But I’m a Cheerleader

Megan is in every respect the prototype of an American cheerleader: pretty, popular, gets good grades at school and goes out with the captain of the football team. And of course she is terribly nice. One day however an unpleasant surprise awaits her at home. Her parents, who cherish some uneasy suspicions, have invited a staff member of ‘True Directions’, a rehabilitation camp for homosexuals. Evidence against Megan has been building and can no longer be ignored: she is a vegetarian, she has a poster of Melissa Etheridge in her room, she embraces her girlfriends and thinks that her boyfriend wants to kiss and cuddle too much, in other words: unnatural urges… In the camp, that is run by the super-feminine Mary Brown, Megan has to follow a hilarious twelve-step plan to repentance. She does not herself believe for moment that she is a lesbian, until she falls in love with one of her camp mates. Step 1: ‘Admit that you’re a homosexual.’ But I’m a Cheerleader is a satire on American attitudes to homosexuality, not venomous, but comic and light in tone, filled with feminine colour schemes versus hyper-male activities. The shameful reality of the fact that camps like this really exist is parried in this film by a crass and absurd humour that bluntly questions the idiocy of homophobia.