In this morning’s edition of our weekly celebrity column No Filter, Christina Tucker casually mentioned it has been 11 years since “Girls Like Girls” the single and music video came out. I almost had to close my laptop and stare at a wall when confronted with the reality of time, but alas, I had to keep working to keep this gay magazine chugging along.

It’s true; it has been 11 years since Hayley Kiyoko — then a rising star, now known colloquially on the sapphic internet as Lesbian Jesus — released “Girls Like Girls” in its original form. And if that’s true, it means it has been 11 years since I officially came out, 11 years since I moved to New York to pursue my dreams, 11 years since I made a low-budget and mostly cringe webseries about a group of lesbian friends that I hope might be The L Word for a new generation (lol).

“Girls Like Girls” came out at a truly memorable point of my coming out journey — not the beginning per se, as I believe the beginning started way before I ever said to someone aloud I’m gay. But the song debuted a month after I turned 23, the first year of my life where I lived truly out as a lesbian. A couple months later, the music video came out, and I remember thinking to myself this should be a movie as I played it on repeat at Gay Music Video Watch Parties (you know the vibe). A couple months after that, I was hired to write here, at Autostraddle.

Since “Girls Like Girls” originally debuted, Hayley Kiyoko has adapted it as a YA novel, which has now been adapted for screen. Since “Girls Like Girls” originally debuted, I got my first long-term girlfriend, moved in with her, went through a truly terrible breakup I’ve written about far too many times on this website, slept with women I probably shouldn’t have slept with, slept with women I absolutely should have slept with, fallen in love with someone on the internet, moved with her to Las Vegas, Miami, and Orlando before marrying her. “Girls Like Girls” softly soundtracked much of this. I haven’t been able to quit this song, even as I no longer need its message as much as I did when it first came out.

The trailer dropped for the upcoming film this week. Two young women of color — Maya da Costa and Myra Molloy — star as central characters Coley and Sonya. Kiyoko directs, off a script co-written by herself and Stefanie Scott, who starred as the Coley character in the original music video! Full circle in so many ways! Based on the trailer, the film has a similar palette, story, and feel as the original music video but with a more expansive world. Take a look:

Regardless of how good the movie ends up being, I’m very interested artistically in Kiyoko’s obsessive return to this same project. I relate. It’s a different kind of retelling and return than the reboot industrial complex. It reminds me of the clusters of essays I write that are sometimes telling the same story over and over again, in slightly different ways.

Girls Like Girls hits theaters almost exactly 11 years after the song came out, on June 19, 2026.