Clea DuVall and Natasha Lyonne learn infant care.

The summer's only lesbian and gay date movie

July 21 2000 GAY PEOPLE'S CHRONICLE

But I'm a Cheerleader Directed by Jamie Babbit Written by Brian Wayne Petersen

Reviewed by Mark J. Huisman

The Freemont High football captain's tongue is roving around her mouth, but Megan (Natasha Lyonne) has her mind on the tightly uniformed, bouncing breasts of her fellow cheerleaders. She's a closet lesbian and doesn't know it. So her parents, Peter (Bud Cort) and Nancy (Mink Stole), pray-"Teach us, God, the roles we are all supposed to play”—and then pack the little one off to summer "ex-gay" camp.

Enter Mary Brown (Cathy Moriarty), the stiff-backed, starchly-coifed proprietor of True Directions, who teaches young queers how not to be. All "rehabbers,” as she calls her campers, must complete a five-step program ranging from Finding Your Root (the cause of queerness, as if there were one) to Simulated Sexual Lifestyle (hetero fucking exercises, like we need an example).

Mary and her counselor Mike (RuPaul Charles out of drag), himself a recent exgay, try valiantly to strike up the het band, but the notes quickly sour. Even Mary's

hunky, denim-cut-off-busting son Rock (Eddie Cibrian) breaks the rules: When she catches him demurely sipping a cocktail, Mary furiously hurls the twisty to the ground and roars: "How many times do I have to tell 'you! Chug it! Chuuug it!"

Gal rehabbers Graham (Clea DuVall), Jan (Katrina Phillips), Hilary (Melanie Lynskey) and Sinead (Katherine Towne) put on good faces washing and baking in pink day dresses, but Megan falls ever more under Graham's seductive spell. After a hard day of war games and auto shop in blue jumpers, the awkwardly winsome Joel (Joel Michaely) and Andrew (Douglas Spain) wrestle with psychological demons while love birds Dolph (Dante Basco) and Clayton (Kip Pardue) wrestle behind the sofa.

There's a terrific subplot about Lloyd (Wesley Mann) and Larry (Richard Moll), who run the "homo underground.” DuVall is terrific as the determined dyke with a sexy Cheshire grin. And Charles astonishes: There's no Supermodel here, just a super actor playing a guy convinced he's all straightened out.

Cool as a double dip of ice cream, Cheerleader is this summer's only lesbian and gay date movie.

But we're filmmakers!

RuPaul out

6) Uniform.

Director Jamie Babbit and screenwriter Brian Petersen on the fine art of satirizing the 'ex-gay' movement

by Mark J. Huisman

While shooting the opening sequence of her debut feature But I'm A Cheerleader, director Jamie Babbit fielded a question from a concerned actress. Since there were over a half dozen actresses arrayed in a line of cheerleaders, how did she look?

"I said, 'You look great!"" recalls Babbit. "And then I whispered to the cinematographer, 'Point the camera down. Point the camera down. Sorry, honey, we're never going to see your face." Babbit shot the girls from their necks down, resulting in a line of tightly uniformed, bouncing breasts that signify the fantasies of her protagonist, Megán, even as she's kissing the football captain. As we all know, wanting to be someone else doesn't necessarily make it so: We are who we are.

"It's so preposterous, this Exodous International idea of changing from gay to straight through a 12-step program," Babbit says, her voice full of the astonishment of someone hearing the concept for the first time. "Brian and I felt really strongly about making a movie that says gay desire does not change. You can put on a baseball cap or a dress, grow a beard or cut one off, but that won't really change how you feel."

"I also wanted to tell a story from a femme perspective, although I have difficulties with the butch/femme dichotomy," Babbit says. "I wanted Megan to be hyper-femi-

nine, the all-American good girl, so she's the archetype of that-a cheerleader. I wanted her journey to be about attaining another girl rather than being attained, which is how I view most lesbian films. Here, she starts out saying she can't be a lesbian because she's a cheerleader. By the end, she's a cheerleader and a lesbian."

Jamie Babbit

Babbit grew up in the Cleveland suburb of Shaker Heights, where her mother ran a rehabilitation camp for adolescent drug addicts and alcoholics called New Directions.

"She was very intent on making her three children a part of that place," Babbit recalls. “We spent our holidays with the kids and grew up with the twelve steps and serenity prayer posted in the house." After public school came Barnard College and various film classes at NYU and UCLA, followed by film gigs as an intern and production assistant. She currently directs the TV series Popular.

"I was an all-black-wearing theater freak," Babbit grins when asked whether her high school experience was more about football players or cheerleading. "When I came out

to my mother, she said, 'But you were never good at sports.' And I was very enamored of lipstick. She didn't really have a problem, she was just confused. I was, too."

Screenwriter Brian Petersen also was not a cheerleader or football player when he attended Flathead High School in Kalispell, Montana.

"I played French horn in the pep band," he says with satisfaction, "So I spent a lot of time with the cheerleaders." Petersen fled those flats for college in Salem, Oregon, where coming out "took all of college to do." He is currently working on ideas for several TV shows, which he intends to pitch this season for next year.

Ironically, Babbit and Petersen shared a penchant for a very important play activity that would inform their filmmaking careers, even if they didn't realize it at the time. "I was obsessed with Barbies, which horrifies most lesbians,” Babbit says, her round face stretching to accommodate a smile the size of a billboard. "I loved my Barbies and played with them all the time. I had the Barbie Dream House, Camper Van, Hairstyling Salon. Those were very big influences on the film's look, those bright colors and artificial materials."

Babbit also cops to owning a Ken doll. "But he was so boring, so plastic, his hair didn't move," Babbit explains. "He was just so plain." Continued on page 13

"I was obsessed

with Barbies, which horrifies most

lesbians."

-Jamie Babbit