Hayley Kiyoko is one of those rare child-actor success stories, going from starring in Nickelodeon and Disney Channel shows to becoming a queer pop star, film director, and holder of the title “Lesbian Jesus.”
Ever since she heard Katy Perry’s “I Kissed a Girl” and “wished that it was a gay girl singing,” Kiyoko knew she wanted to be on stage singing real queer anthems.
She finally hit it big in 2015 with her single “Girls Like Girls,” where she sang, “Girls like girls like boys do – nothing new,” and has now parlayed that success into first, a novel, then into a movie she’s helming that will be released this summer.
So here’s the tea on who Hayley Kiyoko is, why her fans call her Lesbian Jesus, and what she’s up to these days.
Who is Hayley Kiyoko?
Kiyoko started her career as a child actor with roles in Disney’s Lemonade Mouth and Wizards of Waverly Place, but she quickly turned more of her attention to music.
She was in the garage band Hede and joined the pop group The Stunners. They released a handful of singles together, including “Dancin’ Around The Truth,” but the band split up in 2011 before ever releasing an album.
Luckily, that didn’t stop Kiyoko, and after years of living in the closet, she came out publicly when she released the single “Girls Like Girls” during Pride Month in 2015, which catapulted her to fame.
She also directed the music video that accompanied it, which featured two teenage girls who are crushing on each other and join forces to fight back against a creepy straight man who won’t leave them alone. The video garnered millions of views on YouTube and led to a record deal with Atlantic.
The 34-year-old star turned the song into her debut sapphic romance novel of the same name in 2023, and then adapted the story into a movie she’s directing later this year.
In her private life, Kiyoko got engaged to her longtime girlfriend Becca Tilley after proposing in 2025, seven years after they first started dating.
Why is she called Lesbian Jesus?
After hitting it big with her single “Girls Like Girls,” she was able to release her debut album, Expectations, which featured sapphic love songs and celebrated queer desire. It was at this point that her devoted queer fanbase started calling her Lesbian Jesus.
She got the title because of the work she’s done to highlight lesbian romance, and for bringing unapologetically queer lyrics and themes to mainstream pop music. But it was the way she makes fans feel seen and safe that really cemented the moniker.
“I think that we all deserve to have community and support,” the singer said, per Them, “and so I'm grateful that my fans feel that way when they're listening to my music, or they come to a concert.”
What has Hayley Kiyoko said about the nickname?
While promoting her young adult novel Where There’s Room For Us last year, Kiyoko told the Bookmarked by Reese’s Book Club podcast that fans started calling her Lesbian Jesus at Q&A’s and meet-and-greets before her shows, but she was confused about the term until a friend explained it to her.
“I felt like I was out of the loop as a millennial,” she said. “So I was like, ‘Oh, people are calling people 'Lesbian Jesus.' Like, this is a thing that I need to catch on to. I remember going online, and then being with one of my friends, and being like, ‘No. They call you 'Lesbian Jesus.’”
Kiyoko also said that it was “healing” to have people call her this nickname.
“My name is just Hayley. And that's just what people called me,” she said. “I never excelled in sports where I had a cool nickname. And so it feels like it's healing my inner child having a nickname, even if it is 'Lesbian Jesus.'”
Why is everyone talking about Hayley Kiyoko right now?
Kiyoko is making headlines again right now because she just released the first trailer for her directorial debut, Girls Like Girls. The sapphic film is based on her coming-of-age novel of the same name and follows Coley (Maya Da Costa), a new girl in town who falls in love for the first time with her new friend Sonya (Myra Molloy).
Girls Like Girls arrives in theaters on June 19.
11 times J.K. Rowling did something wildly transphobic, ranked
J.K. Rowling attends day four of Royal Ascot at Ascot Racecourse on June 20, 2025 in Ascot, England.
This story originally appeared on Out.
For almost a decade now, Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling has been spreading transphobia and has become the poster child for the UK’s troubling movement of TERFs (trans-exclusionary radical feminists). She has gone on transphobic tirades on social media, written a nearly 4,000-word anti-trans manifesto, donated some of her fortune to anti-trans causes, regularly misgenders trans women, and gleefully celebrates every time the transgender community has their rights stripped away.
The author, once revered for creating an inclusive fantasy world where good triumphs over evil, let her LGBTQ+ fans down by consistently doubling down on her transphobic rhetoric. She has painted trans women as predators who are lying about their gender to take away women’s rights and enter women’s spaces under false pretenses. This dangerous vitriol has even caused many of the stars of the Harry Potter franchise to come forward and call her out for her anti-trans takes.
For queer and trans fans of Harry Potter, this abrupt turn was jarring and has undermined their love of a fictional world where marginalized groups are loved and fought for. But Rowling hasn’t just disappointed her fans by spreading her hateful views; she’s also done so in some of the most bizarre ways, leaving many people not just outraged, but scratching their heads.
11. Tone deaf Dolly Parton tribute
Rowling joined the world in mourning Dolly Parton by posting a tribute on X that backfired when the country music legend’s fans came out in droves to point out that Parton loved the LGBTQ+ community and wouldn’t have supported Rowling’s TERF views.
After Parton fans flooded Rowling’s comment section with messages like, “She certainly would have thought of you as a nasty, hateful woman. Nice little tweet though,” Rowling attempted to hit back after a user called her “a fucking monster” by posting, “Well, joke’s on you, because neither of us want Jolene to take our man.”
10. Accidentally wrote “f*ck up some TERFs” on a child’s drawing
Seemingly by mistake, Rowling replied to post on X about a nine-year-old kid’s drawing of Ickabog, a monster from her children’s book, by including text she likely meant to copy and paste elsewhere.
