag queens give ‘normal’ gay men a bad look. This—kind of reads like that.

            Yet, there’s another layer that bothers me. Ethan being presented as, essentially, a sassy black drag queen is—something. There’s so much at the intersection of blackness and queerness that I don’t think this film could handle or deal with. Or meant to deal with. It made me raise an eyebrow, although Ethan as a character is handled well. He and Simon do talk at one point and he’s a joy.

            Maybe I was just expecting something bad. Transness is often treated poorly in films like this from big companies like 20^th Century Fox. But—I’m not a gay black man. I’m a white trans guy who felt the conversation around gender mess lacking but dodged well enough as it wasn’t within the scope, if you will, of the film. I don’t know. I’m on the fence, but I’m done with this topic now. I don’t think it ruins the film at all, it just raised flags in my head.

            So, moving forward…its established that there’s one out gay kid in the entire school which ups the pressure for Simon and Blue to not come out. They see what happens when you do.

            Simon and his friends go through school, interact with their Vice Principal who overshares every aspect of his life and is…trying. They are all part of the theatre club or class which is putting on Cabaret…which brings me to my second and hopefully last rant.

            There’s a lot of weird conversations around sex in this film? I counted—about 7 conversations about sex in this film. Five of those were between adults and teenagers. Simon’s parents do it twice, the Vice Principal does it once, and the theatre teacher does it a lot. And the school…a high school in Atlanta Georgia is putting on Cabaret.

            That’s a little weird, right?

            Let me put this into perspective. For those who don’t know, Cabaret is a musical about a sex club in Nazi Germany. This is 2018, Trump was president. What high school could afford Cabaret??? For reference, to legally put on a show, you have to buy the right to do so. The movie pretty much just bought the rights to the first song. I don’t know if that’s in the book, but listen. A bunch of teenagers, putting on a musical about a sex club in nazi Germany for their parents is a little weird.

            Now, for those 7 some conversations. At least two of those conversations were between teenagers. There’s a point where Nick and Simon talk about the one time Nick had sex which is pretty great? He talks about how they aren’t taught enough and that it kind of sucked and he didn’t know what anything was—it’s a really fun conversation. The other is between Simon and Leah and is very brief. These conversations, in my opinion, are fine. I think there should be more examples of teens talking to each other about sex because we all know that teens are talking about it.

            It’s those conversations from the adults to the teens that made me pay attention to how often it happened. It would be one thing if they were all conversations like the way Simon’s mother approached them, saying that talking about sex is normal and fine. Educational in a way. Instead, the mom saying that kind of sets us, as watchers up, to question the other sex conversations less. It’s mostly from the Vice Principal and the theatre teacher and they aren’t educational conversations.

            The Vice Principal talks about getting dates on dating apps and unprompted, tells Simon that teachers are people who have sex too….which is weird. Then the theatre teacher goes on a few rants about not getting sex, wanting sex, and that they don’t want sex? It was weird.

            I can’t recall other teen movies handling sex…like this. Was it because it was about a gay teen? Was it because they wanted to be sex positive? I don’t know. I didn’t watch teen movies from this time, I wasn’t a teen. Maybe they were having these same jokes and conversations. Again, it didn’t ruin the film, it was just a little weird. Had they just taken out the rants and weird dating app jokes, it would change nothing about the film. I don’t know. It’s strange. I found it strange.

            Again, I won’t harp on this, it’s just—interesting.

            So anyway, the first half of this movie is really long and tedious. I kept looking at the progress bar thing and wondering how only a handful of minutes had passed. The main thing in this first part is that Simon and Blue are talking and another theatre kid, Martin the aforementioned villain, stumbles upon their emails. Martin, you see, has a crush on Abby because she’s pretty but he kind of sucks. He’s socially awkward seemingly on purpose and tries to be ‘edgy’ and fails with pseudo philosophical speak. We all knew a kid like this. He’s a nice guy who doesn’t handle it well when someone calls him out for not being actually a nice guy. He ends up using a computer right after Simon who didn’t log off of it correctly. When he jiggles the mouse, the email that Simon just so bravely wrote to Blue in the school library, pops up.

            And, like a jerk, Martin takes a bunch of pictures of the emails, corners Simon later, and blackmails him into helping him flirt with Abby. Simon fears for his own secret, but also that he will lose Blue who he is falling in love with. In trying to help Martin, Simon invites him along to a Halloween party a friend of theirs, Bram, is hosting. In the lead up to this, Blue and Simon exchange some information about each other. Blue likes Game of Thrones and Halloween Oreos two things that Bram also likes. So in going to this party (in which Simon and Leah dress up as Yoko Yono and John Lennin, AKA, a couples-ish costume, this is important), Simon is semi-convinced that Bram is Blue and they have some cute moments together during the party…and Simon also attempts to wingman Martin which isn’t overly successful.

            There’s a brief conversation between Nick and Simon about Nick’s very obvious feelings for Abby. Simon dissuades him after very awkwardly pretending to be straight. Nick asks Simon if he thinks Abby is pretty and Simon responds that Abby is but isn’t his type but not because she’s black…another—weird joke. Nick has a pretty appropriate reaction to that stumble. I think it’s a joke based on the fact that Blue is a person of color? I think? If you don’t know that though, it sounds really—something.

