Movies

The allure of the lesbian cheerleader

If you conduct a Google search of the term “lesbian cheerleader,” you’ll come up with a lot of porn. This may explain why there have been so many gay women in short, pleated skirts bearing pom pons on television and film: It’s sexy. But why lesbian cheerleaders? Let’s start with a brief history of cheerleading itself: Men created the group cheer as a fraternity pastime in 1898 and women started participating in the early 1920s because there were no other sports they could play at the time. It wasn’t until the 1970s that the sexual appeal became a huge part of the cheerleading image. That’s when the Dallas Cowboys first put their cheer team in scanty outfits.

The film industry began to take a cue from their popularity, and they couldn’t release sexy cheerleader-inspired films fast enough. Some were only sexy (The Cheerleaders, Revenge of the Cheerleaders, Satan’s Cheerleaders) and some were literally about sex (Debbie Does Dallas). The sport enjoyed a resurgence in popularity in 2000, when Bring it On became a hit film. It earned $70 million dollars and spawned several sequels, inspiring young girls and teenagers to give the sport a go with their own school spirit squads. So where do the lesbians come in?

In their book Cheerleader!: An American Icon, authors Natalie Guice Adams and Pamela Bettis write, “Cheerleaders have never threatened the status quo. In fact, they have served too well, feminists would argue, in perpetuating the status quo. Further, unlike girls and women participating in sports, female cheerleaders’ sexual orientation is simply assumed to be heterosexual; they do not have to face what some would consider the negative consequences of their activity being labeled as a ‘lesbian haven.'”

The lesbian cheerleader archetype comes into play when the cheerleaders forget their good girl personas and “go bad.” The fantasy is that a good girl will become “the promiscuous cheerleader,” an urban legend of sorts that Adams and Bettis say has existed for years. “The cheerleader is the image of ‘the good girl’ – sexually virtuous and highly desirable. She is the object her male contemporaries fantasize about and lust after.” And once those initial fantasies of the bad girl cheerleader fellating entire football teams grew tired, they expanded into other areas, like a team of cheerleaders that enjoy having sex with one another. They were really being bad.

In interviews with real life cheerleaders who also identify as lesbians, I asked about their experiences on their own squads. Out lesbian Shannon Cunningham she said she was cheer captain of her squad, cheering from third grade through college. She says she thinks the lesbian cheer phenomenon stems from the desires of men. “Joking about being lesbians was mostly something guys asked because they wanted it to be true,” she said. “In college, jokes about lesbians in sports from females were mostly referring to soccer players, basketball and of course, the stereotypical softballers.”

Out comic Bridget McManus said she also the lone queer cheerleader on her high school squad, but “Actually, I have a feeling that if I was out when I was a cheerleader I wouldn’t have been accepted by some members of my squad. Lesbianism was a topic that never came up, although the topic of boys did come up a lot.”

Cassandra Avenatti grew up cheering in small town, Indiana and was “buried in the closet” at the time. She never met any openly gay lesbian cheerleaders, only “a handful of gay male cheerleaders from other schools.”

“I think people – men in particular – are intrigued by the camaraderie and intimacy that a team of women can create,” Avenatti said. “I think these relationships seem mysterious to them. In a patriarchal world, this is often translated into sexual fantasies of conventionally attractive women waving pom poms and making out in the locker room. With the exception of But I’m a Cheerleader, I haven’t seen a queerleading film or program that I enjoyed.”

The year before Bring it On hit it big, Jamie Babbit‘s film But I’m a Cheerleader debuted, featuring Natasha Lyonne as Megan, a 17-year-old girl whose family and friends send to an ex-gay conversion camp after deciding she is a little too interested in Melissa Etheridge and vegetarian cusine. “The reason we wanted to have the lead character be a cheerleader is because, for us, it was sort of the pinnacle of the American dream, and the American dream of femininity,” Babbit told Reel.com. “The idea that girls grow up and they are brainwashed to want to be a cheerleader, you know, while, like, the guys play the aggressive sports and make millions of dollars. The girls cheer them on, you know, and make five cents, and show their legs. We just wanted it to be like this sort of stereotypical, you know, teen, teen – teen dream.”

As Babbit noted, in the ’90s, cheerleaders were seen as feminine and the teenage ideal for a lady, and lesbians were the antithesis of that. And it worked out well – the juxtaposition of a young girl who was so out of touch with her sexual desires and orientation having to then own up to it and try to shake it off among her gay peers was funny and smart and also socially conscious. It wouldn’t have worked as well for Megan to be a softball player or something stereotypically lesbian – the point was that a lesbian could look like anyone or be anyone – even someone who wears skirts and thrusts pom pons in the air. Megan was a lesbian character that managed to escape the lesbian character problem so many others have: Being a sex symbol to men or being sexless. She was a normal girl and she was gay. She was also a cheerleader.

“I’d seen a short film that Angela Robinson did in film school that was a documentary about a big cheerleading competition,” Babbbit said. “It had a lesbian filmmaker vibe to the camera’s gaze but I’d never seen lesbian cheerleaders per se.”

At the time, lesbian visibility on television and film was considerably low. There were gay female characters on All My Children and Dark Angel, but that was about it. ER didn’t have their lesbian storyline until the following year, and even Lost and Delirious wasn’t released until 2001. So most representations of lesbian life were tragic (they died) or completely de-sexed (the character referred to herself as a lesbian but never engaged in physical contact with another woman).

