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).

Matt Haller | You Will Find Love / 2024

the man that got away usually did so for good reason

by Douglas Messerli

 

Matt Haller (screenwriter and director) You Will Find Love / 2024 [19 minutes]

 

Simon (Henry Truitt Harshaw) and Gabriel have been childhood friends who grew very close before happened to pull them apart. It’s an old story where love comes to early for young boys to assimilate it, and resulting it their pulling away at the time they most want and need one another. But the society so strongly condemns those very feelings that they deny the very thing they most need and desire.

     Time has passed, Gabriel having become an actor—so far only roles in ads—and Simon having become a novelist of gay stories, which brings him back to their home town for a reading in a friendly bookstore. Frankly, after hearing only the brief end of the story, it sounds rather dreadful, and his voice is anything but the melodic voice of the readers for taped readings, which Gabriel suggests he should try. But they meet up again nonetheless.

      Gabriel has since married a gay man, and wonders why Simon never showed up to the wedding. But obviously he is not terribly sensitive since it is immediately clear to the viewer than Simon still holds strong feelings for Gabriel, and that, in fact, his inability to share his love with his high school friend has regretted it for all the years since, never being able to truly situate himself in a solid relationship.

      When he is finally able to admit to Gabriel that his pulling away at the very moment when he most wanted to kiss and hold his high school friend has haunted him ever since, Gabriel admits that he felt quite similarly, and that his dating other boys soon after (unthinkable in my day) had simply been a front, that he too still longed for a relationship with Simon. The admission almost devastates Simon, and momentarily makes him feel even more stupid that ever before for not having been able to play out his desires. But it also, at least, ameliorates the feeling of not having been wanted, and after a brief head-on-shoulder rendezvous with his former friend wherein Gabriel assures Simon that some day he too will find the right person to love, clearly reinvigorates the young man who has admitted that he is not ever certain that he can go only writing his gay love stories.

    They end the meeting as admiring friends, both suggesting another meet-up at some time, but also both recognizing that their lives have taken them elsewhere and that will likely never encounter one another again.

      It is a beautiful pathos that easily moves the heart of almost any gay man, most of us, perhaps, who have been angry with our selves for not having the wisdom to perceive where we might have found love earlier than we did. I might have found it in the arms of the high school football team captain if only I hadn’t been so fearful and prudish to run off the moment he offered me a long ride home; or I might have made wonderful love in Norway to the local speed-skating champion who I absolutely lusted after but was so innocent that I couldn’t respond to his overtures. How stupid I now realize I was, and how either relationship might have opened me up far earlier to the gay world and self-acceptance.

     But to ponder that failure too long is simply an act of nostalgia and sentimentality. We are ready to become who we are only when we perceive it within ourselves. And that is always the problem with such looking back sagas such as this short film. Simon demonstrates himself as a grand sentimentalist, who could not go on simply because he could not yet accept love because of a beautiful conception of it in the past. Surely neither he nor Gabriel would have been ready to establish a full relationship even if they had kissed at the magical moment when they both so desired it. Gabriel, at least, has moved on and found someone whom he loves and can live with as an adult, while Simon is simply trapped in the past.

     This sometimes makes for great melodrama in the man-that-got-away works such as Douglas Sirk’s grand gay heartthrob drama hidden behind a screen heterosexual romance, All Heaven Allows (1955), and more recently in French film by Olivier Peyon, Lie with Me (2022), and so many others before them, including the heterosexual tear jerker generally adored by every Englishman, Brief Encounter (1945). Yes, I understand the power of these works, to which the rather poorly acted and clumsily written You Will Find Love simply can’t compare; but I am not ultimately moved by their sense of nostalgic regret. Love is something you put into action every day, never in the imaginative sense of what might have been.

Los Angeles, June 3, 2026 | Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (June 2026).