• 5 years ago
The ironies of Simon’s very liberal family, accepting friends, etc. are no match for deeply rooted anxiety and a proclivity to want to create some sort of identity online, a version of himself only he and one other, his anonymous pen pal Blue, can know. Love, Simon is not the first queer teen movie (though it’s being touted as if it is), and it’s not even the first queer film to explore digital identities, but the film is nonetheless of interest because of the way that it uses digital spaces to project who Simon wants to be and and what Simon wants gay desire to look like.
Simon, brusquely masc-performing and part of a dream middle class family, can exist as an ostensibly more honest version of himself in the digital realm, while writing to an anonymous person named Blue, whom he found by way of a “confessions”-like blog. Simon sets up a new email account and assumes the nom de plume Jacques, able to find another person like himself, not someone who is gay, but someone who is gay and closeted. (The other out person in school, Ethan [Clark Moore], is decidedly black and femme and plays the role of comic relief. Simon’s gayness is serious, while Ethan’s is mostly a prop.) The world of Twitter, Gmail inboxes and Gossip Girl-like online blogs are no longer escapes from reality, exactly, as they are augmented permutations of it. The world that these landscapes exist in is adjacent, like the house across the street, where reading another person’s email with a secret tucked into it is like walking in on two people making out at a party.
Simon’s world is punctuated by texts, FaceTime calls, blog posts and, once he learns of Blue’s existence, email notifications. In emails that he feels he can “be himself,” but what does that mean? What has been pushed

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