Video Wednesdays: But I’m a Cheerleader: Not Just Another Teen Sex Comedy

Human sexuality, much less gender identification, is a lot for a teenager to deal with. Growing up a child of the 1960s and ‘70s we were told that we could be anything that we wanted to be. The one unspoken exception to that notion is that sexual preference and identity are not part of that deal. Hence, the sexual revolution was really about teenage boys getting what they wanted and teenage girls getting a better solution to unwanted pregnancies than alleyway abortions or being “sent away” to have the baby and then give it up for adoption. I know this is an entirely overly serious reflection for a teenage-sex-comedy about a squeaky clean Christian girl being sent away to a religious sexual conversion camp. But the first thing I thought about as I began to watch this movie was what it was like working in my little Calvary Chapel in the 1980s and how hung up I and most of my fellow “music ministers” were about sex, primarily “pre-marital” sex. Homosexual sex was one thought beyond my already overwhelmed obsessive thinking. Maybe it was the making out in the car scene, imagining that her mind was totally somewhere else, or God forbid, just bored and/or turned off by my efforts. Now that’s sad but very funny.

The casting for this comedy was spot-on and hilarious. RuPaul playing a non-drag camp counselor fighting his homosexual urges towards the hunky also-queer-ish son of the owner of the camp was perfect. The cruelly prim and apparently sexually-dead camp owner was played by Cathy Moriarty (making me wonder why her character was running a sex-conversion camp, what’s her character’s backstory?). And finally, our favorite redheaded high school cheerleader was played by a very young Natasha Lyonne, who reminded me way too much of a redheaded cheerleader I was way into in college, right down to the very strong sexual urges hiding under the very pretty and feminine social facade… but this is about the movie and not the mistakes I made back then… ack.

Maybe there was more than a little PTSD thinking about all of the hang-ups about sex that we had to contend with growing up and this was way back when we had to sneak peaks at someone’s older sibling’s Playboy or an assorted National Geographic (physical paper media!) if we wanted to see a little nudity. And talk about pooling our ignorance, we liked whatever it was that we saw but were terrified if a girl actually said, Hi. Ha, the good ol’ days. And this was just sex, much less sex with the “wrong” gender.

I joke about this, but there’s nothing funny about one of the founding members of the early Jesus movement in California, Lonnie Frisbee, and how his ministry and life were destroyed because he and those around him never could reconcile his sexuality and his obvious calling to serve. What the hell was wrong with us? And while I look back at those days as a distant mistake, I know that there’s a healthy percentage of so-called Christians who are stuck thinking that there’s only one kind of sexuality. Ugh. So dumb and heartless.

One thing that I love about this movie is that, despite the folks running the conversion camp thinking that homosexuality is the result of “something gone wrong,” the message of this movie is that you just have to be whatever it is that you are. And that includes that there isn’t just one way to be gay either. And while they joke about using electric-shocks as aversion “therapy,” when it came to portraying the girls falling in love and exploring their sexuality, it was done like any teenagers’ first timid experiments connecting with another person. Nothing graphic, nothing lurid, nothing broken, just the typical adolescent confusion about what one feels in their heart and what’s going on with their bodies. Human sexuality and relationships are difficult enough without somewhat dysfunctional adults saying there is only one way that things are supposed to be. I don’t know about you, but humans rarely do anything in just “one way,” much less when it comes to relationships and love. Enjoy.

[Movie viewed on 2025-06-14 at the Beverly Theater].

Bonus behind-the-scene featurette. Enjoy.