Teenage Love Affair

The new romantic comedy “Love, Simon” is all about symmetry. This is a well-ordered world where everyone exists in a state that is not perfect, but rarely uncertain. It is a world that even when threatened with the worst of ruptures is able to knit itself back together with ease. This is significant, because, in case you did not know, is the first teen-oriented film by a major studio featuring a gay lead character. If that seems like a very specific description, I will accede. Because there have been better LGBT movies, and there have been better LGBT movies about teens but “Love, Simon” and its place as a generic film filling the conventional teen romance for gay audiences from a major American movie studio cannot be overvalued. Nor can it be ignored. The heteronormative policies of major entertainment organisations is not incidental. And as I watched the film, thinking of it in relation to its source text (the much more cleverly titled and generally more lithe “Simon vs the Homo Sapiens Agenda”), the release and success of “Love, Simon” only emphasised the chasm between LGBT issues in the Caribbean and LGBT issues in the US. The film’s release here comes as Guyana’s neighbour Trinidad had only just hours before struck down its historical archaic and homophobic antibuggery laws, which was just about the most accidentally symmetrical thing. Guyana, of course, still has not.

And so, in talking about “Love, Simon,” it’s impossible not to talk about things beyond the film. And to think of “Love, Simon” in relation to Guyana, it seems essential to think of what it represents. Nick Robinson, who plays the titular Simon, was the romantic lead in another teen movie I reviewed here–the unfortunately bland “Everything, Everything.” “Love, Simon” is immediately better than that–not for its gay themes, or not only. Still, as I recalled the half packed theatre for “Everything, Everything,” another in a long line of trite (heterosexual) teen romances, I wondered if the paltry audience in the theatre for “Love, Simon” (eight in total) was indicative of the late time I had chosen to watch the film, audiences being depleted because of the continuing success of “Black Panther” and the new horror flick “A Quiet Place,” or whether the teens and adults who were requisitely thrilled by “Everything, Everything” were unwilling to buy a ticket to a movie that expressly announced its gayness.

It’s almost funny. Almost. There was a minor hullabaloo on Film Twitter in early March when the film premiered and TIME magazine declared “Love, Simon Is a Groundbreaking Gay Movie. But Do Today’s Teens Actually Need It?” Like cultural criticism tends to do, it was limited to the country of its origin, so TIME’s question was launched at an American audience, and even there the banal vapidity of the question was evident. For even America’s improved conditions for the LGBT community cannot neuter the real issues for gay persons, especially teens who continue to die from suicide, often because of bullying. Nor can those (relatively) improved conditions neuter a US government that seems ambivalent at best and hostile at worst (in the case of US Vice