“I love this truly fabulous Ickabog, with its bat ears, mismatched eyes, and terrifying bloodstained teeth! In court, Wolf claimed the Facebook post in which he’d said he wanted to ‘f*** up some TERFs’ was just ‘bravado’. #TheIckabog.”
Internet sleuths figured out that in the post, Rowling was misgendering Tara Wolf, a trans woman accused of assaulting Maria MacLachlan, who was at an anti-trans protest in 2017.
9. Accused Olympic boxer Imane Khelif of being trans
When Algerian boxer Imane Khelif took home gold at the 2024 Paris Olympics, Rowling joined fellow wealthy bigot Elon Musk in spreading the rumor that the cisgender boxer was secretly a man, leaning hard into the ever-present transphobia and anti-intersex hate in women's sports.
Even after both Rowling and Musk were named in a criminal complaint filed with French authorities over alleged “acts of aggravated cyber harassment,” Rowling refused to let it go and continued to post anti-trans posts accusing Khelif of lying about her gender.
8. Transvestigated another athlete
Less than five months after harassing Olympic boxer Imane Khelif for supposedly being trans, Rowling joined in on another transvestigation of a woman in sports when she accused cisgender Zambian soccer player Barbra Banda of secretly being a man — she is not.
Rowling took exception to the BBC naming Banda the 2024 Women’s Footballer of the Year. “Presumably the BBC decided this was more time efficient than going door to door to spit directly in women's faces," Rowling wrote on X.
7. Smoked a cigar to celebrate being a TERF
After donating £70,000 (roughly $88,200) to the anti-trans group For Women Scotland in 2024 to help them fight against a 2018 Scottish law that legally recognized trans women as women, Rowling celebrated in a ghoulish way when the U.K. Supreme Court decided that trans women aren’t considered women under the nation’s Equality Act.
Rowling responded to the court decision by posting a photo of herself with a drink in one hand and smoking a cigar with the other. While people like right-wing commentator Megyn Kelly commented “God bless you,” the post was also full of people slamming her for her cruelty in the face of people having their rights taken away. Pedro Pascal even called her out for doing “Voldemort villain s---" and referred to Rowling as a "heinous loser."
6. Accidentally turned herself into a meme
Rowling accidentally turned herself into a meme when she changed her profile pic on X to a photo that showed what looked like black mold-covered walls inside her mansion.
While the photo most likely shows wallpaper and not mold, users ran with it and began joking that the black mold had infected her brain as an explanation for her hateful anti-trans views.
5. Whined about being doxxed
On the eve of Transgender Day of Remembrance in 2021, comedian Holly Stars, actor Georgia Frost and drag king Richard Energy protested Rowling’s anti-trans views by staging a demonstration and posting a photo holding signs in front of the author’s home near Edinburgh, Scotland.
Rowling took exception to her house numbers being visible in the photo and accused the “actor activists” of “doxxing” her in an eight-tweet rant on X. But is it doxxing if the information is already public? Rowling claimed she received “so many death threats I could paper the house with them,” but both of her residences are historical landmarks, and one even has its own Wikipedia page.
4. Wrote a transphobic character that sounds an awful lot like herself
Under her pen name Robert Galbraith, Rowling wrote The Ink Black Heart, where a character gets harassed and doxxed because of their transphobic and racist views.
Rowling claimed that the character wasn’t based on her own experience, despite Rolling Stone writing that the character is doxxed “with photos of her home plastered on the internet” and subjected “to death and rape threats for having an opinion,” which probably sounds pretty familiar to people who have been following the author’s anti-trans outbursts.
3. Called David Tennant the "gender Taliban"
Rowling called Harry Potter actor David Tennant and people like him the “gender Taliban” in a post on X after he spoke out at the British LGBT Awards, where he called transgender critics “a tiny bunch of little whinging f*ckers who are on the wrong side of history, and they’ll all go away soon” and said they are on the “wrong side of history.”
In response, Rowling leaned into hateful anti-trans rhetoric that conflates being transgender with being an abuser of women. “This man is talking about rape survivors who want female-only care, the nurses currently suing their health trust for making them change in front of a man, girls and women losing sporting opportunities to males and female prisoners incarcerated with convicted sex offenders,” she wrote.
2. Dared police to arrest her
Rowling spoke out against Scotland’s new hate crime act in 2024 by daring police to arrest her for misgendering trans women. The act criminalizes “stirring up hatred” regarding age, disability, religion, sexual orientation, transgender identity and variations in sex characteristics, which can result in a fine or a seven-year prison sentence.
Rowling then went on a lengthy tirade on X — something she is known for at this point — where she accused lawmakers of protecting trans women at the expense of “the rights and freedoms of actual women and girls.” She finished by telling the police to come and arrest her if what she wrote “qualifies as an offense” under the new law. “I look forward to being arrested when I return to the birthplace of the Scottish Enlightenment,” she wrote.
1. Posted an upskirt photo
Rowling, who claims to be a protector of women and rails against trans women being allowed in women’s restrooms, targeted a transgender British podcaster who she disagrees with by posting an upskirt photo of her. Freda Wallace became Rowling’s latest target when she refused to engage with the transphobe online.
Rowling responded by misgendering Wallace and posting a photo of her originally taken by anti-trans activist and fellow transphobe Maya Forstater, from slightly below Wallace to show her upper thigh. Rowling said that Wallace refused to debate her but to prove she has “no hard feelings” she posted the photo of another debate. “I hear he left an indelible impression on the audience. And the chair,” Rowling wrote.