gay conversion

But I’m a Bootlegger

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1999 was an incredible year for the high school comedy.  It was the year of Drop Dead Gorgeous, 10 Things I Hate About You, Drive Me Crazy, Cruel Intentions, Jawbreaker, Election, and the lesbian conversion-therapy satire But I’m a Cheerleader.  Only, I didn’t immediately see But I’m a Cheerleader the year it was released, nor did I find a copy at my local video store in the years that followed.  Jamie Babbit’s calling-card comedy was just as revered as its better-distributed contemporaries among my friends in the early aughts, but as someone who relied on the limited, sanitized selection of the Meraux branch of Blockbuster Video in those days, it just never made its way into my bedroom VCR.  So, But I’m a Cheerleader fell under a distinctly 90s category of movies that I saw for the first time after listening to their CD soundtracks for years.  See also: Clueless, Romeo+Juliet, and The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert; all bangers.  I eventually fell in love with the candy-coated production design and post-John Waters queer irreverence of the film proper when I finally had access to it on DVD in the 2010s, but it already occupied a pastel-painted corner of my mind by then thanks to the familiar sounds of Dressy Bessy, Wanda Jackson, and soundtrack-MVP April March (whose anglicized cover of “Chick Habit” fully conveys the movie’s tone & aesthetic before you’ve made it through the opening credits).

Imagine my shock, then, to recently learn that But I’m a Cheerleader never had an official soundtrack release.  To me, its pop music soundscape is just as iconic as any teen movies’ you could name – Fast Times, Breakfast Club, Dirty Dancing, whatever.  And yet, there was apparently no legal way to access that soundtrack outside watching the movie start to end, straining to hear the songs past the spoken dialogue and VHS tape hiss.  In retrospect, the copy of the soundtrack I owned in high school must have been a burned CD traded with a friend, which was some truly heroic mixtape work that I never fully appreciated until now.  Come to think of it, I remember that CD having more April March tracks than the one that’s actually associated with the film, so I’m not even fully sure what was on it anymore.  It was a one-of-a-kind bootleg put together by an obsessive fan who was frustrated that they couldn’t access an official release, passed around as an act of public service thanks to the modern miracle of the CD-R drive. It may not have been accurate to the track list of the songs as they were sequenced in the film, but it was accurate enough to the cheeky humor, swooning romance, and cult enthusiasm of But I’m a Cheerleader that it kept the movie fresh in my mind for as long as it took to find it.  It’s yet another reminder “bootlegger” is just a dirty word for D.I.Y. archivist.

I didn’t know about this outrageous distribution oversight until a recent screening of But I’m a Cheerleader at a neighborhood bar, hosted by Future Shock Video.  A kind of bootleg revival of the vintage video store experience, Future Shock has been screening VHS-era classics around the city in recent months, mostly to promote the opening of their new weekends-only storefront.  This particular screening was a special one, though.  As a Pride Month event and a fundraiser for the Covenant House homeless shelter, Future Shock not only projected But I’m a Cheerleader for a packed barroom, but they also dubbed a small batch of unofficial But I’m a Cheerleader soundtracks on audio cassette.  By now, the movie itself has unquestionably been canonized among the Queer Cinema greats, but I was still delighted that the event was designed as a celebration of its all-timer of a soundtrack in particular.  I was also shocked to learn that the practice of distributing that soundtrack has always been a mixtape-only endeavor, when it should have been in just as many record stores as the official tie-in soundtracks for Clueless or Can’t Hardly Wait.  It turns out that passing around copies of the But I’m a Cheerleader soundtrack was just as much of a public service in the early 2000s as it is now in the mid-2020s.  My Sharpie-labeled CD copy then was not as pretty as the cassette I picked up the other night, though, so I’m including pictures of Future Shock’s version below.

It’s not too late for an official release of the But I’m a Cheerleader soundtrack.  If anything, the time is ripe.  Not only is the film more widely seen and beloved than ever, but its exclusivity as a first-time release would also play directly into physical media obsessives’ debilitating FOMO.  I just watched a bar full of young, queer movie nerds crowd around a humble tripod projector screen to watch this movie with their friends on a Wednesday night; there’s an audience for it.  Until that historical wrong is corrected and the soundtrack receives its first official release, all you can really do is make your own mixtape version based on the track list compiled below.  That can be a little tricky for the more independent artists on the soundtrack like Tattle Tale, who do not have the same far-reaching distribution as a Wanda Jackson or a RuPaul.  Speaking from experience, though, you could probably just sub out a similar-sounding track from the Tattle Tale-adjacent act Bonfire Madigan and no one would really know the difference.  Thankfully, Future Shock did not cut any corners in their own unofficial But I’m a Cheerleader soundtrack, but it would have been okay if they did. The off-brand, inaccurate version I had on CD in high school still did the trick.

