But I’m a Cheerleader Understood The Campy Soul of Christofascism

Predicting Mike Johnson a quarter century ago

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Mike Johnson, the current speaker of the House of Representatives, boasted in 2022 about his efforts to prevent his son from watching porn.

In 2022, Johnson spoke at a Christian right conference about how he and his then 17-year-old son are “accountability partners” who use the software Covenant Eyes to monitor each other’s internet use. The software scans whatever the two do on their devices, and then sends reports if either dare to search sexy keywords or view sexy images. “If anything objectionable comes up, your accountability partner gets an immediate notice,” Johnson declared. “I’m proud to tell you my son has got a clean slate.”

Johnson’s fascination with his teen son’s porn habits is disturbingly odd, in part because of its obsessive hyper-normality. Under Christian patriarchy, parents enforce societal norms, especially around sex and sexuality. This is supposed to ensure cleanliness and health.

But ensuring cleanliness and health means the patriarch is constantly obsessing about everyone else’s sex life in a way that is at best intrusive, and at worst is gross, leering, and terrifying. Which is how you get Florida education boards threatening violent reprisals because librarians won’t remove Judy Blume books that the right has bizarrely labeled as pornographic. Or laws which mandate genital inspections (ie, state supported sexual abuse) to ensure that female athletes aren’t trans. Enforced gratuitous normality leads you into an uncanny valley of grotesque and bizarre abnormality.

That is the message of Jamie Babbit’s wonderful, groundbreaking, and still underappreciated film But I’m a Cheerleader. Released a quarter century ago this summer, the movie was greeted with sweeping critical indifference and hostility; despite recent reevaluations, it still has only a 43% fresh on Rotten Tomatoes. Gemma Files at Film.com accused it of “ungainly sentiment and unnecessary stylization,” while Elvis Mitchell at the New York Times harumphed that it was “So campy it reflexively sends an elbow to its own ribs.”

Contra Mitchell and Files, though, the film’s high camp sincerity is exactly why it’s delightful—and why it’s feels so brilliantly prescient in our era of chilling Christofascist camp.

As the title suggests, the movie is about a cheerleader, Megan (a very young Natasha Lyonne), whose friends stage an intervention because they think she’s gay. The circumstantial evidence is compelling; she doesn’t like kissing her boyfriend, has a picture of Melissa Ethridge on the wall in her room, and has recently become a vegetarian.

Megan is shipped off to True Directions, a conversion camp designed to turn her straight. Shockingly, putting a bunch of lesbians together in a dorm room together is not a path to heteronormativity, and innocent femme Megan soon finds herself falling for much-less-innocent, substantially more butch, rich delinquent Graham (Clea DuVall).

The rom com arcs in the way that the rom com usually arcs, though there aren’t many onscreen couples with as much chemistry as Lyonne and DuVall. The true genius of the film, though, is in its gleeful parody of homophobic gender normativity.

True Directions tries to “cure” homosexuality by getting boys and girls to pursue prescribed gender roles. Girls dress in fabulous flouncy pink and thrust vacuum cleaners back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. Boys dress in fabulous blue shiny suits and learn to fix cars and catch footballs, while casting occasional lustful glances at the backside of Rock (Eddie Cibrian) the hard-bodied, dance-music enthusiast son of camp director Mary Brown (Cathy Moriarty).

Artist and writer Philip Core argued in 1984 that camp is “the lie that tells the truth.” But I’m a Cheerleader’s camp bona fides are in the title itself; Megan lies that she is participating in the standard feminine activity of cheerleading, and so she cannot be queer. But the lie is a truth: her love of femininity—her fantasies of healthy girls in tight tops somersaulting with spread legs—is part of her queer identity.

Similarly, when the guys lick their lips as they watch Rock put his chainsaw between his legs and rev it up, their interest in masculinity is an interest in masculinity. Forcing people into stereotypical gender roles inevitably reveals the limitations and absurdity of those roles. When, like Mike Johnson, you care that much about being a man, you inevitably make people wonder about your investment. The harder the patriarch clutches his staff, the more you wonder which staff he wants to clutch and why.

Mocking Johnson’s Christofascist predecessors is good fun. But the film isn’t just fun—or, to put it another way, the fun is also a lie that tells the truth. Critics who complained because Babbit’s humor is too broad or too obvious are missing a core point; the humor that looks broad is in fact bleakly realistic. The lie here is that homophobic Christofascists are ridiculous bumbling dopes—and that is also the truth. But I’m a Cheerleader is preposterously over the top, but nothing in it is as silly as Mike Johnson and his son monitoring each other’s porn.

The silliness of Christofascism doesn’t make it less dangerous. In some ways, it makes it more dangerous. Johnson and all his homophobic brethren are completely disconnected from reality, which allows them to inflict enormous cruelty on all those they see as their enemies, including their own children.

The most painful scene in But I’m a Cheerleader is a parental intervention, in which Megan’s salt of the earth, aw-shucks, folksy parents explain to her that if she adopts an “unhealthy lifestyle,” they will disown her. The fuddy-duddy delivery of the ultimatum only makes it more vicious and final. How do you fight someone who so earnestly, haplessly, believes that they’re destroying you for your own good?

Almost equally horrifying is a sequence in which Rock and Graham are forced to mime intercourse while Mary looks on and provides inappropriate commentary. (“Real men go in, unload, and pull out!”) It’s gratuitous, grotesque and over the top—and it also accurately captures the way in which enforcing heteronormative gender roles can be indistinguishable from sexual abuse. There’s no doubt that if Mary was around now, she’d enthusiastically advocate for forced genital exams in sports.

The camp gag of the film, then, is that the film is not a gag. Queer kids face vicious abuse which is so hyperbolic, so disconnected from reality, so bizarrely flamboyantly preposterous, that the only way to accurately depict it is to treat it as a camp goof. That’s why the climax of the film is a teeth-grindingly corny scene in which Megan declares her love for Graham in a rhymed cheer, complete with pom poms. The cheerleader fights heteronormative cringe with heteronormativity so cringe it’s queer.

The fact that lots of critics reacted with bafflement, indifference, and irritation to the cring and the queerness is also part of the joke that is not a joke. Today, homophobes like Florida governor Ron DeSantis are passing sweeping censorship bills to make it illegal to share stories like Megan and Graham’s. LGBT narratives, we’re constantly told, are dangerous, irrelevant, corrupting, and worthless. In contrast, a story about monitoring your son’s porn use is supposed to be inspiring and ennobling.

Babbit, faced with such nonsense, refuses to provide the earnest, sober content that so many critics seem to prefer. Instead, But I’m a Cheerleader insists on being big and weird and fake and sexual and joyfully itself. The movie is every Christofascist’s nightmare of what it means to be queer, in part because it demonstrates precisely how weird and fake and sexual and nightmarish Christofascism is. Twenty-five years later, with Mike Johnson and Ron DeSantis demanding a place in every bedroom, Babbit’s genius is still ahead of her time.