In an illuminating article in The Guardian, Anne Smith quotes Russell T. Davies, writer of Queer as Folk as saying: ‘Love, Simon’s director has championed gay characters in many TV shows, from Dawson’s Creek to The Flash: “Greg Berlanti is a TV man through and through. He’s got acres of successful gay stories behind him. To see him bringing that into the multiplexes is a glorious victory.” In this podcast we discuss the film as a young adult romance with a twist: Love, Simon gives gay teens a high school movie with a decent budget and aimed at a wide audience. We both have mixed feelings on it, but find it a well-meaning and substantially positive film. We discuss some shortcuts it takes – the use of a queeny character to render Simon more acceptable, the setting in upper middle class suburbia making Simon’s sexuality the only issue in his life, a certain generic formulaicity – and ideas the film depicts as simple that could and should be more complex, including conversations we’d like to have seen Simon have with his best friend and the aforementioned queen. Not to mention the rather flat aesthetics.

It’s a discussion that does almost nothing but pick out flaws but nonetheless finds that the breadth of the film’s intended audience mitigates them and its goodness of heart shines through. As Davies says in the article above: ‘“I think we should be very careful if we imagine these changes are permanent. It’s been almost 20 years since Queer As Folk but still, every time I write a gay character, someone somewhere complains, and someone somewhere says, ‘This is new!’ It’s not one battle, it’s a constant fight.”’

Worth a watch!

Recorded on 6th April 2018.

The podcast can be listened to in the player above or on iTunes.

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José Arroyo and Michael Glass of Writing About Film