CW: sexual abuse, suicide, potential spoilers

The Netflix special Cheer delves deep into the lives of the cheerleaders at Navarro Junior College. Many of them we find have rough backgrounds or had rough childhoods, and the show beautifully represents them alongside the story of their lead up to the biggest competition of their cheer careers. I highly recommend the show for showcasing stories I don’t think are told often enough. One story that sticks with me is the upbringing of La’Darius Marshall, one of the star tumblers and stunters on the team. His personal life exhibits the struggles of performing masculinity as he grew up in a Florida neighborhood as a black boy with three older brothers while his mother was in prison. La’Darius’ story is compelling as he explains the intersections of his upbringing, masculinity, homophobia, and sexual abuse alongside discovering who he is as a person and what gives him purpose in life.

La’Darius is first introduced on the show as one of the cheerleaders with a very strong personality, “over-the-top”. He dances with a lot of energy and is very loud. A childhood friend of his explains that he was always doing something to bring attention to himself. We find out that he used to be really good at football but quit and became a cheerleader because he enjoyed it more. La’Darius talks about the hate he received during his switch between football and cheerleading, when people began calling him “fruity”. We also learn that his brothers gave him a really hard time for the way he would act and dress. They would call him fruity and sugary, telling him that if he wore certain things to school they wouldn’t associate with him. They made fun of him for hanging out with girls all the time and told him he needed to hang out with boys. It got to the point where they flat out told him, “No Marshall is gay”, at a point in his life where La’Darius didn’t even feel like he knew that about himself. Later on he told them that yes, he was gay, but what were they going to do about it? Here, we see that the line of masculinity is deeply tied with the line of being heterosexual. The performances that are read as masculine are the same ones that are read as straight: playing football, wearing certain clothes, spending time with other boys. Even though La’Darius was very young, 9 or 10 years old, and before he really thought about his sexuality, the way he acted meant that other people assumed he was a certain way. Additionally, the way in which La’Darius presented himself, being “extra”, was also read as being too feminine and too gay. His brother says that if he was going to be a cheerleader, he didn’t have to be “extreme” about it. If you’re going to not be masculine or straight, at least don’t draw attention to yourself. In this logic, silencing a non-hegemonic identity would protect you from retaliation even if it was never accepted.  

Violence is an act that factors majorly in the shaping of La’Darius’ gender and sexuality. When he was young, his brothers would gang up on him and fight him. They would say they were trying to beat him into a man. In an interview with one of his older brothers, the brother reveals that he felt the need to make his younger brothers tough because of what they were going through. Their dad wasn’t present and their mom was in jail. If he was not toughening their skin up, then nobody else would. La’Darius also experienced violence from a teenage boy when he was young that sexually abused him. He reveals that the rumors and calling La’Darius fruity started at that time when he tried to avoid being around that boy to escape abuse. In response, La’Darius began to get into trouble by fighting anyone who said negative things about him. He explains that he felt like people knew about the abuse that was happening to him but allowed it to happen because they didn’t want to deal with someone fruity like him. In a vicious cycle, the violence La’Darius was experiencing made people identify him as someone different, and because they now viewed him as different, they devalued the external violence on him and decided he wasn’t worthy of care because of it. Finally, it leads to La’Darius, as a young boy, trying to commit suicide. The physical and sexual violence La’Darius grew up with tries to function as an action that can display masculinity or coerce adherence to strict gender codes, but also causes confusion and brings other consequences in the formation of identity. Through all of the violence inflicted upon La’Darius and inflicted by La’Darius, none of it functions to actually change who La’Darius is and how his identity is accepted. It only brings him more pain, evidenced by his suicidal thoughts and trouble in school. 

The documentary has a happy ending for La’Darius. Throughout, he explains how important cheer is to him. It provides him an outlet in which he excels through everything he is. His “extraness” makes him a great dancer and performer, essential characteristics of a cheerleader. He is strong and talented and his physical abilities, not in a violent context but in a  competitive context, make him one of the best tumblers and stunters on the team. The team he is on gives him a family that supports him in all he is, from his brother-like roommate who is alos black and gay to his white, female, religious coach who will openly defend and debate anyone who will say something negative about her “kids”. For La’Darius, he explains:

“I love that sport so much. It was exciting to me, it was like it was feeding me. It was giving me my why. I wanted to be the best in every aspect. I wanted to really prove to myself that I was really man enough to do it.” 

Cheerleading offers a space for him to embody the masculinity he wants that was so violently reacted to everywhere else. By allowing him that space, it also gives him a reason to live. At the end of the series, we see that his older brother actually watches the team’s big performance and a tear goes down his face. Perhaps seeing that La’Darius could succeed as the personality his older brother wanted to subdue to protect him made him happy. I believe the show beautifully showcases how gender and sexual identities are policed and shaped in different spaces, and how environments like a Texan cheerleading team, which we might assume to embody hegemonic ideals, can allow people to thrive.