Hayley Kiyoko on “For the Girls,” Becca Tilley, and Her Evolving Panoramic Vision

Hayley Kiyoko is imagining her childhood bedroom, where her younger self sketches her dream fashion line, including baggy boyfriend jeans shredded at the ends, big on pockets. The metallic luster of basketball and softball trophies reflects the faces on the *NSYNC and O-Town posters that blanket the walls. Nick Lachey smiles at her. “I was in the closet, so they're all going to be boys,” Kiyoko tells Teen Vogue about her childhood idols. Now, six presidents, three seasons of Newlyweds, and one Y2K later (two if you’re counting our current Y2K fashion era), she’s here — gay, thriving, and more herself than ever.

There’s a disarming ease about Kiyoko when she arrives for our Zoom video call, her hair a shade of gingerbread caramel. She’s quick to laugh and always smiling. Out of focus behind her is a custom-made Jennings guitar with a panda emblem on the fretboard, a Michael Kelly acoustic Fender jazz bass, and a Martin backpacker guitar. Kiyoko is dressed in black to mask her tendency to stain lighter clothes — she has a high-risk glass of red beet juice in hand (her coffee alternative). “My life’s a mess with the beet juice,” she jokes.

In reality, the 31-year-old Californian’s life has never seemed less messy. She’s in an exuberant era, heading into the release of her sophomore full-length album, Panorama, out July 29, and an ensuing summer tour with Lauv. A few days after our interview, Kiyoko released the album's anthemic first single, “For the Girls,” with a queer Bachelorette-parody music video, featuring a cameo from real-life Bachelor contestant Becca Tilley. Along with the video came an announcement: Kiyoko and Tilley have been dating for four years, and they’re finally ready to share a bit of their relationship with the world.

Tilley’s cameo in the music video was a last-minute idea, but it felt right, Kiyoko says via email a few weeks after our interview. Amid the new buzz about her relationship, she calls this Tilley’s moment: “It is one thing to discover your authentic truth, but to share it takes a lot of courage as we all know,” Kiyoko writes. “She has had to navigate a lot of hardship in her journey, and I've been honored to be by her side through it all. It is not my place to speak for her, but it does feel amazing to get to share the love I have for her with the rest of the world.” 

It’s a love that has inspired parts of Panorama, pulling from their relationship, which has “so many different dimensions.” It’s hard, though, to separate the sources of inspiration, Kiyoko says: “Everything connects.”

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Kiyoko has come a long way from the closeted girl in her bedroom, pining in secret. She’s even come a long way from the Hayley who launched into viral fame in 2015 with the iconic queer bop, “Girls Like Girls," and became known to her fans as “lesbian Jesus” because of her openness about who she loves.

Given the untempered pride Kiyoko radiates as a lesbian, it might be easy to forget that she was once plagued by a fear of being identified solely by her sexuality. Putting the words “Hayley” and “lesbian” together was a horrifying thought; that her boundless, scintillating artistry could wallow in the shadows of society’s labels. She has since overcome that fear. “When you put your heart and soul into your art,” she says, “your art will always speak for itself.”

Kiyoko began writing songs at age six, while simultaneously pursuing an acting career that took her from Nickelodeon to the Disney Channel. “I specifically remember being 19, and I’m playing 16. Like, my Asian descent is really helping me out right now,” Kiyoko says with a laugh. She worked alongside Selena Gomez in Wizards of Waverly Place, had a lead role on CSI: Cyber, guest starred on Insecure, and won an episode of RuPaul’s Secret Celebrity Drag Race. Of these two paths, Kiyoko says, “Music has always been my love and storytelling has always been my wife.” She has successfully married her music and visual instincts into a singular pop career, now directing her music videos and writing for other artists, such as K-pop rising stars aespa.

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“Girls Like Girls” was a turning point for Kiyoko, especially at a time when she only accepted herself on a surface level. The outpouring of love and support revved up her heart. People were okay with her being gay, they would still listen to her music, and they wanted to watch a music video with her and another woman. “I was just so high off of that,” she recalls. “That chapter of me as an artist was me really catching up with myself, finally getting to write these songs about these experiences I had in the past.”

That’s the crux. Thus far, Kiyoko’s career has been a reflection of the past, unpacking trauma and delight and everything in between, most notably on her 2018 debut album, Expectations. It’s a familiar duty for queer people, having to play catch-up with the past, acknowledging that you were never afforded the experiences that your straight peers had. “I have caught up with my past,” Kiyoko says. “I’ve really learned to love and also know who I am as a person.” 

She’s finally had time to explore the intersection of queerness and her biracial identity, a part of herself that she never had enough energy to think deeply about in her youth. She recalls, “I didn't really have any capacity to understand or navigate why I was never Asian enough and why I wasn't white enough, and the disconnect with my culture, because I was just so overwhelmed with hiding the fact that I loved women.”

Kiyoko now holds space for her Japanese heritage and spends time learning about the history and struggles of her people. (During a recent AAPI event at the White House, she wore her grandmother's ring and reflected on how her grandfather was kicked out of college for being Japanese.) She’s moving away from the Barbie blonde, closer to her roots. For Kiyoko, it’s all about peeling back the layers of who she is and who she hopes to become.

Panorama will deliver us into the here and now, chronicling a tumultuous time in Kiyoko's life, breaking herself down, and building herself back up again. “This album is filled with self-failure and heartbreak and finding love and fighting to keep it and all of these things I have yet to share,” she says. 

