Hilary Duff isn’t rewriting history, she’s finally catching up to it.
While revisiting scenes from her career, Duff recently addressed the long-standing queer reading of Cadet Kelly, the 2002 Disney Channel Original Movie that has quietly lived on as a touchstone for queer millennials. During the rewatch, Duff noted that the internet has repeatedly framed the film as a lesbian love story, and she didn’t push back.
Instead, she leaned in.
“I don’t know if I should say this or not,” Duff said with a laugh, referencing the online discourse. “But I know that the internet had this big thing that went on about this being a lesbian love story.” She then wondered aloud why Disney never made a sequel, adding that it “100% seems like it would’ve gone in a great direction.”
For longtime fans, particularly queer viewers who grew up decoding subtext because overt representation wasn’t an option, the comment felt less like a revelation and more like confirmation.
For many viewers, especially those who grew up searching for themselves in subtext because explicit representation wasn’t available, the moment landed as validation rather than surprise.
This isn’t the first time Duff has brushed up against the conversation. In a 2022 interview with Cosmopolitan, she admitted she hadn’t originally considered the film queer-coded, until a queer castmate on How I Met Your Father pointed it out. Actor Tien Tran, who played Ellen, flagged the dynamic between Kelly and Christy Carlson Romano’s Captain Jennifer Stone, specifically the intense proximity and charged tension between the characters.
Duff’s response at the time was telling. She didn’t push back. She said she needed to rewatch the movie. And she added that if the film helped anyone feel seen, she hoped it did.
That framing matters. It acknowledges impact without retroactively assigning intent, a distinction queer audiences understand well.
Why the Subtext Stuck
Cadet Kelly follows Kelly Collins, a free-spirited teen forced into military school by her new stepfather, where she immediately clashes with her commanding officer, Captain Stone. On paper, it’s a fish-out-of-water story. In practice, it’s an emotional duel between two girls who are obsessed with each other’s presence, approval, and transformation.
The supposed love interest barely registers. The emotional arc lives elsewhere.
Carlson Romano has spoken candidly about that legacy. In a 2022 video on her YouTube channel, she acknowledged that many viewers interpreted the relationship as romantic, and went further, saying the character of Captain Stone played a role in helping young girls understand their sexuality.
She noted that the military setting added another layer. At the time the movie was released, queerness wasn’t openly discussed in that context, especially in youth media. Yet Stone’s intensity, control, and eventual vulnerability resonated deeply. Carlson Romano said she was flattered to learn the character served as a sexual awakening for some viewers, something she never anticipated while filming.
That kind of cultural afterlife doesn’t happen by accident.
Duff’s Rewatch Lands Differently Now
What makes Duff’s recent comment feel meaningful isn’t just that she acknowledged the queer reading, it’s that she treated it as reasonable. She didn’t frame it as projection or revisionism. She wondered why the story wasn’t expanded. She laughed, but she didn’t deflect.
That matters in 2026, as audiences continue reexamining early-2000s media through a lens that finally allows queer interpretation to be taken seriously. Representation doesn’t only live in what was explicit. It also lives in what people carried with them when they didn’t yet have language for it.
Duff isn’t claiming Cadet Kelly was written as a lesbian love story. She’s acknowledging that it functioned as one for a generation of viewers, and that’s arguably more important.
Sometimes canon isn’t what the studio intended. It’s what the audience recognized, held onto, and never let go.
