A “Love, Simon” Pseudo-Review

On High School, Deep Dark Secrets, Coming Out, Asexuality, My First Kiss, Longing, Commitment, Separation, and the Eternal What-If?

I initially intended to make this a post for Your Other Brothers. Then I realized this “pseudo-review” for Love, Simon will probably be 2,500 words too long and scattered, diving too deep into the psyche of a world-famous gay/same-sex attracted (SSA) Christian author.

(I’m not technically world-famous, although people around the world have reached out to me for my writings on faith and sexuality. Also, my books were recently sold at a conference one table down from CDs by the David Archuleta — soo, I’ll let the future decide my fame.)

I recently saw Love, Simon alone at the theater. I felt awkward asking for the single ticket. Awkward to be by myself and awkward that the guy behind the counter was probably gay and gave me a student discount even though I haven’t been a student since Barack Obama was inaugurated (the first time).

I picked an end seat to plop myself into, hoping nobody else would sit around me. Hoping I could absorb this movie as privately as possible in such a public space.

Naturally, five minutes later a gleeful gaggle of gays sat two seats down from me.

I first saw the Love, Simon trailer a few months ago, my eyes and heart immediately fixating on the lead actor — the very same guy I gravitated toward and wrote about in my big brother-centric Jurassic World “review.”

Ugh. Nick Robinson, leave me alone.

I’ll admit: I’ve watched a few “gay movies” over the years. Curiosity, connection, a little lust.

I’ll be honest: the ones with sexual activity didn’t really resonate. The ones without sex — the ones featuring all other aspects of the gay experience — those are the ones that stick with me. I could rattle off a short list of so-called favorites, but that’s neither here nor there.

A few friends saw Love, Simon and loved it, telling me to go see it too. Folks on Twitter pestered me to go see it. As a world-famous gay/SSA Christian author and cofounder of a faith/sexuality online community, I need to be knowledgeable about new trends in pop culture, right?

And so, the combination of peer pressure, responsibility, and good old fashioned curiosity-connection-lust drew me to the theater the other night.

Spoiler alerts, henceforth.

Love, Simon: The Resonating

I tracked along with 95% of Love, Simon. The deep dark secrets. The longings for other boys. The conflict between self and persona. The thrill of realizing you’re not alone. Finding freedom through story and the written word. Coming out for the first time. And the second. And to all.

Step by step, scene by scene, they pulled my heartstrings as I handed over my heart, again and again, connecting much of this coming-of-age story to my own.

But then the closing scenes. A romance materializing on a ferris wheel. A kiss before an entire school. The start of a gay relationship.

Credits roll.

And I leave the theater frustrated. Annoyed. Disconnected. Again.

It always goes this way, in movies and in life: resonating with 95% of the gay/SSA experience — Christian or otherwise — but never that last pivotal 5%.

The romance. The sex. The clincher.

Left alone on a ferris wheel like I’m alone in a theater while the gleeful gaggle of gays two seats down proclaim this the greatest gay movie of their young gay lives.

Love, Simon: The Isolating

I’m coming more and more to grips with my sexuality — I thought I figured this all out a decade ago? — realizing that the older I get, the less I want a romantic relationship. Certainly a sexual one. I’ve never dated and never once sought out or even desired sex — with a man or a woman.

Shouldn’t my hormones have kicked in at some point? Back in high school or at least before getting kicked off my dad’s health insurance?

Am I asexual?

I’ve been pondering this question lately. Pondering it a lot. Pondering it seriously and shamefully. Eventually, I want to blog about my ponderings on asexuality and add them to my collection on YOB, but I also want to be careful.

I don’t want to misuse this sacred term and label. I want to better research asexuality and familiarize myself with the “A” sub-community in LGBTQA+.

I’m attracted to my same sex, but I don’t want to have sex with my same sex. Biblical reasons aside, I don’t even want to date my same sex.

I yearn for normalcy more than the thing — sex, romance — that makes everyone else normal.

I’m a clear outlier in the LGBTQ community. A shadow even in the gay/SSA Christian community. A separate seedling still sprouting at 30-almost-31 amid the soil of our garden stories.

But before I dig too deep into the dirt of my differentness, I do want to acknowledge all the parts of Love, Simon that I loved. The parts that unite us.

High School

From the start, I watched Love, Simon and pondered anew my life in high school as a closeted teen — a Christian high school as a closeted Christian teen, no less.

The utter concept of “coming out” in such an environment wasn’t even a thought back then. I couldn’t come out to anyone — not even myself.

While I also pined after other guys through metaphorical blinds like Simon, I never faced my “huge-ass secret” like he did. Not at his age.

