But I’m a Cheerleader (1999) 💓💙🧡

“But, I’m a cheerleader!”

There’s been lots of movies made about the horrors of conversation “therapy”, but none have quite the style or sting as Jamie Babbit’s feature film But I’m a Cheerleader. We get Natasha Lyonne playing a sweet baby angel, RuPaul in masculinity drag, Kathy Moriarty doing her best impression of Mommy Dearest, and Clea DuVall being her magnificent self. Even though the subject matter is heavy, this film is such a joy to watch. The exaggerated, campy aesthetic highlights how ridiculous gender norms are, and while the adults behave like large children, it’s the teens stuck in the bizarro binary house that are the most grounded and rational.

Babbit had a budget of about 1 million, and used a lot of that to build the plastic “in-organic” world of the conversion house. She also made a point of casting as many people of colour as she could. In a 2000 interview with NitrateOnline.com, she said “There’s so much racism at every level of making movies. The casting directors don’t bring them in, the agents don’t sign them because there’s less work, so you have to look harder as a director, but I feel it’s your responsibility to do that. Fifty percent of my crew was African American, because I had an awesome line producer who hired them. … Actually, my first choice for Megan, before Natasha Lyonne, was Rosario Dawson, but my executive producer wouldn’t let me. He had a point, that I was creating this All-American character. And he said, ‘Jamie, she’s Puerto Rican,’ and I said, ‘Yeah, but that’s American!’ We have so many battles to fight.”
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