--The Miseducation of Cameron Post
I finally saw this film and it sure is a 180 degree turn from how Boy Erased was presented. While Boy Erased was directed
in a heightened tense and foreboding manner, all in dark grays and blues, this one flows more normally and believably and
allows you to empathize with the characters in a conversion therapy setting, filmed naturally, whereas in Boy Erased you are
more concentrated on hating the workplace people and place where it happens, which seems to eliminate your empathy for
the main character.
The ending of Cameron Post is hopeful, but non-determinative, which leaves you wondering. I don't think either film is quite what
they should or could be, but they make a nice double bill on the subject. I'd give the edge to Cameron Post because it doesn't seem
so distant.
This one was also based on a book, though I don't know if it was fact based or not, as Boy Erased was.
Insightful comparison, Lyle !
Cameron Post is based on a teen novel by Emily M Danforth, a queer writer who grew up in Eastern Montna.
Here are some extracts from an interview:
How did you come up with the idea for The Miseducation of Cameron Post?
There were actually many ideas that propelled and shaped this novel during the years that I was writing it. I don’t think I can pin the whole book down to one idea or a-ha moment. I didn’t say to myself one day, or even one week, “Well this is the big idea, this is the story I have to tell.” This novel is really a collection of disparate ideas working, I hope, in chorus. It was my first novel, and so there was just so much I wanted to “get at” with it. I knew, early on, that I wanted to write a great big coming-of-age story that spanned several years of a character’s adolescent life, and I also knew, early on, that this main character would be gay—that part of the novel would be about her burgeoning queer sexuality.
...I was several months into working on it before I realized that Cam would be sent to conversion (or reparative) therapy.
I made that choice after I learned about Zach Stark, a sixteen-year-old from Tennessee whose parents sent him to a conversion therapy summer camp (this caught the attention of the national media after Zach Stark posted about this on his then-myspace page). It was that story that got me to spend months researching conversion therapy, and all of that research shaped so much of what ended up in the novel.You yourself are from Miles City, Montana. How much of Cameron’s experience of her home town – the events, the views - is based on your own? Are there any aspects of the first half of the story that are semi-autobiographical?
The easy answer here is yes, absolutely. In the novel there are locations—the abandoned hospital and the lake Cameron lifeguards at; events—the Bucking Horse Sale, even the swim meets (I’m still an avid swimmer); and a fairly distinctive sense of place—the landscape, the weather, the views and culture—that I culled from my own experiences growing up in eastern Montana. This novel is at least partly a complicated sort of love letter to my adolescence there.
I have great and lasting affection for my hometown, despite the challenges of growing up queer there during the 1990s. But because of some of those challenges, I was also able to draw on memories of my own feelings of guilt and shame and fear about my early crushes and attractions, though the specifics of Cam’s situation—her orphan status, her relationships in the novel—are completely invented. In lots of significant ways I’m no more Cameron Post than I am Lindsey Lloyd or Aunt Ruth or even Coley Taylor—all of those characters came from parts of me and then were invented, imagined, into fuller selves. http://www.onceuponabookcase.co.uk/2013/07/interview-with-emily-m-danforth.html