            Regardless, they get pretty tipsy because this is a high school party and there’s alcohol. Simon drunkenly talks himself up to tell Bram that he’s Jacques and when he goes to find him, he finds Bram making out with a girl which, of course, means he can’t be Blue. Which I was a bit upset by because I liked Bram, but anyway.

            Simon keeps trying to help Martin who fails every attempt. This leads to Simon getting himself, Abby, and Martin into a Waffle House where their waiter is a classmate who remembers Simon and himself sharing a class. Which leads Simon to think that this guy—whose name I didn’t write down and I only referred to as ‘Waffle Boy’ in my notes—is Blue. In the follow email exchanges, we find out that Blue is Jewish and ends up coming out to his dad (his parents are also divorced which leads me to realize that two of the three main characters of color come from divorced families…it’s all of these different little things that really started to get to me—but no more harping!).

            Anyway, Martin makes this big speech about Abby deserving to be happy, or something—this is one of the things I skipped because the whole thing is occurring with Abby and Martin standing on the booth seats and broadcasting the entire conversation to the entire Waffle House. I skipped it, too embarrassing. After all of that, Simon takes Abby home and ends up telling her that he is gay. She’s very cool about it and happy for him. I liked how she responded to his question ‘are you surprised?’ She says no, so he asks if she knew and she also says no. It’s a very lovely way to say that it doesn’t matter.

            An underlying message of the movie is that being gay doesn’t change who you are or make you less or more. It is just a part of you, which was a lovely message.

            We begin to enter the second half of the movie from here, which is a relief because it goes much faster than the first half. See, because Simon is agonizingly trying to deal with Martin being a jerk and bad at talking with girls, he’s setting his friend group up for disaster. After the Halloween party, Leah hints that she has a crush on Simon, but he’s too gay to realize that and thinks she’s talking about Nick. Meanwhile, Nick wants to ask Abby out and Simon keeps making up all of these lies to keep him from doing so like saying Abby has a college boyfriend or that she has a crush on Martin which really should have been a red flag to Nick. Anyway, at this tipping point, Simon convinces Nick that Leah has a crush on him, which he genuinely thought was being helpful. Nick asks Leah out maybe in a spiteful way? I’m not sure about that. Either way, that leaves Simon and Abby to go to what I assume is a homecoming game together. There, Waffle Boy asks Simon if he and Abby are dating because Simon is lucky to date such a pretty woman which means Waffle Boy is out.

            Martin tries to ask Simon if an idea he has is a good idea, but Simon, rightfully upset with Martin, tells him that he doesn’t care what he does. Which Martin, for some terrible reason, takes to mean his idea is a good idea because he cannot read a room.

            His idea is the second section I skipped because Martin steals the microphone from the girl singing the national anthem to make another grand speech to Abby. I skipped it. I don’t know what he said. I do know that Abby rejects him.

            Then it’s Christmas!! Yaaaay!

            Less yay, Martin outs Simon pretty much instantly to get the heat off of his personal failings. Simon has a relatively reasonable crash out, even if he yells at his sister who reported the post so that whoever runs this secrets blog thing is forced to take it down. He makes her cry which I understood but very much didn’t like.

            Feeling like he doesn’t have a choice, Simon comes out to his parents on Christmas day, which his mom has a good response too, but his Dad clearly struggles with it at first. He fumbles a joke about it before having to flee the room. It makes the watcher think he’s going to be homophobic. Instead, he just needed a moment. He and Simon have a conversation later, much like Simon talks with his mother (not his sister! He should have apologized! Anyway…). His dad is more upset that he didn’t realize something so important about his son before telling him that he loves him and that him being gay doesn’t matter.

            Now, I remember a lot of criticism about this scene. People claimed that it wasn’t realistic or too ‘idyllic’ of a reaction. Which is a criticism that requires missing that Simon’s father married a woman who is a psychologist and anarchist. He makes some homophobic jokes, but its made really clear that he is more trying to not be homophobic in a very misguided way. To another point, this is a rom com. Rom coms are supposed to be idyllic and unrealistic. It’s a fantasy that no matter how much you make a mess of things, you’ll still keep your perfect life and get the girl/boy in the end. They’re not supposed to be reality, they’re supposed to be better than reality. It’s a fantasy queer folks don’t get to see a lot in media about them and it’s media that they deserve to have, no matter how cheesy it is.

            Honestly, sometimes I want to read about a world in which being gay is normal, okay, and accepted with no exceptions. Where a high school in Atlanta Georgia rallies behind the gay kids. That feels nice. It feels normal, because all of the straights get those movies. All the nerds get their ‘not like other boys/girls’ moments. Queer folks deserve that too. I don’t agree with the criticism leveled against queer media that is has to be realistic or that it has to be perfect. Because nothing is perfect and it’s going to be unrealistic and that’s okay. I love that.