  1. “Chick Habit (Laisse tomber les filles)” by April March
  2. “Just Like Henry” by Dressy Bessy
  3. “If You Should Try and Kiss Her” by Dressy Bessy
  4. “Trailer Song” by Sissy Bar
  5. “All or Nothing” by Miisa
  6. “We’re in the City” by Saint Etienne
  7. “The Swisher” by Summer’s Eve
  8. “Funnel of Love” by Wanda Jackson
  9. “Ray of Sunshine” by Go Sailor
  10. “Glass Vase Cello Case” by Tattle Tale
  11. “Party Train” by RuPaul
  12. “Evening in Paris” Lois Maffeo
  13. “Together Forever in Love” by Go Sailor

-Brandon Ledet

The Miseducation of Cameron Post (2018)

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As a shithead atheist teenager, I always made an obnoxious show out of not participating in the Catholic rituals my parents dragged me through. This bratty rebellion reached its pinnacle when I was enrolled in Confirmation classes in high school, which I agreed to complete as a final favor for my family before never stepping foot in a church again (wedding & funerals excepted). I was a total ass in these Confirmation classes, joining forces with the few fellow over-this-bullshit weirdos who had gotten pulled into that orbit to just generally disrupt the process in a way I’m sure annoyed the more earnest participants around us. I recognized a lot of that same dynamic in Desiree Akhavan’s sophomore feature The Miseducation of Cameron Post. It’s just that the film’s gay “conversation” camp (read: emotional torture camp) setting makes for much higher emotional stakes than whether I could shut my bratty suburban mouth during a lecture about the sins of abortion or masturbation. The Miseducation of Cameron Post offers a sympathetic eye to that kind of bratty camaraderie in the face of religious evangelism, using the setting of gay conversion “therapy” (again, torture) to frame that snotty attitude as an essential act of political rebellion. It even goes a step further to offer the same sympathy to the counselors on the other end of the dynamic, lost souls who do not know the extent of the damage they’re causing to the teens in their “care.” If I were a mature, well-rounded adult I would praise the radical empathy of that approach. The truth is, though, that a large part of me is still a shithead teenage atheist who wants to see the piss taken out of those evangelizing counselors. I much prefer the glibber takes on this same material like Saved! & But, I’m a Cheerleader!, because at heart I’m still a combative brat.

Chloë Grace Moretz stars as the titular brat of this particular religious battle, sent to conversion therapy when she’s caught smoking weed & having sex with her closeted girlfriend in the parking lot outside their high school prom. I’ve always had a difficult time taking Moretz seriously as a dramatic actor, but her casting here leans into her strengths as dazed, confused participant in a culture she doesn’t believe in. From her awkward body language when trying to fit in as a straight girl with a boyfriend to her puzzled expression at the sermons of her God’s Promise prison, her visible discomfort fits the character & script here, when it’s often distracting in other projects (this year’s Suspiria, for one). The Christian instructors at God’s Promise are just as confused & uneasy, using “stern love” (abuse) and reinforced gendered roles to attempt guiding hormonally-rattled teens back to a Godly, de-sexed lifestyle. The truth is that they don’t have any more idea what they’re doing there than the kids do, and there’s a humanizing vulnerability in that lack of confidence. They’re essentially attempting to erase identities that haven’t been fully forged yet, as teenage years are a time of transformation & self-discovery. They push our protagonist to admit who she is (gay) and why that’s wrong (it’s not), but she struggles with the exercise because she’s too young to be sure of the answers. For fellow campers who take the Christianity portion of the therapy dead seriously, this forced, unnecessary identity crisis can lead to volatile, life-threatening results. For our more dismissive, out-of-place POV character it’s more a disorienting haze of psychobabble & mixed messages. She holds onto the other non-Christian weirdos in her vicinity (including American Honey’s Sasha Lane) for life support as she resists “the treatment” offered by God’s Promise. The resulting US vs. Them battle of stubborn wills unfolds in a mature, even-handed, tender drama; it’s an admirable search for kindness & understanding when what I really wanted was for the kids to lash out & burn it all down.

There’s a highly-specific version of queerness bucking against religious conservatism in Akhavan’s debut, Appropriate Behavior, that feels like it’s largely missing in this follow-up. The entire film has a kind of sanitized YA sensibility that feels entirely foreign to the NYC hedonism of Akhavan’s particular POV. The times when her wilder, more passionate depictions of queer sexuality do crop up (mostly in the protagonist’s nighttime sex dreams & erotic memories) it feels like an out-of-nowhere intrusion on an otherwise delicately told story. The Miseducation of Cameron Post could have used some of that rebellious hedonism in its daytime drama, whether or not it would have been faithful to its source material novel. The closest we get to an open act of bratty rebellion is in the inclusion of a so-bad-it’s-good Christian workout video titled Blessercize, a real-life found object that offers some much-needed levity to the film’s soundtrack & imagery. Mostly, our bratty non-Christian rebels restrict their resistance to hushed eyerolls, hikes to smoke ditch-weed in the woods, and smuggled copies of The Breeders’ Last Splash on cassette (to be fair, it’s a really good album). There’s a brief moment when they stage a forbidden singalong to 4 Non Blondes’ “What’s Up?,” but the less I say about that tragically corny coup the better (it may be my least favorite scene of the year?). As someone who was lucky enough to escape any indoctrination worse than a few (hundred) Catholic masses and a mind-numbing Confirmation course, it’s not my place to say if anything more than those minor, hushed rebellions would have been appropriate to the story told here. I can only report that I was personally much more pleased by the cathartic, disruptive, over-the-top rebellions of Appropriate Behavior, Saved!, and But, I’m a Cheerleader!. This is a well-staged, well-performed, admirably empathetic drama mired in a subject I love to see treated with a snottier attitude unconcerned with those qualities.

-Brandon Ledet