Every Version of Love, Simon

A Letter That Started Everything

Becky Albertalli published Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda in 2015, and the YA world immediately understood it was something different. Not darker or edgier than other queer teen fiction, just warmer: a funny, propulsive, genuinely romantic story about a closeted sixteen-year-old in suburban Georgia who falls for an anonymous classmate he only knows as "Blue." The novel's central argument, that gay teens deserve the same light, fizzy, unserious rom-com experience straight teens had always had, turned out to be commercially and culturally irresistible.

Three years later, 20th Century Fox adapted it as Love, Simon (2018), becoming the first major Hollywood studio release built around a gay teenage romance. The film's success made the case clearly enough that Hulu greenlit Love, Victor, a spinoff TV series set in the same fictional Creekwood universe, which ran for three seasons from 2020 to 2022. Meanwhile Albertalli kept writing in the same world: Leah on the Offbeat (2018) centers on Simon's best friend Leah Burke, and Yes No Maybe So (co-written with Adam Silvera, 2020) extends the same inclusive, sunny sensibility to a new pair of protagonists. The story has not traveled as far across media as some franchises, but what it has crossed into, it has crossed into well.