Sam Williams

This May, as part of a charity fundraiser for Switchboard UK, York St. John’s Film Society held a screening of Jamie Babbit’s But I’m a Cheerleader (1999) in collaboration with the Cinema and Social Justice Project.  

Despite the setting of Babbit’s film, a conversion therapy camp, But I’m a Cheerleader was chosen for this screening due to its uplifting nature, and overall comedic tone. As a committee, we considered other queer texts such as Carol (Haynes, 2015), Portrait of a Lady on Fire(Sciamma, 2019), and Moonlight (Jenkins, 2016), but Cheerleader’s affirming conclusion better reflected the sentiment we wished to portray. Megan (Natasha Lyonne) and Graham (Clea Duvall) continue their relationship despite the efforts of True Directions and their parents to force them to assume heterosexual identities. 

The idea of screening a queer film came naturally to us as a queer-led committee, with our cultural knowledge and lived experience allowing us to identify a film that effectively mediates the queer experience. Typically, we use DVDs for our screenings, as we believe that using physical media adds to the cinematic experience due to a combination of uncompressed video and audio, more closely replicating cinema quality than streaming services do. In this instance though, we resorted to streaming the film because the DVD we had didn’t have any subtitles. Accessibility is a big priority for us, and we have taken care to ensure everything we show has subtitles following complications at previous sessions.  

“we wished to contribute to improving support for the queer community, an increasingly prominent issue as the political climate continues to morph in favour of anti-queer sentiments”

We also held an accompanying fundraiser for Switchboard UK, the leading LGBTQ+ helpline in the nation. We managed to raise £300 via a JustGiving page. We chose to support Switchboard as we wished to contribute to improving support for the queer community, an increasingly prominent issue as the political climate continues to morph in favour of anti-queer sentiments. The UK has significantly dropped in its position on the Rainbow Map (an annual ranking of European countries based on how safe they are for queer people), now standing at its lowest ever position of 22^nd, a far cry from the 1^st place it held in 2015. The Cinema and Social Justice Project’s mission to analyse inequality through a cinematic lens aligns with our screening and charity endeavour, bringing attention to both the work that art can do to mediate these experiences of injustice to film audiences, and highlighting the current legal and sociological issues occurring on a wider scale. 

The screening was well received by attendees, with many noting their prior knowledge of cast members due to their roles in other queer media, such as Melanie Lynskey (Hilary) in Yellowjackets (Lyle & Nickerson, 2021-), Natasha Lyonne (Meghan) in Orange Is the New Black(Kohan, 2013-19), and drag superstar RuPaul (Mike). Several people reported that the film effectively portrayed questions of identity that aligned with their own individual experiences, with the themes of repression and exploration being greatly familiar, and Meghan’s eventual assertion of her homosexuality providing a sense of positivity unexpected of a film set at a conversion therapy camp. But I’m a Cheerleader is a queer cult classic, and in conjunction with our fundraiser for Switchboard UK, we held a screening which not only celebrated queer identities, but also drew attention to the continued injustice that queer people face whilst contributing to the improvement of support for this vulnerable community.

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Sam Williams is a third-year English Literature and Film Studies student and the Vice-Chair of York St. John’s Film Society. They were an editor on the 2025 YSJ Critical Editions project and have previously contributed to Neutral Magazine. They recently completed their dissertation focusing on themes of body horror and consumption in New French Extreme cinema.