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When Cameron Post (Chloë Grace Moretz) is caught having sex with another girl on prom night, her conservative aunt sends her away to a Christian-run conversion therapy camp. There, along with other young ‘disciples’, Cameron is counselled to examine her psyche to find the reasons why she’s such a poor, lost sinner.

Director and co-writer Desiree Akhavan – herself a queer woman – has hit a home run with The Miseducation of Cameron Post, a film based on emily m. danforth’s 2012 novel for young adults. Akhavan’s empathy for all her characters is obvious, from gay teens Cameron and Mark, to the ‘ex-gay’ Reverend Rick who is supposed to be mentoring the kids, but is in fact as lost as they are.

I’ve seen a series of critiques of The Miseducation of Cameron Post as being ‘timid’ or ‘passive’, and I can’t help but think that these reviews come from a place of privilege that seems to have prevented the reviewer from empathising with the central characters. Film critics are, by and large, male and straight, and the conversation about how that influences their reception of movies not ultimately about them is one we’re finally starting to have. My response to the film has been deeply informed by my own experiences as a queer woman: the film is set in nineties Montana, a time and place that isn’t too far off my own coming-out story. Although I was spared ‘conversion therapy’, I, like many other LGBTQIA+ people have my own stories of facing down other people’s misplaced piety. As for passivity or timidity, large swathes of this film are about young people surviving an institution designed to destroy their sense of self. There’s absolutely nothing timid about surviving that.

But I’m a Cheerleader was the conversion therapy movie when I was coming out. t was 1999, the year after gay teen Matthew Shepard was murdered (as told in The Laramie Project, if you can bear it) and the subject was handled with biting satire and dark humour. The two storylines are incredibly similar – down to an out-of-drag RuPaul Charles as an ‘ex-gay’ camp counsellor in his Straight Is Great! T-shirt. We weren’t ready for the sort of thoughtful, introspective look at conversion therapy found in The Miseducation of Cameron Post in the late nineties or early noughties. We needed to laugh at the horror then; now, we’re in a safer place as a community and it’s time to tell the story more plainly.

The sense of time and place is vivid, but the immediacy of the story keep the film from settling into the comfort of a period piece. It never stops to say, “Look at what a backward time this was;”. There’s no smugness about it. The camera stays very present, remaining with the emotional core of the story at all times – mostly tightly on Cameron, but lingering once or twice on other characters to give them their weight of feeling.

In the role of Cameron, Moretz is incredible. By turns sullen and desperate, she embodies the confusion of figuring out you’re queer in a world that isn’t necessarily okay with that. I physically flinched when Dr. Marsh (Jennifer Ehle) condescendingly shoots down the idea of celebrating Pride: “Would you let drug addicts throw themselves a parade?” She’s an incredible villain, controlling and cold, peddling hate as ‘compassion’. I can’t recall the last time I viscerally hated a character so quickly. I spotted the tragedy her methods of ‘healing’ the youth under her care would cause just moments before it unfolded on screen, and thought it was tastefully done.

As well as Moretz, the rest of the teenage cast are all outstanding. Owen Campbell as Mark has such a dignity, even in his breakdown scene. Sasha Lane as Cameron’s friend Jane has all the charm and wry humor of a young Tessa Thompson. Native American actor Forrest Goodluck, as Mark’s roommate Adam, is fantastic. He has a resigned, sarcastic sense of humour about the horrible situation they’ve found themselves in, and his character’s brief description of himself as Two-Spirited, a Native American queer identity, comes off as authentic rather than as ethnic window-dressing.

With gay marriage legal in much of the West now, I’ve seen criticisms that we “don’t need” coming out movies any more. Honestly, that’s nonsense. Queer youth need and deserve to have their stories told, and queer adults need those stories, too. We need to anchor ourselves in our stories, just like anyone else. Bolstered by the belief that its conclusion might just be possible, Cameron’s story is finally one we have the space – and the heart – to tell.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VEdngvMGjg0