So when But I’m a Cheerleader focused on a normal young woman who realized she wanted to embrace her homosexuality instead of repress it, and she didn’t die in the end, it was a great success. Even today, the film remains a favorite in the LGBT and indie film communities.

It took a a few more years for the cheerleading craze to grow large enough that lesbians became a bigger part of that landscape. In 2006 on the UPN series Veronica Mars, reality star Kristen Cavalleri and actress Miriam Korn played closeted cheerleaders Kylie and Marelna, who were being blackmailed by a fellow student. Someone found a love letter Kylie had written to Marlena and the taunting began. When Veronica (Kristen Bell) meets Kylie for the first time, she doesn’t understand why Kylie would be part of this whole mess. “Sorry to blow your mind, Veronica, but I’m a lesbian,” Kylie says. Veronica tells her it’s “cool,” and Kylie says, “In college maybe – not in high school!” Kylie’s girlfriend Marlena endures a lot of slurs and is referred to as “Pep Squad Lez” in the halls.

Eventually Kylie decides to come out to the school on their in-house news program by saying, “Oh yeah, I’m gay, and Marlena is my girlfriend” and they spend another episode parading around the school hand-in-hand. Unfortunately, all doesn’t end well for our lesbian cheerleaders, as Kylie eventually gets in on the blackmailing and threatens to out another gay student if he doesn’t give her the money she’s demanding. Not the best visibility we could have hoped for.

In 2007, Heroes readied a lesbian cheerleader character named April, played by Lyndsy Fonseca. After hyping her up, though, April only appeared in the first episode of season 2, as Fonseca took another job on Desperate Housewives. In 2009, though, the show’s other cheerleader, Claire (Hayden Panettiere), experimented with her sexuality when she began a more-than-friends relationship with her college roommate (Madeline Zima). The Claire-Gretchen relationship received mixed reviews, as there never seemed to be a clear understanding of how Claire felt about her friend and the writers seemed to back off after giving the characters an initial interaction. Other queer cheerleaders in pop culture include bisexual Paige on Degrassi and lesbian Spencer, for a short time, on South of Nowhere.

The 2009 Bring it On-esque film Fired Up featured Danneel Harris as Bianca, a tough cheerleader who, despite being attractive, comes off as predatory at times. She jumps into bed with Hayley Marie Norman’s character, and is asked to leave. She also grabs her butt and kisses her several times in the movie, but there doesn’t appear to be a mutual admiration. Bianca is also referred to as a “lesbotron” in the film. Last year, Megan Fox played the murderous bisexual cheerleader in Jennifer’s Body and Lauren London played Christina, love interest to one of the main male characters, Dixon, on 90210. She eventually came out as bisexual, pointing out her girlfriend in one of the last episodes in which she appeared. Once she was no longer of interest to Dixon, her character exited the show. The success of Bring it On was largely because of the showy dance and music-elements, so it was inevitable that Fox’s musical show Glee would be a hit. And Glee writers gave cheerleader Brittany (Heather Morris) a line that has dictated a whole new way of thinking about her and best friend (and cheermate) Santana (Naya Rivera). On the final episode of season 1, Brittany says, “Sex is not dating. If it were, Santana and I would be dating.” Suddenly, we had another pair of gay cheerleaders on our hands – or at least bisexual ones. Considering how gay Glee is in general, fans hoped to see more of Britanna and a possible romantic storyline between them.

But they aren’t alone: Both Hellcats and the U.S. version of Skins will be introducing two lesbian cheerleader characters in 2011. On the former (a CW series), Elena Esovolova will play Patty “the Wedge” Wedgerman a “ballsy, fearless and cheerfully profane” member of the cheer squad.

On Skins, lesbian character Tea cheers because, as actress Sofia D’Elia says, “she likes to be around a lot of girls.” “Of course girls love to hang with girls,” Babbit said. “Softball teams, field hockey teams have always overflowed with mini dykes to be. But, yes, I think cheerleader femme types join to hang with their friends – and it’s only natural they might start finding them hot.”

“I think it’s certainly part of the appeal,” Avenatti said. “As a confused 16-year-old, all I knew was that I wanted to be close to other girls, and I definitely had red-faced sputtering moments in the locker room with my teammates. However, cheering is also about skill in dance and tumbling, and a love of performance.”

While it looks like the new trend of lesbian cheerleaders is progressing in a positive fashion, the ideal of the sexy Sapphically-indulging spirit girl is based on the male gaze. With the hot, promiscuous cheerleader stemming from the NFL’s marketing team and then being expanded upon in pornography, it has perpetuated a stereotype that some women involved with the sport are in it for the other women.

The predatory lesbian is a very common storyline, so including a lesbian cheerleader could be an easy plot device for writers who feel obligated to include a gay girl in the mix or who want to titillate by suggesting that in a gaggle of women, at least one or two of them have experimented sexually with another. But there’s also a glimmer of hope that the new characters are moving beyond this stereotype and are more akin to what Babbit tried to do with her protagonist in 1999.

“I think cheerleaders are like Barbie,” Babbit said. “Very iconically female and American. And to make that icon lesbian is subverting an archetype – culture-makers are trying to find new themes for tired characters.”

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