But I’m a Cheerleader, the iconic 1999 lesbian rom-com, was conceived and directed by a Scorpio, Jamie Babbit, and written by a Libra, Brian Wayne Peterson. And honestly, it kind of makes sense that that coupling would create such a chaotic, funny, and horny queer classic.
The film uses the frightening premise of forcible youth “re-education” (a.k.a. conversion therapy) to stage a sweet love story upon the campiest of color-coordinated sets. Viewed in 2022, the soundtrack still rips, the costumes hold up, and the performances from leads Natasha Lyonne and Clea DuVall couldn’t have been better.
If you’ve never seen it, you need to go stream it, but I’ll give a brief plot refresher for the uninitiated and the forgetful: Megan (Lyonne) is a high school cheerleader whose parents and friends suspect that she is a lesbian due to her vegetarianism, appreciation for the music of Melissa Etheridge, and lack of enthusiasm toward kissing her heavy-tongued boyfriend. Her parents ship her off to reparative therapy camp True Directions, which promises to deliver her back to her worried parents as a “normal” “ex-gay” following two months of treatment.
But once at camp, Megan meets Graham (DuVall), a fellow Sapphic who inspires Megan not only to accept the reality of her own queer desires, but ultimately act on them. Along the way, we meet a variety of fellow campers and counselors, all of whom are in various states of acceptance or denial about their own LGBTQ+ identities.
Conveniently, one of the funnest things to do with an ensemble cast is to appoint astrological signs to each of their characters based upon their depicted personality traits. It’s even more entertaining in this case, because the Scorpio-Libra duo of Babbitt and Peterson even pack tons of personality in characters who receive only a few speaking lines.
With such a rich text in hand, it’s easy to find the zodiac roots for each character in the film. Want to know who you’d be based on your sign? Find out below.
Click here to jump to a sign: Aries, Taurus, Gemini, Cancer, Leo, Virgo, Libra, Scorpio, Sagittarius, Capricorn, Aquarius, Pisces.
Aries is passionate. Aries is take-charge. Aries is Dolph, the varsity wrestling jock whose queer “root” is “too many locker room showers with the varsity team.”
Portrayed by Dante Basco (RU-FI-O! RU-FI-O! RU! FI! OOOH), Dolph is a straight-shooting gay who’s quick to figure out what — and who — he wants. Dolph is the first to be booted out of True Directions for breaking Lana'sLana'sLana'sLana'sLana'sLana's Mary’s rules after initiating a midnight makeout with fellow camper Clayton. Fortunately for our banished homosexual hero, we later learn that he was taken in by True Directions survivors and ex-ex-gay neighbors Lloyd and Larry, who provide him with a striped rainbow pajama set and help him rescue Clayton from Mary’s clutches in a pickup truck.
Sadly, Mary Brown, the impeccably coiffed plastic-flower cultivating bigot who runs True Directions, is probably also an Aries — albeit an evil, twisted one who uses her implacable willpower to intimidate queer youth at the behest of their homophobic families. While she seems to be able to cow her own son, Rock, into terrified silence, even her disapproving eyebrows don’t stand a chance against a righteous Aries in the throes of a fresh queer crush. In this ram-on-ram contest of horned headbutting, victory inevitably belongs to Dolph.
Picture this: you’re in a small but well-attended bar called Cocksucker, sitting soberly on a stool and feeling uncertain about your presence in the building and place in your own life. A quietly confident person in a black tube top and statement necklace strides up, stares you dead in the eye, and asks for a dance. When you rethink your knee-jerk refusal and join them on the floor, they knowingly pull you to their chest and gently stroke your hair as you spin and sway in unison. Also, this individual possesses the devastating planetary-gravitational attraction level of French American actress Julie Delpy. You never even knew their name… but you know they were a Taurus.
