Recently, I went out of town. While a bulk of the week was spent at a conference, during the weekend I spent some time with my family, including my step-brother and step-sister-in-law (henceforward all “steps” will be dropped). My sister-in-law coaches a co-ed, internationally successful cheerleading team, and this weekend also happened to be the same weekend as the World Cheerleading finals.
This event. Wow. My parents and I got to the venue early to be sure to get seats, and O.M.G. My cheer knowledge and research has been limited to the original Bring It On movie. Not even the sequels, sadly, but only the original. I can say that this portrayal is super accurate. As my mother and I waited for my step-dad to ask directions to the right cheertorium, we were swept up in a tide of fabulocity that cannot be ignored or avoided.
Leaning into my mom’s ear, I said, “Mom, don’t ever worry about going to a gay bar, this is all you would ever need.”
Important Elements of a Gay Bar: Cheer Edition:
1. Built, hot, homosexuals. These were errrrywhere. You couldn’t turn your head without seeing a guy who looks like he walked out of GQ or…Hot Man Monthly (Is that a thing?). Surprisingly, a lot of these guys are straight, but they also are shameless and wander around shirtless, so you might as well be at a shower party.
2. Drag. Whilst drag is not about men dressing as women, there are a lot of teenage and early-twenties females wearing enough make-up to supply Iran for a good decade. The Simpsons has an excellent illustration:
3. Drag II: The Cheer Moms. Cheer moms are all did. Up. While most of my sporting experience has been limited to rowing in college and small-town basketball and track, the moms of cheer are a different beast. While my mother would wear a sweatshirt, glasses, and mom jeans to a track meet, these moms looked like they were going to dinner with P.Diddy (Diddy? P? Swag? …I’m so behind the times.) and then the club. Don’t get me wrong, these women are beautiful, but when juxtaposed to the 60% of cheer mom and dads who look they were up at 6 a.m. to see their kids cheer and ARE wearing mom and dad-jeans and sweatshirts, they might as well be wearing 3-foot high hair and fake breasts.
4. Club music. In five minutes in the main cheer-stage, they played “Call Me, Maybe,” Adam Lambert, and Gloria Estefan.
5. Twerqing. Everyone twerqing. All. The. Time. Boys, girls, my five-year-old niece. Twerq. Twerq. Twerq.
Cheer world is basically the best thing ever. I have a group of really close gay and straight friends that have a Facebook group and the whole time I was watching the cheer menagerie saunter by, I wished they were there. We would have had so much fun.
I also didn’t really know what to expect from the actual cheertations. We knew that my sister-in-law’s group was up at 9:11, so I assumed the show would be made up of about 10 minutes of cheering.
No. Each group has 2 minutes and 30 seconds. This is super-duper intense. Imagine someone throwing glitter in your face, knocking you down to the ground, and then twerqing over your sprawled body. It’s kind of like that. People are jumping, spinning, being hurled in the air, twerqing (always, always, the twerq), diving, rolling, tumbling, freewheeling, etc. It’s a delightful 2:30 assault of all senses. Even the audio is erratic and switches between roughly 200 songs in 2:30. (Chicago peeps: imagine the DJ from Scarlet. Just like that, the song changes every time you blink.)
We only saw about five groups before we were shuffled back to meet my sister-in-law’s team. Truth be told, I could have stayed and watched a few more hours. It’s really pretty cool, and I feel like I watch the same group do the same routine fifteen times and see something new with each performance.
My sister’s team was good, but I would give the World MVP to GetIt Gurl, who came on with the second group. Imagine your very best overweight girlfriend. Then imagine her doing five flips and six cartwheels across the stage, killing her landing, then shaking her exposed gut in a brief display of triumph.
You would give her the MVP, too.
Usually when I experience events like this I think to myself, “Man, Tedd, wouldn’t this be awesome? You could be a cheerleader!” But that was absolutely untrue in this particular instance. There are certain personalities that make great cheerleaders. They are talkative and supportive and bubbly. These are the people you are drawn to at parties and who are friends with everyone. I am not them.
