Throwback Thursday: Pride Edition — A Biting Satire of Conversion Therapy

A quintessential lesbian classic about the quixotic quest to cure someone of their craving for quim…

Hey Fleshbot fans! I’m back with one more lez-tastic Pride Month mainstream movie pick for y’all for Throwback Thursday-- this time we’re checking out indie classic But I’m A Cheerleader. The film, released in 1999, is directed by Jamie Babbit and stars Natasha Lyonne, long before she starred in Orange Is The New Black and Russian Doll. Her character is Megan Bloomfield, a senior whose parents send her to conversion therapy to cure her of lesbianism, before college, at which point she might be "lost" entirely! Let’s dive in!

Megan is a wholesome church-going cheerleader, dating a football player, which is de rigeur, but she’s not particularly showing physical interest in him. In fact, she’s kinda scoping out the other girls on the squad and hoping no one notices. That, and she’s a vegetarian who really loves her some Melissa Etheridge music, so this has her conservative parents on edge and they make the shitty decision to send her to conversion therapy. The male half of the team who runs the conversion camp is “ex-gay” Mike, hilariously played by RuPaul, and on the assigned day, Megan’s parents deliver her to the camp, called True Directions.

True Directions is decorated in a completely surreal style with all of the girls’ area looking like the inside of Jeannie’s bottle on I Dream Of Jeannie, crossed with a Barbie fever dream. Everything is lurid Pepto pink. Literally everything. And of course, the guys’ area is all bright blue. The girls are forced to take lessons about child care, cooking, and numerous other gender role related things, while the guys are forced to hang out outside, sweating and dressed in tight outfits, fixing cars, playing football, or at least pretending to as they ogle the hunky gardener. We can see how this helps everyone be not-gay, right? It’s all part of the True Directions five-step program, the last stage of which is to simulate heterosexual intercourse.

Megan makes some friends and we see other now-familiar Hollywood faces among the other campers including her eventual girlfriend Graham (Clea Duvall) and Hilary (Melanie Lynskey.) I won’t spoil everything for you but once the campers decide enough is enough, they band together to bust out and be their authentic selves, making sure no one has to go through True Directions’ bullshit ever again.

This film has something in common with Saved! which is about Christian high school, and even Heavyweights, which is about fat camp. All three films are set in fictional versions of places where actual people have had quite a lot of actual trauma happen to them, but they are lampooned in these satirical films to just truly show how ludicrous these institutions can be and to show how the people running them are often motivated by greed than religious zealotry or desire to help anyone. Most importantly, they show the camaraderie and solidarity that are present among the oppressed, and that’s some Pride Month goodness if I ever saw it. Wrap up your Pride month in style and check it out!

But I’m A Cheerleader is available to stream (at press time) on Paramount+