I wouldn’t face myself until my sophomore year in college, years later.

My affinity for parallel dimensions and other lives lived makes me wonder — agonize — how my life would have been different had I put pen to paper (or screen) and written those words as a 17-year-old Simon: “I’m gay.”

(Or: “I have homosexual fantasies,” or: “I have same-sex attraction,” or: whatever sugarcoated Christianese thing I would have said at the time.)

To tell myself. To tell a friend.

What if?

The first big suckerpunch of Love, Simon comes when Simon and his female friend sit alone in a parked car. He says those two gigantic words for the first time in his life: “I’m gay.”

And she isn’t scared. She doesn’t cry, “What?” She doesn’t rebuke him or flee from the car. She accepts him. I don’t even interpret the scene as her accepting his sexuality, proclaiming gay is okay.

She accepts him as a human. As a friend.

For the life of me, I can’t imagine coming out to myself at 17. I certainly can’t imagine coming out to another person at 17.

I can’t fathom a Christian high school experience that features Good Little Christian Tom coexisting as Gay/SSA Christian Tom also coexisting as Asexual? Christian Tom.

And yet I wish I could. I wish I could imagine it, and I wish I could relive it. To set a firmer foundation for vulnerability in my life and bypass all those ensuing years of isolation and inauthenticity.

As I watched Love, Simon, my heart grieved for this loss of adolescence, this lack of vulnerability, and this so-called “Christian” space that failed to encourage my integration and growth.

As usual with these sorts of high school films, my heart also grieved for the simpler things: driving to school, picking up friends, going to parties, getting tipsy, attending football games, dating, and the like.

I was so damn alone back then. In so many ways.

The Internet

Once upon a time, the Internet infused my life with a brand new story. After spending 21+ years convinced of being the only Christian who ever lived with homosexual thoughts, I typed a Google search that would unknowingly change the next decade of my life.

A brand new decade of stories, connection, friendship, broken friendship, repaired friendship, brotherhood, fresh starts, regret, inner wandering, outer wandering, and even a career path in books, blogs, podcasts, videos, and more.

Story is a powerful thing. For good, for awful.

Another huge suckerpunch of Love, Simon comes with Simon’s discovery of a fellow classmate’s anonymous posting online: “I’m gay.”

Simon begins an anonymous email correspondence with the poster and for the first time puts into words his deep dark secret with another human being who fully understands the journey.

The conflict of being who you are and maintaining the status quo for all to see.

Gosh, did this storyline take me back to my days on Xanga. Of blogging my story anonymously in my early twenties. Of typing a Google search and discovering a community of fellow believers also wrestling with matters of masculinity and sexuality.

Differentness. Together.

It was all so new. So fresh. So inspiring. So relieving. So invigorating to check the blog every day and every night. New posts, new comments.

New stories.

But those days are gone. They’ve been long gone for years now.

Never again will I experience that rush of a new notification. A new message. A new comment. A new connection with a new face or an old one.

Sure, we get new readers and supporters all the time at Your Other Brothers. I don’t want to diminish the value of their stories.

After doing this whole “Internet story thing” for a decade, however, I just don’t get the same thrill out of it for myself that I used to. Not compared with a time when the scales of my life were so drastically weighted in deep dark secrets.

Ten years later, the scales are starting to even out. Vulnerability is literally becoming my “brand.” I’m the “struggle guy” now.

As a result, this formerly shiny thrill of “connection” via story on the Internet has dimmed considerably.

After watching Simon and his new friend correspond by email, I found myself aching for those Xanga days. For the nostalgia, yes. For those initial rushes of realizing I’m not alone, yes. But more for the ease of relational expectations.

Friendships were so much simpler back then.

Ten years into a story of connections and broken connections and reconnections and re-reconnections, I feel expectations spiraling out of control. Friendships that grow and deepen yet creak and weaken.

Oh for the days of an anonymous pen pal like Simon.

Getting to know someone is so much easier than knowing them. Seeing their faults. Exposing yours. Communicating always. Keeping in constant sync.

It’s hard. Friendship is so hard. I don’t feel able.

I feel far better equipped to be pen pals than real pals.

“Get Over It.”

Where Love, Simon ultimately lost me and where these sorts of stories always tend to lose me is the end. At the crossroads of commitment.

An anonymous email correspondence that goes back and forth and forth and back, through hills and valleys, times of fluent communication and prolonged voids, the yearning, the longing — and then a ferris wheel meet-up that reveals identities and kickstarts a romantic relationship with a kiss for all to see.

