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The Eyes of Tammy-Faye
Directed by Fenton Baily and Randy Barbato
How to order But I'm a Cheerleader
Directed by Jamie Babbit
Written by Brian Wayne Peterson
With Natasha Lyonne, Clea DuVall, Cathy Moriarity
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The past 20 years of gay life in the US have been dominated by the enormous threat posed by the religious right. Since 1978, when Anita Bryant's "Save the Children Crusade" formed in reaction to Dade County, Florida's passing a gay rights ordinance, much of the gay movement's energy has focused on combating this new force in US politics. With the exception of a few independent documentaries, these issues have not been represented in movies. Now there are two films that do tackle the topic-- and we would have been better off without them.

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But I'm a Cheerleader hit the gay and lesbian film festival circuit this past June and was nicely reviewed in both the gay and mainstream press. Directed by Jamie Babbit and written by Brian Wayne Peterson (from an original idea by Babbit), it deals with the travails of Megan (Natasha Lyonne), a perky, blonde teenage cheerleader who is suddenly thrust into the nightmare world of reparative therapy when her parents and boyfriend think that she is a lesbian. She is, after all, a vegetarian, sports a poster of Melissa Etheridge in her room, and doesn't like kissing boys. And while Megan (who is a Seventeen cover-girl type) is at first confused by her parents' logical leap, she eventually comes to understand they are right. After being forced to go to "True Direction," a sort of going-to-be-ex-gay summer camp, she ends up meeting Ms Right, a nifty butch named Graham (Clea DuVall). The girls fall in love and eventually Megan runs away and comes back to "save" her lover-- and other gay teens-- from the clutches of Mary (Cathy Moriarty) the drag-queen-like women who runs the camp.

But beneath its sunny (and, very occasionally, funny) script lurks something ugly. It isn't that the film treats reparative therapy as a joke-- comedy can make all kinds of political points-- but rather that it simply denies the political reality of the ex-gay movement. While ex-gay ministries-- almost always connected to right-wing politics-- advertise themselves as independent venues for gay people who "want to change," they are all connected (in small and large ways) to conservative groups who oppose a wide range of gay rights and antidiscrimination laws. Yet But I'm a Cheerleader misses this political link. Why? Well, it's clear from the film's relentless attempt to be spoofish and upbeat that it simply did not have the nerve or intelligence to be honest and up-front. How would mainstream critics-- who generally liked the film-- have reacted if it actually attacked right-wing Christians and their high-level political connections (like to the Republican party)? How would mainstream critics have reacted if the film had honestly portrayed gay teens being forced by their parents to become "straight?" And isn't it odd that a film that portrays the mechanics of reparative therapy as a silly, campy joke would be praised by queer critics as well?

This political dishonesty is also written all over the new documentary The Eyes of Tammy-Faye. Directed by Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato, it purports to be a quirky-but-honest look at the rise and fall and sort-of-rise-again of right-wing Christianity's favorite drag-like doyenne: the much mascaraed, craftily coifed, and always slightly scary Tammy-Faye Bakker. While it recounts the fabulously fast rise of the Bakkers from their humble beginnings as a small, local network to the multimillion-dollar owners of a huge, Christ-centered amusement park (who are duped and bamboozled by the even more evil and greedy Jerry Falwell), the film is, at heart, a love letter to Tammy-Faye herself for being a tacky pop icon who is less evil than lovable, less appalling because she is slightly ridiculous. The tagline for the advertising campaign is: "She'll Make a Believer Out of You." No surprise that it was marketed to a gay audience.

The film presents Tammy-Faye and her former-husband Jim (who spent time in the clink for embezzling the funds his faithful sent in) as semi-innocent victims of fate, and takes great pains to construct her as a "gay icon." We are told that she was one of the first of the televangelists to have a person with AIDS on her show, that she did a talk show with an openly gay comic, and that she is far more open to both "accepting" and "forgiving" a number of sins than are her God-peddling cohorts. And certainly Tammy-Faye has all the makings of a gay male icon: she is a grotesque caricature of "female beauty," she is aggressively campy, she is shrilly self-aggrandizing, and she has endured as many adversities and hardships as Judy Garland.

Ick-on

But Tammy-Faye was actually a gay male joke, never particularly an icon. Think of that T-shirt (popular in P-town and other gay resorts) that was a blur of mascara, lipstick, and false eyelashes that read "I Ran into Tammy-Faye at the Mall." But what is so fucked-up about the movie is its intent to create this joke into an gay icon. It's no wonder that Bakker went along with the filmmakers here-- this is the best press she has received in years.

But this hagiography comes at a cost. The resurrection of Tammy-Faye Bakker as a gay icon means that the filmmakers cannot look, even in superficial detail, at her career or the broader context in which it existed. So while there are indications that other people in the televangelist biz were homophobic-- a gross understatement-- Jim and Tammy-Faye Bakker are seen as the near-innocent pawns of this ugly game. They simply are never held accountable for their part in the larger picture. The huge money-making apparatus that runs the televangelist industry is fueled by an arch-conservative theology that is queer-hating at heart. So Tammy-Faye making nice with a Person with AIDS on her show is, in retrospect, nothing compared to the harm that she has done. Her "I'm just a poor girl who wanted people to like her" stance is disingenuous. In the end, The Eyes of Tammy-Faye is so desperately dishonest that it is not simply disheartening but despicable.

Author Profile:  Michael Bronski
	Michael Bronski is the author of Culture Clash: The Making of Gay Sensibility and The Pleasure Principle: Sex, Backlash, and the Struggle for Gay Freedom. He writes frequently on sex, books, movies, and culture, and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
	Email:	mabronski@aol.com