★★☆☆☆
How heartening that a mainstream studio flick could have a gay protagonist. How disappointing that said flick is as twee and anodyne as this. Nick Robinson (likeable, bland) stars as Simon Spier, a 17-year-old schoolboy in Atlanta, whose life appears to have been curated by an irksome advertising agency. He has gorgeous, understanding parents (Josh Duhamel and Jennifer Garner), he listens to the Kinks (on vinyl, natch) and he has a sickeningly clean-cut group of friends, for whom “drinking too much coffee” is the ultimate vice. He’s also gay, but he hasn’t told anyone, until he meets an anonymous person online who is in the same boat. The inevitable coming-out scenes are nicely done, though still bedevilled by clichés — the friend who knew all along,…
He hasn’t yet plucked up the courage to come out to his family or friends, and his sole confidant is an anonymous pen pal, another boy at school, who admits to being gay as well. These two pour out their hearts to each other, but only behind the safe curtain of email aliases, and while Simon’s curiosity about the identity of “Blue” drives the story this way and that, his correspondent is resolute about playing coy.
One thing Love, Simon handles really nicely is the way it allows its hero’s longings to flit excitably from one guy to the next, in the manner of most inchoate crushes we have when we are young. He gets his hopes up that Blue might be one person, only to rule that person out and alight on the next candidate. Meanwhile, his straight friends have a bunch of feelings towards one other, and in one case towards him, which get tangled up in his calculus, especially when a classmate called Martin (Logan Miller, terrific) snoops on a library computer and blackmails him to fulfil a romantic agenda of his own.
If Simon had the guts, he’d come out there and then to avoid screwing up multiple friendships. But he’s also got Blue’s privacy to worry about, so he submits through gritted teeth to what Martin wants, and winds up feeling treacherous and alone at the precise moment when he needs his friends the most.
Anti-LGBTQ activist Peter LaBarbera was, unsurprisingly, not a fan of the new gay teenage romance film “Love, Simon,” complaining to Religious Right radio host Janet Mefferd on Tuesday that the film fails to promote a “religious message” and does not warn audiences that gay people face a life of physical and mental illness “and of course the judgment of God.”
LaBarbera joined Mefferd on Tuesday to weigh in on the release of “Love, Simon,” which is a romantic comedy film that features a 17-year-old boy who reveals his sexual orientation to his friends and family and falls in love with a classmate. LaBarbera, who has long been livid about the entertainment industry advancing LGBTQ causes, shared with Mefferd what he saw to be “three myths” promoted in the film.
“Number one is that being homosexual—quote-unquote ‘gay’—is basically who you are, intrinsically who you are. You know, if that line just happens to be gay. That’s number one. Number two, that there’s a total mutual equivalence between homosexual romances and the gay lifestyle and normal, heterosexual living, so it’s presented as totally equal. Number three, that parental love, the way they love their son after he comes out and declares his homosexuality or they find out, the parents, is they just basically express regret they didn’t know earlier,” he said. “There’s no sorrow. There’s no religious message at all in the movie, Janet, and there’s nothing that says any disapproval.”
LaBarbera said he believed the movie was “like a Disney gay movie” that was made for teenagers before complaining that “there’s no aftermath after this boy finds his quote-unquote ‘gay’ romance.”
“We’re never going to hear later about the diseases associated with homosexuality that he likely would get, mental illness, and of course the judgment of God,” LaBarbera said.
Mefferd asked LaBarbera to expand on what he meant when he referred to mental illness, to which LaBarbera responded by promoting the book “The Health Hazards of Homosexuality,” published by the anti-gay group MassResistence. He claimed that conditions like HIV are now “gay male diseases,” claiming that this is the case “because homosexual behavior is a perversion like God says it is, it is deviant, it is not normal.”
LaBarbera also said he was upset that “Love, Simon” posed the question of why heterosexual people don’t have to come out as “straight” to their friends and family. He answered the question by saying it was “because that’s the way God designed it.”
“It’s so basic and yet Hollywood is doing everything it can now. We’re going to see more and more movies like this. And Janet, this is the first major teen homosexual romance film to be a big box-office hit. And so this is, again, Hollywood is trying to mainstream sexual sin,” LaBarbera said.