Now begins an entirely new story. One of commitment. Of looking this same person in the face, day after day, communicating your insides to him, maintaining expectations, fighting, forgiving, fighting and forgiving, again and again — and, oh right, probably having sex, too.

I’m sorry, I don’t want it. I never really have. As soon as I think I might like the idea of having such a person in my life — man or woman — I realize I don’t.

And yet I know the vast majority of guys in this strange gay/SSA subculture of Christianity do want it. They want these humans terribly.

They want to date dudes.

They want to make out with them and have sex with them and spend the rest of their lives with them.

They want these deeply romantic and sacred, sexual things. And they can’t not want them.

I love being my own person. I love not having to communicate every deep dark thing that crosses my heart. I love not dating. I love not having sex. I love not committing my life to one person til death do us part.

But I hate feeling alone in loving not dating, not having sex, and not committing my life to another.

I hate it so much. Being this single seed in the soil, separate from all the other seeds now sprouting in gardens around me.

I’ve never dated, never kissed, never had sex — all as I continue journeying into my fourth decade of life.

People tell me to just get it over with. Maybe not casual sex. But go on a date. Kiss a friend as a joke — or not a joke. A loving peck on the lips with a friend, as common to other cultures.

“Remove the mystery,” they say.

“Move on with your life,” they say.

“Get over it,” they say.

But I can’t. I can’t get over it. Can’t just whip up such a moment on a whim.

My first kiss? As a joke? As something not deeply romantic or at least “right”?

Katy Perry recently made headlines by forcing a kiss on a 19-year-old guy who had never been kissed. She stole something from him, something he can never get back. I felt his mourning in this article: “I wanted my first kiss to be special.”

In truth, I want my first kiss not so much for the romance but for the shared human experience. Most people have that experience by my age. A first kiss. They have it in high school or even earlier. They certainly have it by college or when your eyebrow hairs start turning gray.

I watch Simon kiss his love on the ferris wheel as the crowd cheers, and inside I twitch and groan as I’m still waiting for the right moment with the right person. Whatever the hell that even means.

The pain of this differentness can’t be worse than the pain of a special moment cheapened or stolen away, never to be returned or exchanged.

I just wonder if such a special and such a person even exists for a same-sex attracted turned asexual-ish Christian like me.

The Redo

After watching Love, Simon, I was left pondering my choices in life, wondering if I could somehow hit a button and do things over again — would I? Namely my choices in coming out the ways that I’ve come out.

With my first book. And this blog. And my continuing work with Your Other Brothers.

Over and over and over. Coming out and coming out and coming out. Publicly and publicly and publicly in writings for all the world to see.

How I yearn for the simpler days of coming out to someone in a parked car.

Coming out isn’t special anymore. No longer can I connect with someone in such a meaningful way. To let someone into a sacred space in my heart that only few souls occupy.

My life is a literal open book now. Anyone can Google my name or peruse my social media profiles for 15 seconds and learn what was once my deepest darkest secret for an entire quarter-century.

I don’t deny the good that’s come from coming out on such a wide scale. The freedom I’ve found for myself, but also the freedom so many others have found in my story as they learn to tell theirs.

It’s humbling to be used by God in such a way. Over and over. I don’t want to appear ungrateful.

But damn. How I wish I could wake up some days and still call the shadows home. Instead of this unrelenting sunlight that feels more and more like a spotlight.

On the one hand, I’m proud of the way I came out all those years ago. That nobody outed me as was unfortunately done to Simon.

I did it my way: first with loved ones, and then with a book. I can’t possibly regret anything.

But what if?

I almost long to create a new identity. To shave my head and grow a beard and move far away and change my name and relive the coming out experience with a new cast of characters. A new story.

To have people know me from the ground up again rather than starting from the mountaintop and working my way, long and slow, down to the valley.

Isn’t that how most friendships work?

In Closing

Love, Simon is a good movie. It feels a bit idealized at times. The perfect parents. The perfect friends. Cheesy dialogue. A 22-year-old straight actor playing a gay teenager that’s hard for my intuition to shake.

But Love, Simon has a ton of heart. It honors the coming out experience — with friends, with parents, and with an entire school. It translates the power of story and confession. Vulnerability.

It gives voice to the swirling longings in gay youth, and I know Love, Simon will help many kids navigate the storms inside.

Above all, Love, Simon normalizes what I wish had been normalized two decades ago — at a Christian school or otherwise. That some kids simply grow up attracted to their same sex for God knows why.

They didn’t choose it, they didn’t ask for it, and in fact many have asked God to make it go away only to hear silence.

And it’s okay. It’s okay to feel the storms inside.

As long as we have other people to help us man the sails.