Also probably a Taurus: protagonist Megan Bloomfield’s mother Nancy. Played by legendary John Waters film villain Mink Stole, Nancy is blunt enough to flatly blurt the words “lesbian” and “cocksucker” in the face of her husband Peter’s hesitancy, but hides under the brim of her (fabulous!) hat lest she be recognized while attending a PFLAG meeting in the post-credits scene. Blamed as Megan’s “queer root” for acting as breadwinner when Peter was unemployed, Nancy made a cruel ultimatum in a last-ditch effort to suppress her daughter’s queerness. Hopefully she went on to atone and amend for the “what will people think?!” attitude that led her to send her own child to a candy-colored conversion therapy camp.
Golden haired Clayton, who works in retail, is a homosexual. He is gorgeous. He doesn’t get a lot of lines, and perhaps for that reason comes across as a little simple. He is also a Gemini because, while this movie doesn’t immediately appear to be overburdened with Gemini energy upon casual viewing, Clayton’s entire arc of:
- Getting sent to anti-gay retraining camp
- Making out with the hottest guy there
- Spending an indeterminate amount of time locked in a literal dog house as a punishment
- Being released only to deliriously participate in an anti-LGBTQ+ harassment campaign under duress
- Floating through a series of increasingly inane compulsory exercises while only being partially present in his own brain
- Getting last-minute rescued from being declared straight by a hot Aries who forcibly storms the grounds, and
- Ardently making out with said hot Aries rescuer before even reaching safety
…sounds exactly like some shit a Gemini you’ve been friends with for five years would casually mention happened to them. They’d tell you that story in the cadence of a joke, and then laugh uproariously as though ⅔ of it weren’t absolutely traumatizing, leaving you unsure how to react.
Our hero Megan gets underestimated because she’s “sweet as fucking pie.” She enjoys a sense of camaraderie, and she likes making sure other people feel good. She will go out of her way to alleviate others’ discomfort if she feels she has the power to do so…. up to a point. But Megan is ultimately un-manipulatable, because she isn’t afraid to feel and embrace her own emotions.
Portrayed by the incomparable Natasha Lyonne — whom you might think of as a more brash presence, based on her contemporaneous roles in American Pie and Detroit Rock City, or her more recent appearances in Orange is the New Black and Russian Doll — Megan is soft, and that is her strength. She can’t lie to herself very successfully and eventually refuses to force untruth on herself at all. Megan knows the rightness of her own heart, and that surety is her guide. She is willing to risk familial alienation in honor of her own truth, and she won’t easily give up on love even when her partner’s (understandable) cowardice threatens their bond.
When Megan’s direct rescue attempt à la Dolph fails to convince Graham to flee from the closet with her, our protagonist remains undeterred. Stripping off her camouflage and fetching her pom-poms, Megan returns to face down a hostile gathering of homophobes and liberate her girlfriend in the best way she knows how: by vulnerably, earnestly declaring her love in front of a crowd of other people without caring that they can see. If that just ain’t the Cancer-est thing, damn. And it works! Megan’s “1, 2, 3, 4, you’re the one that I adore!” leads into “Glass Vase Cello Case” and the sweetest ending of any movie released in the same year as Boys Don’t Cry.
Hilary is such a boss bitch. After showing Megan the ropes and initially getting primed to become a sub-antagonist, Hilary proceeds to appears visually in the center of most camper gatherings, look awesome in her glasses, and make a solid point about the relative ease of abstaining from opposite-sex shenanigans when one is attracted to the same sex. She presumably survives True Directions’ conditioning to return to her boarding school and do whatever the hell she wants — or at least that’s what I choose to see in her surreptitious wink at Jan just outside of Mary’s view.
As with Gemini, this movie does not exude heretofore uncharted magnitudes of Leo energy, but even reserved Leo sun signs have such strong protagonist vibes that it’s easy to imagine a coexisting narrative featuring a young, authentically New Zealand-accented Melanie Lynskey (never a straight character may she play) as a primary perspective on the experience of True Directions. Just what did happen at your all-girls boarding school prior to your stint at anti-gay camp, Hilary? And what will happen now that you can return to your peers with an official trophy of heterosexuality? I would like to see that movie.
