In his review of Love, Simon for Variety, Peter Debruge wrote: “It takes enormous courage to come out in high school. It’s a period marked by peer pressure and bullying for most teens, and one can’t blame most adolescents — gay or straight — for wanting to keep their heads down. … But let it be said: Love, Simon is precisely the kind of movie its main character so desperately needs — which means, Simon is about to become the model for an entire demographic that has had to do without, until now.”
It’s very rare for a major Hollywood studio to produce and distribute a coming-of-age story centered on a closeted gay teenager. These kinds of stories are nothing new to independent film, but major studios have long avoided putting a gay protagonist front and center. That drought has ended with the 20th Century Fox feature Love, Simon, a film adapted from Becky Albertalli’s young adult novel “Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda.”