Review: But I”m a Cheerleader – 1999, directed by Jamie Babbit.

Teen romantic comedies were not unusual in 1999, but a gay, R-rated one certainly was. Megan is a 17-year-old high school cheerleader, living in Fremont. She’s religious (vaguely Protestant), and has a boyfriend. Nonetheless, her friends and family stage an intervention, confronting her with dubious evidence of her homosexuality (e.g. her vegetarianism, and more relevantly the female pin-ups from her locker). Even worse, her parents send her to True Directions, a conversion therapy camp.

You might expect conversion therapy to involve a lot of prayer, but in fact religion is barely mentioned at True Directions. The program is more about enforcing gender roles: For example, the girls are taught the proper way to do housework and change an infant, while the boys are taught soldiering and auto maintenance. In contrast, later in the film a character asks an ex-ex-gay if he can teach her how to be a lesbian, and his response is that there is no one way; she’s just going to have to keep being herself. Charitably, I don’t believe the message is that you need to be gay to be free, but that we are all restricted by social norms, and homosexuality is merely one way to transgress.

Megan is horrified to discover that she is in fact a lesbian, and applies herself to the conversion program. Her fellow camper/patient Graham, however, believes it’s all bullshit: “You are who you are, Megan. The only trick is not getting caught.” Graham is at True Directions solely to protect her inheritance from her bigoted father. Eventually Megan opens her mind to self-acceptance.

Other reviews have compared But I’m a Cheerleader to John Waters’ films, and I can see the resemblance. The film is filled with strange characters and is a bit surreal. No one is exactly a villain, not even the director of True Directions. Rather, everyone is following their own lights or dealing with their own hang-ups.

Verdict: Recommended to fans of light comedy.

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