As part of my conference I actually took this personality test which stated that my two main personality types are Rebellion and Mystique. Unless the cheerleading competition involved a subdued, veiled Arabian fan dancing portion, I think I would be very ill suited for the rah-rah-shish-kum-bah of the cheer life.
This was made even clearer at the cheer party after. The kids were aged 15-22, and they were all bubbly and bouncing around the team’s house they had rented for the event. Most of them participated in a reenactment of the entire cheerformance in the backyard for all the parents. At this point in the day, I could barely stay awake to lift the beer to my lips, and these kids were all running around with their barely-clothed, perfect bodies and still hurling each other into the air.
“Hey, Coach, who’s that creepy blonde guy drinking Miller Lite alone in the backyard?”
“That’s my brother-in-law… Don’t make direct eye contact.”
Actually, I wasn’t that creepy. Much more awkward than creepy. I occupied an age group between the late teens of the cheerleaders and the mid-thirties of my brother, sister, and co, so I just sort of sat there and listened to people talk and drank a few Miller Lites.*
*See… Not a cheerleader type.
Two things of major importance happened at the cheer party. The first was that I met the team’s Big Red. Yes, just as Bring It On spoke, it is so. All teams have a Big Red. During the course of the party, however, I wasn’t able to ascertain whether this girl was nicknamed Big Red because her hair was a beautiful, dark red; or, whether she had been sedated, forcibly had her hair dyed, and then been branded with the title of “Big Red” in order to keep the scriptures of Bring It On. Because it is cheer world, both possibilities are very likely.
The second important thing is that there were two or three gay boys on the cheer squad. One of them was this adorable high school kid who is super attractive and has an A+ body. I was in the yard for thirty seconds before he had his shirt off and was standing within a foot of me talking to someone close to me; as far as I could tell there was no reason for him to be in my vicinity. Inside my head I was absolutely dying with laughter. He sensed another gay and had to come over and be like, “Yup. I’m hot. Check it out.” I was wondering whether I should remove my shirt and we could cluck around in a circle and show our plumage to each other.
Later that night my sister-in-law said to me, “Felix, right? You wish he was in his twenties.” And I had to say, “No,” because in some third-world countries I could have been his father.
But what was awesome about Felix is the fact that he was sixteen and out. That in his world he can take off his shirt parade around his back yard and talk to another gay guy. He can talk to his friends about his boyfriend, about hot guys, and his Would You Rather Game could consist of Ryan Gosling and Ryan Reynolds. At a later point in the night when he put on his skintight swim trunks, his proud poppa laughed and said, “Classic Felix. He’s working at a pool this summer; it’s the perfect job for him.” And in Felix’s world, this is all normal and great.
On my drive home I couldn’t help but be sad myself thinking about the decade I spent in the closet. In my world even if you had the looks of Felix, you would have had to have been dating a girl, you couldn’t kiss your boyfriend before practice, and wearing tight swimtrunks would have raised eyebrows up to heaven.
But times they are a-changing, and Felix has a magnificent running start into the rest of his life. In truth, he and GetIt Gurl are far out in front of me. They are twerqing and clucking far into the horizon. I suppose the cheer road isn’t for all of us, though. We veiled fan dancers have to make our own, more circuitous way. In a lot of ways this is much appreciated; I like DJs to finish their entire songs, and I can’t do a cartwheel to save my life. But I have to say I’m epically grateful to be a part of the LGBT(PZTLYSX?...I’m so behind the times…) community that is seeing the changes wrought by generations of gay men and women who were at the front lines of battle for rights and recognition. We should all be grateful to them for all their work. When Felix saunters around in his short-shorts, it is aesthetically pleasing, but its beauty runs much deeper than that. Because of what others did, he can be who he is. And that, I suppose, is one thing I would be happy to cheer about.
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