N. Phillip and Keiynan Lonsdale | Kiss the Boy / 2018 || piano version 2024 [music videos]

ferris wheel to heaven

by Douglas Messerli

 

N. Phillip and Keiynan Lonsdale (storywriters and directors) Kiss the Boy / 2018 [4.24 minutes], piano version 2024 [5.12 minutes] [music videos]

Australian actor, dancer, and singer, Keiynan Lonsdale, after showing up at the end of the film Love, Simon (2018) as Simon’s secret lover, pretty much expressed what he had already announced in 2017 when he reported that “I like girls & I like guys,” that he had bisexual inclinations.

     The 2018 video, Kiss the Boy, directed by N. Phillips, shows a wide variety of unrelated images of girls kissing girls, boys kissing girls, and, significantly, boys kissing boys as the singer proclaims his difficulties and his newly discovered recognition that:

 

“If you wanna kiss the boy

Then you better kiss the boy right now

And you ain't gotta be afraid

Of the words you wanna say right now

'Cause love is a game we deserve to play out loud

So if you wanna, hey

If you wanna kiss the boy

Then you better kiss the boy right now”

    In an interview of the same year, after having kissed Nick Robinson on the Ferris Wheel to nearly everyone’s joy and approval, Lonsdale noted that in the song:

 

“I knew I wanted it to be as obvious as possible. There can’t be any mistake that this is a boy singing about a boy and that’s that. There’s other songs where it may be more ambiguous, and there’s a message in that as well. I’m definitely not going to shy away from singing about guys or girls or whatever kind of love. The love that I feel is what I’ll put in the song.”

 

    Although the original 2018 video is quite charming in its direction and straight-forward images, I far prefer the 2024 piano version with a real narrative where Lonsdale keeps running into the handsome black friend throughout the city and finally invites him to his recording session, where he finally kisses to boy he has been so long secretly observing, but has been afraid to make his feelings clear. As he writes with Tyler John Minford and Morgan A. Matthews in the original song:

“I've been afraid of my place

Of this way of my feelings

But I'm amazed at how we talk

It's so chill but there's tension

What was the deal when your eyes locked on me?

What was the deal when you smiled at me like that?

'Cause see I try to be cool

But the problem is you're messing my emotions up

My head gets stuck

I'm scared to show just how I feel 'cause people talk

Don't wanna worry 'bout whatever

Just gotta know your deal

See half the time I'm wondering if this is real

And why not say something's on my mind if I feel love?

But when the moment's right I freeze

That's how I know my heart is his”

 

Los Angeles, June 3, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (June 2026).