The Miseducation of Cameron Post has been compared to Love, Simon from the minute it was released and, on the surface, it’s easy to see why: they’re both films based on books about gay teenagers. But there’s a lot of differences between the films, with one major one being that Cameron Post didn’t get the ticket sales that Love, Simon got. It didn’t get the widespread advertising, the social media hype, or the budget. There’s no single reason to point to for this – the films themselves are very different. Love, Simon billed itself as the rom com of the summer, with a happy ending and a sanitised and straight-friendly gay main character. Cameron Post isn’t quite so carefully marketed at a straight audience.
Despite being set in the 90s, Cameron Post feels just as contemporary as Love, Simon, but darker and unfortunately probably more realistic for thousands of queer teenagers across America and beyond. Caught kissing a girl after her prom, Cameron is sent to God’s Promise, a conversion therapy camp that teaches gay teenagers that their ‘sin of same-sex attraction’ is because of their upbringing or their jealousies or their interest in sports. The film does not hide from the fact that this kind of therapy is abuse, or that there’s little-to-no support available for teenagers whose parents have put them into these situations and won’t let them leave. There are no cute anonymous emails and Ferris wheels, and there isn’t a happily ever after where good prevails and all the bad people learn their lessons. But that doesn’t mean it’s not an important film, and it certainly shouldn’t only be living in Love, Simon’s shadow.
In some ways, Cameron Post is no more an accurate representation of being a queer teenager than Love, Simon is, because everyone’s experience is different. If there was a scale with each film at either end, then my own experience of secondary school and coming out would probably fall three quarters of the way towards Simon’s tale. I didn’t exactly get a Ferris wheel scene, but no one packed my bags for me and sent me away to a Christian conversion camp. In order to paint an accurate picture of life as a gay kid, we need more queer films. Hundreds of them, across every genre and with every possible background and character represented. Y’know, kinda like we have with straight characters in films. Obviously that’s not something that’s about to happen overnight, but until it does we’re left with Love, Simon and Cameron Post, and it’s not bad that they’re different, it’s good. But only if people watch Cameron Post too. Queer films made for straight audiences, which I would argue Love, Simon definitely is, have their place – you need to have mass market appeal to get a big budget, and if that means making a film that nine straight people will want to see just so one gay kid who needs to see it can, that’s alright with me – but they can’t be the only ones we watch, particularly when their protagonist is a white male. For every Love, Simon film you see, make sure you watch a Cameron Post too. It might not be easy, especially since the smaller budget films have much less marketing and a much smaller cinema release, but it’s important. The only way to encourage the film industry to make their mainstream queer films as varied and diverse as their straight ones, is to prove that they’d be making something people would want to watch.