“Girls Like Girls” has been a long time in the making.Originally released as a music video in 2015 by musician Hayley Kiyoko, the tune with the lyrics “Girls like girls, just like boys do” quickly became a sapphic anthem, amassing 163 million views on YouTube to date.“After we released the music video, I saw thousands of comments from fans saying, ‘I wish I could go see a film like this. I thought to myself: I’ve never been able to see a movie like this before,” Kiyoko tells Variety. “It planted this seed, and it’s been an extreme challenge of 10 years convincing the industry and the world that our voice matters; that being a queer woman of color is not niche, it is mainstream. There are millions of us, and we deserve to have stories that we can count beyond just our two hands.”
Kiyoko’s feature film, which opens in theaters nationwide on June 19, is an expansion of the music video of the same name. “Girls Like Girls” follows Coley (Maya Da Costa), a teenager who finds herself falling for her best friend, Sonya (Myra Molloy). After meeting through a chance encounter, the two grow closer, exchanging IM’s and hanging out in every spare moment, eventually sharing a kiss after Coley opens up about her dead mother. Unable to deal with her growing feelings for Coley, Sonya (who also has a boyfriend) starts pushing Coley away, leaving the latter to navigate her growing pains alone.
