But I'm A Cheerleader Ending Explained: Conversion Camps Are Absurd

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Jamie Babbit's 1999 film "But I'm a Cheerleader" is a broad, colorful satire that takes aim at that most deserving of targets: conversion camps for teens. So-called conversion therapy, openly lambasted by the Human Rights Campaign, is the attempt to alter a young person's sexual orientation or gender identity, often using any number of abusive or manipulative means. As of this writing, conversion therapy is illegal in France, Germany, Spain, Mexico, Albania, Canada, and multiple U.S. States. Bans are pending in other countries. Many of these conversion camps are run by church groups, "ex-gay" ministries, and other non-profit organizations. Many people who have run said camps have come out to denounce them as psychologically torturous. 

In media, conversion camps have appeared as the central setting of several recent major feature films. The 2022 slasher film "They/Them" is set at a conversion camp. The Netflix documentary "Pray Away" — a shortening of the conversion camp catchphrase "pray away the gay" — traces the extreme evangelical origins of Exodus International, a conversion movement that started in the 1970s and disbanded in 2013. The 2018 film "The Miseducation of Cameron Post" is about a teen girl who falls in love with a female classmate and is sent by her conservative grandparents to a camp, and Joel Edgerton's "Boy Erased" from that same year follows a teenage boy into a camp that is decidedly church-like. 

Prior to all those films, though, came Babbit's "But I'm a Cheerleader," a lighthearted, optimistic, and hilarious skewering of conversion camps and traditional heteronormativity seen through a pink-tinged, cartoony, John Waters-inflected lesbian love story. The film wasn't terribly well-received upon its release — some didn't like Babbit's whimsical leniency — but some now consider it to be one of the better queer films of all time. 

Babbit and her then-girlfriend Andrea Sperling conceived of the idea for "But I'm a Cheerleader" as a sendup of the 12-step recovery programs that Babbit's mother ran. Her ideas were laid out in a Post Script interview, handily compiled in the book "Film Voices." Babbit saw cheerleaders as the pinnacle of archetypal American femininity, and wanted to use a cheerleader character to tell a lesbian love story from the perspective of a "femme" lesbian. Many of the lesbian films of the mid-1990s — films like "Go Fish" and "The Watermelon Woman" – were too often about "butch" lesbians. 

In Kirby Dick's 2006 documentary film "This Film is Not Yet Rated," Babbit is interviewed about the struggle she had over her film's rating. Initially, "Cheerleader" was to be rated NC-17 for, it seems, relatively tame sexual references. The contested scenes were a shot of Graham touching Megan over her clothes, a scene where Megan is masturbating, also while fully clothes, and a spoken reference to Megan performing cunnilingus. Babbit was outraged at the rating, citing "American Pie" from that same year as featuring far more explicit scenes of teen sexuality — including a masturbation scene — yet still receiving an R rating. "But I'm a Cheerleader" had to be edited down to avoid an NC-17 rating, which, to Babbit, was irrefutable evidence that the MPAA ratings system is a homophobic institution. Notoriously, queer films get harder ratings than heterosexual films. 

If one adopts the thinking patters of a conspiracy theorist, one can perhaps posit that "But I'm a Cheerleader," in being a film about tearing down ridiculous and dated homophobic institutions, attracted the ire of homophobic people. It almost seems like a queer film is being censored. If one were paranoid.