Kiyoko sustained a concussion in early 2016, which, coupled with mental health obstacles, pushed her into a tunnel where survival meant putting one foot in front of the other, over and over again. She has emerged from those battles as a more self-assured version of herself, now seeing the bigger picture, stopping the world long enough to admire the view: “Panorama is me trying to own where I'm at.”

She’s been open about her recent journey with body image, which involved many physical changes while taking medicine and recovering from her concussion. “I navigated not being able to look at myself in the mirror, loving the masks, being able to cover my face all the time,” Kiyoko says. She has played the self-blame game and knows what it’s like to lose confidence. “There’s no book on how to get that back,” she notes, but mantras in the mirror have helped her write the prologue.

The creation of Panorama has been a process of musical liberation. “I had this epiphany that, lyrically, I was still holding back and hiding how I truly felt,” Kiyoko says. The music she’d written in her youth was healing and comforting, but it was coded. “No one was ever going to know what I was actually saying, in fear of someone finding my journal, or someone thinking that I was a flaming lesbian.” Even when she began writing explicitly queer lyrics, something in that self-censoring tendency remained. Documenting her stories on Panorama has meant that she no longer steels herself within this protective mechanism, instead sharing exactly what she means, word for word. She pulled everything apart and put it together again. Now she's reveling in the clarity.

Kiyoko hopes everyone can find their own truth in Panorama. She wants to be an artist for all. “Hey, I’m Hayley, and I’m a lesbian, and I’m here for the queers,” she says. “But I'm also here for everyone else.” She isn’t around only for Pride — she’s just as vibrant and gay during the other 11 months of the year. Her music is for people who feel lost and struggle with mental health, she adds. “We're all so connected and we're so different, but we're so similar in so many ways.”

Even after all her success, Kiyoko doesn’t feel like she’s arrived. There are days when she wakes up less confident than the day before. She has not figured everything out. “'Arrived' is a weird word, because I don’t feel satisfied,” she says. “'Arrived' has this layer of satisfaction. I do feel satisfied with where I'm at, at this point in my life, and I am proud of who I am today. But I feel like I'm still just beginning to feel like that resonates.”

While she’s here, wherever that may be, Kiyoko intends to keep telling stories through her own lens about women who love women, not through the male gaze she was so exposed to in her youth. “What I love about directing is, I love giving a stage or platform for someone else to shine,” she says of being in charge of the vision of her music videos. The video for “For the Girls” is proof of that: In the dating show of her dreams, people from all walks of life get a shot at love with Kiyoko. The diverse casting of predominantly queer contestants was a conscious choice, she says, and fostered a sense of camaraderie on set. “We all felt so comfortable and seen by one another.”

Kiyoko is still imagining the bedroom from her childhood. But it wasn’t all boy band posters with curled corners or fashion designs with smudged lines. Her trophies also reflected the faces of the rock band No Doubt. Gwen Stefani stared her down, and Kiyoko found a kinship in their shared edginess. She didn’t want to be with the members of *NSYNC, she wanted to be them. She dreamed of her “No Strings Attached” moment in the Staples Center, drinking up love from the audience.

The walls of her current bedroom are covered in a lot less muscle, decorated instead with Monet-type paintings. She’s drawn to the colors, the way they can calm, heal, and inspire. A painting of Sacré-Cœur Basilica in Montmartre takes pride of place, done by an artist who sat at the foot of the church and let their brush consume the canvas. Every night Kiyoko lies in her bed and stares at the vibrant textures and muted swirls on her walls.

She thinks about music and her fans, and hopes that they’ll support her as she continues to grow in this lifetime. She thinks about the Hayleys of eras past and the ones who might exist in the future. They coalesce into one: a Hayley Kiyoko who wants to inspire her fans to chase their dreams, get the girl they like, and live a life of courage; a Hayley underpinned by one mission to “ignite hope.” A tapestry of experiences and expectations, now a panorama for all to see.

CREDITS

Editor in Chief: Versha Sharma

Photographer: Ally Green

1st Assistant: Avery Mulally

Stylist: Ade Samuel

Hair Stylist: Abraham Esparza

Makeup Artist: Marla Vazquez using Chantecaille

Tailor: Vita Gavrylyuk

Prop Stylist: Andre Shahjanian for Hype Creative

Production: Caroline Hughes for Hyperion

Production Assistant: James Gonzales, Lauren Oley

Senior Fashion Editor: Tchesmeni Leonard

Assistant Fashion Editor: Kat Thomas

Art Director: Emily Zirimis

Visual Editor: Louisiana Mei Gelpi

Designer: Liz Coulbourn

Executive Editor: Danielle Kwateng

Features Director: Brittney Mcnamara

Senior Entertainment Editor: Eugene Shevertalov

Senior Culture Editor: P. Claire Dodson

Senior Director of Creative Development: Mi-Anne Chan

Senior Social Media Manager: Honestine Fraser

Social Media Manager: Ysenia Valdez

Associate Manager, Audience Development: Ashley Wolfgang

Video Credits

Director/DP: Gina Gizella Manning

Lighting: Mike Pecci

Assistant: Mike Tran 

Editor: Arjun Srivatsa

Social Video Producer: Mia Conway

Senior Director of Creative Development: Mi-Anne Chan

Lead Creative Producer: Logan Tsugita

Production Manager: Marilee Hodge