Not to be confused with Joe Goldberg, stalker narrator/main character of You, Joel Goldberg is the sole Virgo among the gaggle of True Directions campers. Prone to worrying, Joel doesn’t always immediately understand how to behave in any given social interaction and constantly mines his experiences for rules to help him navigate uncertain territory. “Give her the cake first,” he repeats to himself, after praising his mutual beard Graham as “so good at being straight!”
Joel’s Virgo tendencies reassert themselves as he attempts to comfort too-“sissy”-for-True-Directions camper Andre upon his departure from the camp: “You're nice and clean and smart...and sexy and firm and luscious and…” he says in that order, before a frustrated Andre interrupts him to exeunt stage left. What a set of Virgo priorities! Joel will go on to experience great things and excellent relationships following the conclusion of this film, with the help of some legitimate therapy.
Also a Virgo: “ex-gay” counselor Mike, played by none other than RuPaul Charles. It is perhaps only by remaining proximate to handsome True Directions heir Rock that Mike is able to convince himself that hard work and discipline can solve all his problems. However, not even the most rigorous dedication to unnatural routine can truly alter personal reality. Hopefully at some post-2000 point, Mike thought better of his True Directions counselorship and is now living a happy life with Rock, sharing mai tai mocktails through twisty straws on South Beach.
A random Cocksucker bargoer might be forgiven for assuming that Andre — “actor, dancer, homosexual” — is a Leo. But they would be wrong! Mild-mannered and game to play along in the tragic but at least aesthetically tolerable environment of True Directions, Andre is willing to attempt to catch a football and follow his given stage instructions.
But in true Libra fashion, once he is liberated from the confines of judgmental oversight and provided with a feather boa, Andre is prepared to burn a whole dance floor down. In spite of his acting prowess, Andre is eliminated prior to True Directions’ final challenge of heterosexuality, and that’s when his easygoing demeanor explodes into rage. He reads the remaining True Directions campers for filth before wafting away, probably to support himself as a cage dancer in a queer go-go club while appearing in underfunded but critically acclaimed off-Broadway plays.
Rock Brown, son of True Directions dictatress Mary, is likely a Libra, too. Much like one of those plastic flowers in the front garden, Rock has thus far withstood the pressures of the false environment in which he has been grown, nourished only by the covetous gazes campers lavish on his chiseled physique. When he eventually finds the courage to pay a visit to Cocksucker himself, Lloyd and Larry will doubtless shelter him from Mary’s wrath.
Graham is the coolest camper at True Directions because she’s fucking terrified. She initially seems like the boldest of the lot in defiantly claiming her true identity in the face of oppression, but in actuality it’s a complicated sort of disguise.
As Graham understands it, “You are who you are. The only trick is not getting caught.” Graham did get caught in entanglement with another girl, hence her presence at True Directions, and the very vehemence with which she snarls “does it matter?” in response to Megan’s question about whether she loved her past partner reveals that it did and does still matter very deeply, very much. So while she despises inauthentic affectation, Graham is adept at deceiving and manipulating her adult tormentors in the service of sparing herself future pain. Graham is immediately suspicious of Megan’s plucky sincerity, but once she realizes Megan’s earnest personality isn’t put-on, it’s no wonder Graham’s whole heart hearkens to the thrill of someone so fearless in the face of feeling.
Too afraid to come out to her horrible wealthy father (and consequently forfeit her home, college fund, and inheritance), Graham betrays Megan’s honesty to see the charade of True Directions through to the finish. Having committed to her fate, she even refuses Megan’s first attempt at rescue from the Big Straight Graduation Ceremony. But when Megan essentially dares Graham to choose truth and love, baring her heart openly and unashamedly before friends and enemies alike, Graham finally stops denying herself and follows. Like any Scorpio who finally decides to dip a hesitant toe into the ocean of emotion, she cannonballs all-in immediately after.
