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You might think the success at this year's Oscars of the film Call Me By Your Name signals a shift in the kinds of stories Hollywood is willing to champion.
Think again.
For all the accolades bestowed on that picture, which chronicled the summer the 17-year-old central character began exploring his homosexuality, it was a small-budget, European production, initially only given a limited release in US theatres. (It won only one of the four awards it was up for.)
Instead, consider Love, Simon.
The film, which arrives in Australian cinemas this week, is being hailed as the first teenage drama with a gay protagonist to have the backing of a major movie studio, coming via 20th Century Fox with a heavy marketing strategy in tow.
"We're living in a time when gay kids can have their own sweetly mediocre studio movies with all the best intentions," critic Todd VanDerWerff wrote last week on Vox. "Isn't that something?"
Becky Albertalli thinks it is
She wrote the book Simon Vs The Homo Sapiens Agenda, on which the film is based.
The book and film tell the story of Simon Spier, a high school kid who falls in love with a fellow student he starts corresponding with anonymously.
"It's kind of awful that we have gotten to 2018 without this being a part of our culture," she says.
"If you end up in a screening with a lot of teenagers, it is absolutely magical.
"A lot of these kids have not seen themselves reflected in any kind of very mainstream media, certainly not in a Hollywood movie."
Of 125 major studio films released in the US in 2016, 23 contained LGBTIQ characters, according to GLAAD, an advocacy group that has been tracking this kind of data for years.
"Major releases continue to lag behind the ground-breaking stories we see in independent films," including Call Me By Your Name and last year's Oscar Best Picture winner, Moonlight, GLAAD's president Sarah Kate Ellis said last year.
"If film wants to remain relevant and retain an audience that has more options for entertainment than ever before, the industry must catch up in reflecting the full diversity of [the United States]."
Albertalli, 35, came to writing after a short career as a clinical psychologist, specialising in working with teenagers.
She describes the novel as, "a love letter to a community of kids that are really important to me for professional and for personal reasons".
That has not made her telling of this story controversy-free
"There are gay authors who get frustrated with any women who are writing in this space, about gay boys, whether the women come from the LGBT community or not," says Albertalli, who is straight.
"But I do think there is a particular tension when it comes from outside the community.
"You can do all the research in the world, and you can be embedded — and those are things that I consider the bare minimum — but you can't strip away the privilege that you have."
The author says she has learned a lot in the five years since she started writing Simon vs The Homo Sapiens Agenda, particularly about who has the right to tell certain stories.
"It's really important to me to follow the kinds of conversations that happen around diversity and representation and writing inclusive books," she says.
"If I were sitting here today, knowing what I know now, I don't think that I would choose to write this book."
But she is seeing positive reactions to the book and film
She says she gets lots of messages, public and private — gratitude, coming-out stories, and not-coming-out stories.
"Sometimes I get kids who are not in a place where it is safe to come out, but they read the book and they felt less alone because of it."
That's important because, she says, while same-sex marriage legislation in the United States and Australia has been a positive development, it "didn't end homophobia".
She hopes the significance of the film's release both reflects a cultural shift, and helps that shift continue.
"But … one of my personal hopes, for the book and the film, is that they will open doors instead of closing them, so that there will be more and more opportunities and more stories told — a broad range of stories of people from different parts of the community."
Topics: film-movies, arts-and-entertainment, gays-and-lesbians, sexuality, united-states
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