‘It’s radical to release a film called Girls Like Girls in this climate’: hitmaker turned director Hayley Kiyoko on sexuality, safety and becoming ‘Lesbian Jesus’

2026-10-02

A lot of Hayley Kiyoko’s teenage summers were spent waiting, bored and pining, as she sat at the computer willing her crush to message her back on AOL instant messenger. Like Coley, the 17-year-old protagonist of Girls Like Girls, the film the pop star has co-written and directed, Kiyoko fell hard for a girl who “put me through my own heartbreak and haunted me for a long time”, she says.

Although the 35-year-old singer became known by fans as “lesbian Jesus” following the release of her breakthrough single Girls Like Girls in 2015 (the film is an extended version of the story first told in the song’s music video), feeling comfortable in her sexuality didn’t actually come until after its release. Her gay identity was, at the time, the topic she was “the most scared of writing about”, and the song’s confident refrain “Girls like girls like boys do, nothing new” came from wanting to “manifest feeling confident”.