Cero Magazine

In the past nine years, since the release of her breakout hit single “Girls Like Girls,” Hayley Kiyoko has become a multi-hyphenate force, an actor, singer, and now author who has long been known as a heartthrob icon to a generation of young queer women. After first coming to public attention as a child actor, she has since released and toured two pop albums filled with R&B-inspired melodies and snappy earworm hooks. Last year, she adapted “Girls Like Girls,” a song centered on the validity of queer relationships in young girls, into a young adult novel that reached the top of the New York Times’s Best Seller list.

On a Tuesday morning late last year, Kiyoko was at first somewhat quieter and more reserved than the bubbly persona she presents on camera and stage when we discussed our respective mornings over Zoom. She was dressed down in a black hoodie with her hair pulled back, as opposed to the confident performer often seen draped in pride flags and glitter at public events. As she opened up, she spoke with a laid-back focus and a gaze that pulled me into her every word. Even over a video call, her confidence was just as palpable but less pronounced.

Kiyoko was introduced to the reality of a creative career at an early age. It began with her mother, a renowned ice skating choreographer whose process she watched as a child. “I was always killing time in ice rinks while she was choreographing and directing,” she says. “Growing up was a very colorful, imaginative environment because both my parents love to create and to dream.” Her parents, she adds, were equally supportive of her passions and realistic about the challenges of pursuing art as a professional career.

Coming of age is a running theme in Kiyoko’s lyrics, visuals, and now her novel. Within her work, she often looks back at her teenage years and attempts to heal her inner child. “Gravel to Tempo,” the lead single off her 2016 EP Citrine, for example, depicts a young woman in the process of discovering she is attracted to other women. In the accompanying music video, Kiyoko plays a high school student who forges a new path through the tangle of adolescent cliques by conquering her fears and societal pressures. “My perspective on my dream has evolved. I’ve built more self-love for myself. That’s the biggest shift,” she says. “I think growing up was like, ‘I want to achieve this, but I am not good enough and no one will accept me if they know I’m gay.’ I didn’t feel like there was hope for me to be a pop star because I didn’t feel like I saw an out lesbian pop star charting when I was younger.” She eventually came to understand the possibilities of her aspirations: “My perspective has heavily shifted because I believe that it is possible and that you can break the glass ceiling. If you haven’t seen someone do something, that doesn’t mean that it can’t be done.”

At this moment, I pause to thank Kiyoko for everything she has done for me and so many other young queer women trying to find themselves and tell her how her work affected me as a young lesbian of color entering the world of writing and filmmaking. It is partially because of her that I now know what is possible. Her impact can be felt in the sellout crowds that attend her shows around the globe and the rise in fellow lesbian and queer figures in popular music such as Rina Sawayama, Fletcher, and G Flip. My confession seems to take her aback, but she seems deeply touched.

The seeds of Kiyoko’s path to becoming Lesbian Jesus, as she is known to her fans, were planted when she began writing and journaling as a mechanism for coping with not feeling represented in mainstream media. Her queerness had come to seem like a dominating factor because of the emphasis society placed on that facet of her life, but she wanted to be seen in full. Once she began to love her identity as a lesbian, she began to love her culture as a biracial person, half Japanese and half white, as well. She recalls often feeling neither white nor Asian enough as an adolescent but beginning to appreciate her complexity later in life.