            And Love, Simon is a fantasy because over the break, his friends talk with each other and realize that Simon has been lying to them. Then there’s the leaked emails. When he finally sees them, they demand to know why he lied, why he helped Martin and are still unreasonably (to me) angry that he was only doing it because he was being black mailed. I can kind of see why Abby was angry, she knew he was gay and he definitely should have just told her once that went alright. I do not understand Nick and Leah. Yes, Simon lied to them, well, to Nick. He honestly states that he thought he was helping Leah who snaps that she liked Simon, not Nick….which leads me to question why she agreed to go on a date with Nick? Even after talking with Simon? I donno, it’s manufactured drama for the plot’s sake.

            Regardless, Simon ends up alone, even without Blue who deletes his email after the entire fiasco out of fear of also being outed, leaving Simon all alone. He’s okay with his family, and after briefly thinking that the kid who plays piano for theatre is Blue (he point blank asks the kid who says no, but then is kind enough to ask him if he needs to talk things out, kudos to that kid), Simon is bullied by the local jocks.

            These jocks have been mocking Ethan the whole movie and make the leap in logic that because Simon and Ethan are gay that must mean that they’re dating. They put on this—show? It’s supposed to be bullying, but really makes it look like these two bullies have a thing for each other. Anyway—the theatre teacher puts an end to it when Simon stands up to them despite feeling so alone.

            This cuts to Simon and Ethan sitting outside the oversharing Vice Principals office as he lectures the bullies. I was confused why Ethan was there at first. I really didn’t realize that one of the bullies was supposed to be dressed up as Ethan during this—really not helping their case—but the two of them have a really nice conversation which I’m realizing in real time means three of the four characters of color have divorced parents in this…

            Anyway, the bullies are forced to apologize, and Simon manages to make up with Leah probably because the reason they were all so mad was superficial anyway. So, Simon makes his own post on the blog taking back control of his own coming out and leveling a challenge to Blue. At the school’s fair, on the Feris Wheel, he’ll be waiting for Blue to come and join him.

            Thanks to his well written post and the scolding the bullies got, the entire school rallies behind Simon on fair day…very—‘and everyone clapped’ kind of thing. Again, this is a fantasy, where everything ends up okay, so of course the school thinks Simon’s cool and brave for this (but doesn’t think that of Ethan which—right. Not harping…).

Having made up with everyone, the only thing missing is knowing who Blue is. Simon gets on the ride, having handed over a bunch of tickets, and…waits. Everyone does, because they want to see this go well.

Right before his tickets run out, Martin runs up and claims to be Blue because, even if he’s a jerk and sucks…he knows he messed up big time and feels really bad for Simon, especially since it seems that Blue isn’t coming. Simon blandly tells him he’s lying so Martin just pays for one last ride as an actual apology (it was funny in this scene because Nick in the background clearly fully believed Martin).

Just before he’s strapped in for one last ride, Bram runs up and asks to join him. And I was so happy to be right!!

See, I was kind of baffled that the movie made it seem like Blue was Bram just for him to disappear once he’s caught kissing the girl. BUT! I noticed that in an email Simon sent shortly after the party to Blue which included; Love Jacque, as the sign off that Blue writes it off as Simon being a bit tipsy when he wrote the email.

Now, of the three guys the movie presents to us, only Bram would know that Simon would have been drunk. But the movie moved on from him so quickly, I thought we’d never see him again! So I was happy to know I was right and did pick up all of the clues.

I do wish we had spent more time with him as Bram, like—that he didn’t fully go away. He writes off kissing the girl as being super drunk himself, which I could see, and that’s…about it. They end up kissing at the top of the wheel, to exciting cheering from the crowd.

The movie then ends with Simon picking up all of his friends, and then boyfriend, finally out of the heavy hoodies he wore the entire movie, and taking them on a little trip around town, something he clearly would have never done before. He and Bram are dating and it’s very cute.

All in all—I clearly have questions, but it’s a good movie! I enjoyed it—minus it being nearly two hours and feeling like four. There was this one scene I loved though. There are a few ‘imagination’ scenes where the cast act out a hypothetical Simon narrates. One of which is about how straight folks don’t have to come out. That scene includes all three of his friends coming out as straight to their families, all of whom react to the news just like homophobic parents do when their children tell them that they’re gay. It’s very funny and highlights how utterly bizarre the reactions are.

My favorite is the actress that plays Abby’s mother just for this scene. She nails it. She fully understood the assignment where the other actors clearly felt the ridiculousness of the idea. No, she nails her performance.

I will say that it is very much just another teen drama movie. In today’s world, it would be one of a bunch and would be forgettable, but there’s no denying how powerful that movie would have been back in 2018…not to mention the book itself in 2015. I remember people scoffing at the idea of queer folks getting a relatively normal movie back then, and I’m glad that’s changed so much, in thanks to this movie.

I have my complaints and questions, but I do recommend the movie, if only to see what you think about the different aspects. It’s not perfect, and it doesn’t need to be. It’s exactly as I’d like. A little messy, a little silly, one or two great scenes, jokes that do make me laugh, and the horribly wonderful feeling of an average movie made just for people like me.

That was a Review of Love, Simon by the Holiday Pride. Thank you for listening and thank you for sticking around.