Content warning: homophobia, misogyny. Major spoilers for “But I’m a Cheerleader.”
“But I’m a Cheerleader” is a cult classic film for good reason. With the heavy task of being an early cinematic satire of the indoctrination of queer people through conversion therapy, it surprisingly stuck the landing in some regards. It helped pave the way for future queer storytelling in ways that aren’t solely confessional or necessarily dramatic. “But I’m a Cheerleader” celebrates true love and acceptance in a place where you’re shunned if you don’t fit the societal mold. The movie subverts tropes of only expressing queer expressions of pessimism and austerity and making fun of queer people in bad faith. This results in punching up at misogynistic and homophobic institutions in a comedic way.
“But I’m a Cheerleader” must be discussed when talking about campy movies for its plot alone. For context, the 1999 film directed by Jamie Babbit stars Natasha Lyonne as Megan: a goody two-shoes Christian cheerleader in high school living the “American dream” in the sense that she’s popular, has a boyfriend and has a stable home life. However, she gets singled out for acting flirtatious with other women. Her religious parents send her to a conversion therapy camp, suspecting that she’s a lesbian. Megan gets close to a rebellious masculine woman named Graham who’s confident in her sexual orientation, but the conversion camp wants to separate them.
“But I’m a Cheerleader” uses stereotypes to its advantage for a controversial effect. For example, the stereotypes of the “femme” lesbian for Megan and the “butch” lesbian for Graham reinforce, on a surface level, traditional gender roles’ application to non-heterosexual relationships. Furthermore, the queer men depicted in this film are oftentimes speaking with a lisp. This reliance on tropes and stereotypes could be argued as hindering the film, but for the sake of comedy the stereotypes work to parody the very caricatures that intolerant people create and critique the systems behind these prejudices.
Gender roles are prevalent to a sickening extent in this movie. The queer women wear pink along with skirts and the queer men wear blue with ties. The camp segregates the sexes only by their sexes and disregards gender identity in the process. Gender is perceived as a tool to control people and tell them what they can and cannot do. Of course, the film makes fun of this too.
Near the end of the movie, the conversion campers are forced to wear skinsuits with leaves covering their genitals (in reference to the story of Adam and Eve, the first man and woman in the Bible) and simulate having sex on a bed. Disregarding their ages and the fact that everyone’s forced to watch, the staff at the conversion camp are supportive of these heteronormative displays of sexuality where the woman is always submissive and the man is always dominant. For a variety of reasons, it’s so disgustingly uncomfortable it’s absurd. Hopefully, it makes you consider the institution of gender roles in our culture as a result.
The underlying theme of anti-LGBTQ+ indoctrination in the youth in this film is shown when the conversion campers are forced to protest how much they supposedly hate homosexuality in front of the house of a gay couple who freed the conversion campers to go to a gay bar. They shout homophobic slurs and other catchphrases, but they don’t really mean it. While it may seem easy to resist the bigotry, it penetrates the mind and destabilizes your confidence.
Graham faces this lack of confidence when given an ultimatum to choose her love for Megan or finish the conversion program. Although she loves Megan, she chooses to marry a man to finish the program and to assimilate back into her family as a “heterosexual” woman — until Megan wins her back over by crashing the wedding with a protest cheer.
This ultimate switch from comedy to romance-drama at this point of the movie hits like a freight train because it’s a candid symbol of claiming one’s full identity. We are genre-less and capable of so many different moods. We cannot be easily labeled. And despite her stereotypical character, Megan eventually refuses to hide any part of herself. She accepts her identity and the truth about who she is.
“But I’m a Cheerleader,” while not perfect, is really a story about accepting yourself no matter how you identify and despite oppression. Letting go of harmful traditions — originally decided on by people we’ll never meet — that promote social constructs such as the patriarchy and cisgender, heteronormative ideologies is a goal facilitated by art as methods of education and critique. “But I’m a Cheerleader” has a beautiful, riveting love story that resists and critiques homophobia, misogyny and ultimately the seizing of autonomy in blatant terms. The movie’s story results in further developing a queer canon that deserves to be remembered, appreciated and built upon.