But I Have Pom-Poms, Excuse Me, I’m Clearly Heterosexual

The Gayest Thing About Me Is Apparently Everything in But I’m a Cheerleader and Other Conversion Camp Bad Ideas

Image: Promotional still from But I’m a Cheerleader (1999). Courtesy of Lionsgate Films. Wow, do those pom-poms make her look gay or super straight? …Nah, super gay.

One of the funniest movie titles ever written might also be one of the smartest.

But I’m a Cheerleader doesn’t wait for the audience to understand the joke. It puts the joke right in the title.

“But I’m a cheerleader!”

As if that settles the matter.

As if pom-poms are legally binding evidence of heterosexuality.

As if school spirit somehow functions as a sexual orientation.

The title tells us everything we need to know about the world we’re entering. A world where stereotypes are treated as facts, assumptions are treated as science, and a teenager’s participation in extracurricular activities is apparently enough to launch a full-scale investigation into her sexuality.

And somehow, it only gets more ridiculous from there.

Released in 1999, But I’m a Cheerleader follows Megan, a seemingly perfect high school cheerleader whose family becomes convinced she is a lesbian. Their evidence is questionable at best. She doesn’t seem particularly interested in boys. She has a poster of a female model. She likes Melissa Etheridge.

Naturally, the only reasonable solution is conversion therapy.

As one does.

Megan is promptly shipped off to True Directions, a camp designed to transform gay teenagers into proper heterosexual adults through a carefully structured curriculum of gender stereotypes.

The boys learn masculinity.

The girls learn femininity.

And everyone learns that whoever designed this program has never actually met a human being.

What struck me while revisiting the film wasn’t simply its commentary on sexuality.

It was how much of the movie revolves around performance.

Everyone is performing.

The campers are performing masculinity and femininity.

The counselors are performing authority.

The parents are performing certainty.

Even the sets are performing. The movie’s hyper-saturated pinks and blues make everything feel like a toy box version of reality. Nothing looks natural because the film isn’t interested in naturality. It is interested in exposing how artificial these expectations really are.

The camp’s entire philosophy boils down to a simple idea:

If we can get you to act differently, you will become different.

The film spends ninety minutes gleefully destroying that premise.

One of the most brilliant casting decisions is RuPaul.

Today, RuPaul is one of the most recognizable LGBTQ figures in the world. In 1999, however, audiences were treated to the delightful sight of RuPaul playing Mike, one of the camp counselors responsible for teaching masculinity.

The joke works on multiple levels.

On the surface, it’s funny.

Underneath, it’s devastating.

The movie quietly points out that masculinity itself is often treated as a performance. Stand this way. Walk this way. Talk this way. Wear this. Don’t wear that.

The campers aren’t discovering themselves.

They’re being handed scripts.

Which is why the film’s funniest moments often reveal its deepest truths.

Take Jan.

Poor Jan.

Jan’s visible mustache becomes one of the movie’s recurring jokes because she doesn’t fit the camp’s prescribed version of femininity. The adults react to this as though they’ve discovered a national security threat.

Nobody stops to ask whether Jan is happy.

Nobody wonders who Jan actually is.

The concern is entirely about whether Jan fits the role she has been assigned.

The mustache isn’t the joke.

The adults are.

The more I watched, the more I found myself fascinated by the authority figures.

Not because they were convincing.

Because they weren’t.

Take Mary Brown, played with absolute conviction by Cathy Moriarty.

Mary is so invested in maintaining these rules that the movie practically dares us to ask a question:

Why?

Why does she care this much?

Why is this mission so personal?

The film never gives us a neat answer.

And that is probably for the best.

Because But I’m a Cheerleader isn’t really interested in diagnosing individual people.

It is interested in exposing systems.

The movie understands that institutions often become detached from the reasons they were originally created. Rules exist because rules exist. Expectations exist because expectations exist.

Nobody remembers why.

They just keep performing them.

Which is why the film feels surprisingly modern more than twenty-five years later.

The specific targets may have changed.

The language may have evolved.

But the pressure remains familiar.

Perform masculinity.

Perform femininity.

Perform confidence.

Perform normality.

Perform whatever version of yourself makes everyone else comfortable.

The real triumph of But I’m a Cheerleader is that it refuses to believe authenticity can be manufactured.

You cannot force someone into becoming themselves.

You cannot punish someone into honesty.

You cannot assign identity the way you assign homework.

Identity emerges despite those efforts.

That truth sits at the center of Megan’s journey and her relationship with Graham, played by Clea DuVall. While Megan spends much of the film discovering who she is, Graham has already lived through the exhaustion of being told who she should be.

Together, they cut through the noise.

Not because they have all the answers.

Because they stop accepting everyone else’s.

That may be why the film has endured while so many comedies from the late 1990s feel trapped in their era.

At first glance, But I’m a Cheerleader looks like a quirky cult comedy.

Underneath, it is something sharper.

It understands that the people most obsessed with defining “normal” are often performing just as much as everyone else.

The difference is that everyone else eventually realizes they’re acting.

The people running the camp never do.

And that’s the real joke.