Review of But I'm a Cheerleader (2000) by Edith N — 10 Nov 2010

A Spectacularly Ineffective Treatment Program.

It's amazing how often "ex-gays" are found going into gay bars. Often with such lame excuses as "using the bathroom." The idea that gay is just something you are is not one which some people are willing to accept, no matter how much evidence is shown. Almost any work of fiction involving ex-gays makes the point that it's basically lying to yourself. I do believe that there is such thing as bisexuality, and I have known bi people who were perfectly happy to marry and be faithful to someone of the opposite sex. It does happen. However, you kind of have to start the process as bisexual, and indeed I know someone who's as close to lesbian as makes no difference, though she was married to a man for a while and seemingly quite happy about it. He was just a man to whom she was actually attracted. However, if she had been an actual lesbian, the relationship would not have been as theoretically happy as it was. Then again, she's really not the sort of person I can imagine as lying to herself.

Megan (Natasha Lyonne) is perfectly happy in her quiet, suburban life. She is, as the title says, a cheerleader. And, no, she doesn't much care for kissing her boyfriend, Jared (Brandt Wille), but watching him kiss her makes pretty much everyone else squirm, too. He's just bad at it. However, what with one thing and another, her friends and family stage an intervention along with Mike (a not-in-drag RuPaul Charles), an ex-gay who works at True Directions, an indoctrination--sorry, healing--camp for teenagers. At first, Megan is totally bewildered as to why everyone thinks she's a lesbian. She's a cheerleader! She has a boyfriend! She's a Christian! But the more she thinks about it, the more she has to come to terms with who she really is. And, as the movie goes on, who she is turns out to be someone desperately attracted to Graham (Clea DuVall), whose rich father has basically given her the option of being straight or being broke and homeless.

True Directions is possibly the single most homoerotic place I've ever seen. Mary (Cathy Moriarty) is trying to train them into proper sexual roles, including working out their "root," the thing which made them gay. (Graham's mother was married in pants.) So the boys wear stupid little blue short-shorts and shirts, and they go dodging about, chopping wood and playing silly war games. And, of course, Mary's son, Rock (Eddie Cibrian), is very obviously trying to make Mike slip back into his old ways by, say, fondling the handle of a shovel in a suggestive fashion. The girls all wear a horrible shade of pink, and they practice doing housework and things--in pairs. Mary says that friendship is something being gay takes away from you, and so they wash floors and diaper babies with another girl. So yeah. There are these giant wooden cut-outs where the boys are playing their games which are extremely phallic. There are also these little mini cattle prod things with which they're supposed to zap themselves when they have impure thoughts. This doesn't work on Sinead (Katharine Towne), who gets off on pain, though.

It's also fairly amusing to me that part of Mary's method is segregating the boys and girls into two large separate bedrooms. In other words, putting a bunch of hormonally charged teenagers in the same room all night with the sex to which they're attracted. Unsupervised. And then getting surprised when they sleep together. Really, Mary seems to know next to nothing about human interactions. Leaving aside the ex-gay thing, her methods are just silly. She actually forces the kids to think of people in stereotypes. You have to follow proper gender roles. And when she finds out that Megan's father (Bud Cort) lost his job for a while and her mother (Mink Stole) had to be the breadwinner for a year or so, it becomes obvious that it's why Megan is a lesbian, despite the fact that it happens all the time to people who grow up straight as an arrow. She's terribly, terribly Freudian. But I guess you'd have to be, running the place she does.

And, of course, there is the great, great joy of the ex-ex-gays, Lloyd (Wesley Mann) and Larry (Richard Moll). They were some of Mary's first cases, and they realized that they couldn't keep lying to themselves. One rather suspects their relationship is like that of a handful of the kids of this batch--they met at True Directions and fell in love. Indeed, it seems that meeting there and falling in love is a path towards coming to terms with who you are. Oh, Graham was forced. She's only pretending to want to be straight so she can keep college, a car, and a trust fund--surely great incentives. But Megan really thinks being a lesbian is something which can be fixed. She's not entirely sure there's anything wrong with being gay, just that there's something wrong with her being gay. She probably would have lived a peaceful life of believing she was straight if only her friends and her parents hadn't tried to cure her of being a lesbian.