A Decade After Its Release, Hayley Kiyoko’s ‘Girls Like Girls’ Gets a Feature Film

When Hayley Kiyoko cancelled her North American tour in early 2020, the public saw a rising artist pumping the brakes for no clear reason. Behind the scenes, she was stuck on a project she’d been trying to make for years: a feature film expanding the story of her 2015 single “Girls Like Girls.” “I felt like I was just trapped in stagnation,” she said. “I kept cancelling my tours and putting my albums on pause because I thought I was gonna go shoot this movie, and the commitment is multiple years once you start.”

The result arrives June 19. Directed by Kiyoko, Girls Like Girls follows teens Coley (Maya de Costa) and Sonya (Myra Molloy) as mutual attraction forces them to confront sexuality, social pressure, and their own relationship. It’s a love story built from the raw material of the music video’s quieter gestures, rendered now in long form. “No matter who you love,” Kiyoko said, “every single person in this world has had to confront somebody about their feelings.”

“Girls Like Girls” never reached the Billboard Hot 100, but its impact was sharper than chart placement: the song and its video became a private rite of passage for countless young women discovering desire on their own terms. Released the same week Obergefell v. Hodges legalized same-sex marriage, it landed as a public coming-out moment for Kiyoko and a personal revelation for listeners. Singer-songwriter Gigi Perez called her “a pioneer of queer music, of gay music, of lesbian music; she didn’t have a trampoline to fall back on. That was her truth.” The film closes a decade-long loop, turning a song that lived on bedroom screens into something meant for a shared room.