With the digital release of the But I’m a Cheerleader director’s cut in late 2020, around the same time Hulu’s gay holiday rom-com Happiest Season was released, I found myself considering the two films in juxtaposition, and what their respective happy endings say about the kinds of stories we tell.
But I’m a Cheerleader (1999) and Happiest Season (2020) are both important entries in the queer cinema canon — But I’m a Cheerleader is a beloved cult classic, and Happiest Season made history as the first holiday rom-com from a major Hollywood studio to center on a same-sex couple. Both put a romantic comedy spin on topics such as lack of acceptance from family members, pressure to conform to heteronormativity, and families of choice.
In But I’m a Cheerleader, high school cheerleader Megan (Natasha Lyonne) is sent to conversion therapy camp after her family stages an intervention because they believe she’s a lesbian. At the camp, Megan learns “how to be straight” through a parody of heteronormative training sessions. Megan falls in love with fellow camper Graham (Clea DuVall) and the two begin a secret relationship. When they’re caught by the camp leader, Megan expects that Graham will leave the camp with her, but Graham is afraid of her father’s threats to cut off all support, so she stays.
Megan, forbidden to come home by her own parents, moves into the home of an older gay couple, Lloyd (Wesley Mann) and Larry (Richard Moll). Determined not to give up on Graham, Megan sneaks into the camp’s graduation and performs a cheer professing her love, and Graham runs away with her as the film ends.
Happiest Season centers around the relationship between Harper (Mackenzie Davis) and Abby (Kristen Stewart) as they visit Harper’s family for the holidays. But Harper’s family doesn’t know she’s gay, and think Abby is her straight roommate. As Abby endures a series of absurd misunderstandings with Harper’s wealthy, dysfunctional family, she grows frustrated that the relationship is being kept a secret and that she is not seen as Harper’s partner in the eyes of her family.
During a Christmas party, Harper and Abby are outed. When Harper still tries to deny it, Abby leaves, but Harper goes after her and says Abby is her real family, and the two make up. Harper comes out after all, and at the end of the film, Abby has been welcomed into the family. The final montage shows them all enjoying the holidays together.
There are many similarities in these two stories. The crux of the tension in the main relationship is one person wanting to walk away from the homophobic family situation, while the other feels obligated to stay out of fear of rejection from her family. But the way this conflict is reconciled in each film is very different. But I’m a Cheerleader’s happy ending allows Megan and Graham to abandon heteronormative society entirely, while Happiest Season’s happy ending is one of assimilation.
Happiest Season is one of the most mainstream queer movies to date, and certainly one of the most mainstream gay rom-coms. Despite this success, I can’t help but reflect on the message of But I’m a Cheerleader, a film released more than two decades prior and with a much smaller initial distribution, and feel that Happiest Season takes a major step backwards when it comes to challenging heteronormative culture.
But I’m a Cheerleader defies heteronormativity at every turn. The conversion camp is a mockery of the straight lifestyle. The focus on gender roles is made into absurdity: the final test for all campers is to “simulate” heterosexual sex while wearing Adam and Eve bodysuits. Acceptance and happiness are found after being thrown out of the camp — and therefore heterosexual society — entirely. When Megan shows up at Lloyd and Larry’s door, she discovers that Dolph (Dante Basco), another student who was kicked out of the camp, has been taken in as well. Megan, Dolph, and the other queer youths taken in by Lloyd and Larry create a family of choice that doesn’t neatly fit into the nuclear family expectations of heteronormative society. When Megan rescues Graham and they escape the conversion camp graduation together, they are escaping more than the camp — Graham is choosing, in that moment, to leave heteronormative society in favor of the queer family that will accept her.
In contrast, Happiest Season emphasizes conforming to heterosexual culture. Abby’s best friend John (Dan Levy) is vocally critical of heteronormative constructs — when Abby says she wants to propose to Harper, John says that Abby’s “trapping her into a box of heteronormativity and trying to make her your property. She is not a rice cooker, or a cake plate! She’s a human being!” — but the film tends to frame this criticism as a joke. It certainly doesn’t follow through with that criticism in the story’s narrative. Abby does want to follow certain heteronormative expectations, like asking Harper’s father’s permission to propose. And Abby and Harper’s happy ending is not found in leaving behind the society that rejects them; it is found in conforming to that very society, with a conservative family that comes around after one conversation.
Now, homonormativity in media is nothing new, and I’m not watching a Christmas comedy with the expectation that it won’t resolve the conflict in an oversimplified hand-wave. Mainstream gay media, even when made by gay people, has to appeal to the straight audience too, and selling a homonormative message makes it more broadly appealing. The ending of Happiest Season is a reassurance that what gay couples really want is to be just like straight couples, getting married and settling into an upper-middle-class life. There’s no room for the transgressive elements of a film like But I’m a Cheerleader.
This is not to diminish the ways in which Happiest Season was groundbreaking — it was incredibly well-received, which paves the way for more queer holiday movies and rom-coms in the future. And maybe future films will challenge the constraints of heteronormative culture in ways that Happiest Season did not.
But for now, I keep returning to the final moment of But I’m a Cheerleader, Megan and Graham kissing in the back of a pickup truck as it drove them away from a society in which they would never belong — one which they realized they didn’t want to belong to in the first place. I imagine an alternate version of Happiest Season where Abby, Harper, and John get in a car and, instead of driving back to Harper’s family, simply leave, off to create their own community and sense of belonging. Perhaps both films handle their subject matter in idealistic ways — but of the two, I know which ending I prefer.
