Summer movies aimed at high-schoolers — comedies, romances, horror flicks — have been a tradition for ages. Think Fast Times at Ridgemont High, Dirty Dancing and the original Friday the 13th, which all drew hot-weather crowds back in the 1980s.
This summer, the movies are queer — not just in casting, but in method and purpose. These three teen flicks transform familiar movie styles by bringing them an LGBTQ sensibility.
A raunchy comedy: She's the He
You know the drill: a bonkers lose-my-virginity plan is hatched by inseparable high-school best buds who are so eager to get girls to notice them, they can hardly think straight.
So, they don't think … straight. For reasons that could only make sense to horny 17-year-olds, Ethan and Alex decide the way to catch the attention of the school's hottest girls is to pretend to be trans.
Filmmaker Siobhan McCarthy uses that premise to tell a sweet story about Ethan (who realizes mid-scam that she really is trans), while also mocking some of the more ridiculous transphobic notions — "bathroom scare," anyone? — that have been politically weaponized recently.
When the whole football team decides that donning women's attire is a small price to pay to get access to the girls' locker room, McCarthy prompts boisterous laughs while also establishing how idiotic and unlikely this scenario would be in real life. Casting trans men — say, team captain played by Emmett Preciado — as the cis male characters allows McCarthy to further poke at conservative anxieties.
As leads Alex and Ethan, Nico Carney (a sharp trans comic whose read on toxic masculinity proves hilarious), and Misha Osherovich (sweetly affecting as Ethan discovers her true self) head a terrific, mostly trans and non-binary cast. And a similarly queer team behind the camera helps make She's the He a raucous, touching, seriously fun charmer — think Some Like It Hot meets American Pie with a Heartstopper vibe.
The romance: Girls Like Girls
This gentle teen love story sprang from a hit song Hayley Kiyoko released in 2015. The music video that accompanied the song pictured a budding lesbian romance and has since racked up over 160 million YouTube views. In 2023, Kiyoko penned a young adult book version, which debuted at the top of bestseller lists. Now, she's brought all of those elements together in a movie about Coley (Maya da Costa) and Sonya (Myra Molloy), two 17-year-old girls navigating a summer romance that takes both of them by surprise.
First-time filmmaker Kiyoko seems content to honor teen romance conventions in a more or less by-the-book tale of first love that has been through enough permutations to feel vaguely workshopped. Still, she's gotten engaging performances from her leads, as well as from a supporting cast that includes Zach Braff as a loving dad, and Levon Hawke (son of Ethan Hawke and Uma Thurman) as Sonya's jealous boyfriend.
The horror thriller: Leviticus
First-time feature writer/director Adrian Chiarella uses horror conventions in this Australian thriller to explore the trauma caused by a particularly callous strain of homophobic cruelty. The story is centered in a small mill town where high school boys Naim (Joe Bird) and Ryan (Stacy Clausen) fall for each other, only to run afoul of the conservative teachings of their religious community.
Chiarella imagines a Christian sect that has put conversion therapy on steroids, curbing queer desire with a scare-away-the-gay ritual that conjures supernatural demons. The boys smirk as church leaders conduct the ritual, but later discover that when they're left alone, they're attacked by murderous entities that take the form of the person they love — each other. Soon, reaching out to — even just seeing each other in school hallways fills them with anxiety. This is, of course, the design: the church leaders want them to be scared. And it will never end.
It's a conversion therapy metaphor as apt for gay kids as the metaphor in Jordan Peele's thriller Get Out was for victims of racial bigotry.
Breathtakingly well-crafted, Leviticus clearly has queer teen audiences in mind — all three of these films do — but not exclusively. Yes, Leviticus fills a representation gap. It's also freakin' scary.
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