Like Dolph and Andre, Jan does not graduate from the True Directions ex-gay training camp nor receive a surname in the film’s dialogue. Unlike Dolph and Andre, Jan doesn’t fail out of the program: Jan simply quits after having an epiphany that renders the whole farcical experience too ridiculous to dignify. Jan likes to play softball. Jan is coded transmasculine. And while Mary Brown — and presumably Jan’s parents — want to eradicate any sense of attraction Jan may feel toward women, their whole bizarre endeavor is misguided at its very root (heh) because Jan doesn’t even like girls like that! Jan wants to fuck men — an emotional, vulgar clarification issued to everyone at camp right before an explosive exit.
In short, Jan is a paradigm disrupting Sagittarian icon. Jan, along with most Archers, is disinclined to be anyone other than exactly who they are, gender norms and social strictures be damned. Watched through 2022 eyes, my fan theory is that Jan would be proudly living life as a gay trans man today, but far be it from me to confine the Sagittarian Jan to just one possible outcome.
One half of the ex-ex-gay couple who runs a safehouse for True Directions escapees, Larry is the gruff, taciturn but trustworthy driver during the campers’ secret late-night excursion to Cocksucker. Larry prefers to show love and affection by handling practicalities on behalf of others.
When freshly out-of-the-closet, newly disowned Megan arrives on his and Lloyd’s doorstep, Larry is the one to bring up the topics of finding a new school and scheduling plans for future independence over breakfast the next morning. In return for taking care of everything for everybody, all Larry wants in return is to have his opinions respected, his input valued, and to receive tender physical affection from his partner, Lloyd. Would that everyone could be lucky enough to be gently cushioned into lives of open queerness by a competent and caring Capricorn! We all love our Larry Bear. ❤
Whereas Larry Morgan-Gordon makes shit happen, Lloyd Morgan-Gordon is the idea man of the duo. After meeting Larry at True Directions before forming their own haven of queer domestic bliss, Lloyd clearly felt called to a purpose: to provide the young wards of the brainwashing camp with “a balanced perspective,” to give them objective information about the nature of reality so that they can make better-informed choices about whether they “want to be who they are or keep it hidden,” as he puts it. To borrow from another excellent 1999 film, Larry is the Morpheus of But I’m A Cheerleader.
“There’s no one way to be a lesbian,” Lloyd advises Megan when she asks for tips on how to be gay correctly, gently breaking the frightening but freeing truth that to be queer, all Megan has to do is be her authentic, honest self. Lloyd is mentally and emotionally tuned in, always. He is also quick to soothe and assure when he realizes that his scornful dismissal of Larry’s pragmatism has hurt his beloved earth-sign partner’s feelings. Lloyd knows he can’t save all of the kids who are kidnapped into reconditioning at the homophobic camp next door — people have to make their own choices, for good or ill — but when questioning youth need his support, thoughtful Aquarian Lloyd stands ready to offer truth.
The interior of the shared Morgan-Gordon home is covered floor-to-ceiling in rainbow decor. In my headcanon, Lloyd once passionately declared his fondness for the aesthetic emblem in an unprompted monologue recounting its entire history of being a queer symbol. Larry never gave any acknowledgement that he was listening, but ever since then, he picks up a new rainbow gift to bring home for Lloyd each time he goes into town for supplies.
“I’m Sinead. I like pain.” She may as well have concluded her introduction with, “...and I’m a Pisces.” The ring-collared goth of the True Directions crowd, Sinead transmutes her pain into more pleasurable sensations, zapping away and moaning late into the night with the shocking device intended to deter her from indulging her fantasies.
Sinead doesn’t exactly take the high road when scorned by her crush Graham in favor of basic blonde cheerleader Megan, but a triple water sign love triangle was always bound to get vicious at some point and Sinead still comes out of her time at True Directions looking aesthetically amazing in the camp’s eye-searingly pink vinyl graduation dress. Born in France — a detail she cites as her “queer root” — Sinead was always meant for larger, more exotic locales than the pink-on-pink girls’ dormroom of True Directions or the neon concrete of Cocksucker. Masochist that she is, Sinead probably went on to attain both Master’s and Doctorate degrees in Creative Writing and earn international acclaim for her outré collection of semi-autobiographical allegorical essays based upon the travails of her youth.
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