It’s hard to recall this now as an out, proud, and reasonably happy adult, but I spent a lot of my teen years lying—not to other people, necessarily (except when my mom asked if I was the one who’d crashed her work computer illegally downloading Chinese-subtitled episodes of America’s Next Top Model), but to myself. On some level, I knew the nervous, vaguely nauseous feeling I got in my stomach around certain girls and women had a name, but I couldn’t bring myself to speak it, so I loudly crushed on hot male actors and popular boys from neighboring schools who vigorously ignored me at play practice instead, confining my likely-obvious queerness to moments when I was alone and could luxuriate in the beauty of the various femme and androgynous objects of my affection.
I had many secret lesbian crushes in my youth, from The L Word’s Shane McCutcheon to Meredith Blake from The Parent Trap, but I don’t think any of them burned as bright as my repressed lust for Keira Knightley as sports bra-clad, soccer-obsessed proto-dyke Jules in Gurinder Chadha’s 2003 rom-com Bend It Like Beckham. Don’t get me wrong, I was plenty gay for the movie’s actual star Jess (Parminder Nagra), too, but it was Jules’s short-haired, frill-eschewing futch confidence that got me on board. Yes, she crushed on boys just like I pretended to, but she also refused her mother’s attempts to make her over and wholeheartedly pursued her love for soccer despite the world’s derision, and even as a shy, tentative indoor kid, I fell right into the “Do I want her or do I want to be her?” trap that has ensnared queer women for decades. (Spoiler: It’s both! It’s always both!)
For years, I thought I was alone in my Jules obsession; even though my best friend from high school turned out to be a bisexual adult too, we would have rather died than admit to each other that we were…you know… back then, so we sat side by side rewatching Bend It Like Beckham on successive Saturday nights as though we were just really into soccer-related coming-of-age independent films. (LOL! LMAO, even!)
As it turns out, I’m far from the only queer adult who realized something pretty significant about themselves from watching Jules tear up the soccer field. In honor of Keira Knightley’s 40th birthday, please find a roundup of stories from LGBTQ+ individuals who also consider Jules to be their all-time gay root.
“Bend It Like Beckham came out when I was 10 years old, but I don’t think I saw it til I was 11. I DEFINITELY did not know I was queer and mostly metabolized it at the time as an unbelievably strong yearning to be very good friends with Keira Knightley. She was like if Jonathan Taylor Thomas was tall and smelled good and had a British accent, and she was good at sports and had a temper?! Come on!” —Sophie, 32
“I was a sporty 10-year-old with short hair when Bend It Like Beckham came out, and I had never seen a character like Jules before. She looked like me except she was cool and confident. It was a classic young queer confusion—did I want to grow up and become her, or did I want to grow up and have a girlfriend just like her? Either way, it gave me options I couldn’t visualize before.” —Emily, 33
“As an awkward, chubby gay kid in 2003 suburban Boston, I had no idea enby lesbian representation was possible until Keira in Bend It Like Beckham opened up that horizon for me.” —Jack, 32
"Why was Keira Knightley so gay in that movie? And yet, not actually gay…I asked my partner recently how she had possibly never seen Bend It Like Beckham when it’s a gay movie. She said, ‘So they’re lesbians?’ I was like, ‘Well, no…’ but there’s so much hot we are doing something wrong tension between Jules and Jess.” —Libby, 34
“Watching the Bend It Like Beckham VHS as a soccer kid at around 10 or 11, I was so fascinated with Jules’s aesthetic and didn’t know why. The baby tees, the leather jacket and bandana, her jersey loosely draped over her boyish frame, the way her hair was too short to put in a ponytail; she was so hot-coded, but in a different way than I had really considered before. It felt like she was supposed to be hot for me.” —Dove, 29
“This is the haircut I gave myself in seventh grade because of Keira in Bend It Like Beckham, done with kitchen scissors and an unknowable sense of urgency.” —Pheli, 29
“I’m pretty sure I saw Bend It Like Beckham right when it came out, so I was 10 or 11. I was a tomboy weirdo with a very traditionally girly (straight) older sister and a history of intense, obsessive female friendships, so I think I just really related to Jess. The German nightclub scene (and both Jules and Jess’s outfits in it) has lived in my head rent-free ever since then.” —Thea, 32
“I rented Bend It Like Beckham from Blockbuster when I was a sophomore in high school and watched it in my parents’ basement with my best friends, Lauren and Neema. I soon decided I needed to own the DVD. It became the comfort movie I kept rewatching, partly because it looked like our friendships—playful, multi-racial, intimate, devoted, with men very peripheral (just sub out soccer team for ultimate Frisbee). But deeper down, it was the mis-reading of their platonic intimacy that I found most intoxicating. At 15, to have our girl-crush romances (mis)read as true lesbianism was what I most feared and most wanted. I didn’t have the words to say it, so I rewatched those scenes and let Jess and Jules try to say it for me.” —Alicia, 36
