But I'm a Cheerleader

But I’m a Cheerleader

Seventeen-year-old Megan (Natasha Lyonne) is a sunny high school senior who loves cheerleading and is dating a football player, Jared (Brandt Willie). She does not enjoy kissing Jared, however, and prefers looking at her fellow cheerleaders. Combined with Megan’s interest in vegetarianism and Melissa Etheridge, her family and friends suspect that she is in fact a lesbian. With the help of ex-gay Mike (RuPaul), they surprise her with an intervention. Following this confrontation, Megan is sent to True Directions, a reparative therapy camp which uses a five-step program (similar to Alcoholics Anonymous’ Twelve-Step Program) to convert its campers to heterosexuality.

At True Directions, Megan meets the Founder, strict disciplinarian Mary Brown (Cathy Moriarty), Mary’s supposedly heterosexual son Rock (Eddie Cibrian) and a group of young people trying to “cure” themselves of their homosexuality. With the prompting of Mary and the other campers, Megan reluctantly agrees that she is a lesbian (Step 1 of the Five-Step program). This fact, at odds with her traditional, religious upbringing, distresses her and she puts every effort into becoming heterosexual. Early on in her stay at True Directions, Megan discovers two of the boys, Dolph and Clayton (Dante Basco and Kip Pardue), making out. She panics and screams, leading to their discovery by Mike. Dolph is made to leave and Clayton is punished by being forced into isolation. The True Directions program involves the campers admitting that homosexuality (Step 1), rediscovering their gender identity by performing stereotypically gender-associated tasks (Step 2), finding the roof of their homosexuality through family therapy (Step 3), demystifying the other sex (Step 4), and simulating heterosexual intercourse (Step 5). Over the course of the program, Megan becomes friends with another girl at the camp, Graham (Clea DuVall), who, though more comfortable being gay then Megan, was forced to the camp at the risk of otherwise being disowned by her family.

The True Directions kids are encouraged to rebel against Mary by two of her former students, ex-ex gays Larry and Lloyd (Richard Moll and Wesley Mann), who take the campers to a local gay bar where Graham and Megan’s relationship develops into a romance. When Mary discovers the trip, she makes them all picket Larry and Lloyd’s house, carrying placards and shouting homophobic abuse. Megan and Graham sneak away, one night to have sex and begin to fall in love. When Mary finds out, Megan, now at ease with her sexual identity, is unrepentant. She is made to leave True Directions and, now homeless, goes to stay with Larry and Lloyd. Graham, afraid to defy her father, remains at the camp. Megan and Dolph, who is also living with Larry and Lloyd, plan to win back Graham and Clayton.

Megan and Dolph infiltrate the True Directions graduation ceremony where Dolph easily coaxes Clayton away. Megan entreats Graham to join them as well, but Graham nervously declines. Megan then performs a cheer for Graham and tells her that she loves her, finally winning Graham over. They drive off with Dolph and Clayton. The final scene of the film shows Megan’s parents (Mink Stole and Bud Cort) attending a PFLAG Meeting to come to terms with their daughter’s homosexuality.

In this satire, parents who are worried that their children might not be walking the straight and narrow path discover a rehabilitation camp designed to curb alternative lifestyles. Megan (Natasha Lyonne), a high school student and member of the cheerleading squad, seems like an ordinary enough teenage girl, but her habit of honestly expressing herself and lack of romantic enthusiasm for her boyfriend convince her very repressed parents, Peter (Bud Cort and Nancy (Mink Stole), that Megan is becoming a lesbian. So Megan is shipped off to True Directions, a camp for gay and gay-leaning teens, where Mary Brown (Cathy Moriarty) attempts to deprogram kids with homosexual tendencies. The first step in the process is to get each teen to admit to their homosexuality, which Megan is loathing to do, since she doesn’t believe she’s a lesbian – or at least she didn’t think so before she met her new friend Graham (Clea DuVall), who seems quite sure that she likes girls. Meanwhile, Mary’s son Rock (Eddie Cibrian), may be exempt from the camp’s activities, but he turns more than a few heads among True Directions’ male inmates. Noted female impersonator RuPaul appears as a camp guide, and Julie Delpy has a cameo as a “lipstick lesbian.”