Hayley Kiyoko wants to sail the same-sex-loving high seas.
The musician, novelist and filmmaker says her dream project is a queer take on “Pirates of the Caribbean.” “I would love to do a lesbian pirate show or movie — Keira Knightley, but gay,” she said. “Very gay and fantastical.”
Kiyoko’s remarks came Thursday night during a panel at UTA in Beverly Hills titled “Saving Queer Media.” The program also included filmmakers Angela Robinson, Adam Shankman and Wash Westmoreland. Moderated by Variety’s Marc Malkin and hosted by UTA Proud, the evening served as a fundraiser for the Los Angeles-based LGBTQ+ film festival Outfest.
She’s hoping to turn her second novel, “Where There’s Room for Us,” into a film as well. “It’s a period piece, which no one wants to pay for, but they will one day,” she said to cheers and applause from the audience.
“It’s a true story, and it’s set in Britain in the 1930s, where being queer was career-destroying, and you’d be thrown in jail. It was absolutely illegal,” Westmoreland said. “It’s about a group of queer MPs who are very repressed and very secretive about their lives, but they go to the one place in Europe where you can have a good time and a sexy weekend, which was Berlin at the time of ‘Cabaret.’ So they went there.
Westmoreland called it a story about “queer war heroes” that resonates today. “It is a powerful analogy to what’s happening now, the authoritarians they need people to beat up on and guess who’s very easy to beat up on? LGBTQ people are,” he said. “It’s this vigilance of standing up for what we believe in and preventing the pushback of our rights.”
