Disney
“Hey, I’ve always known that there are some stories that have to be told,” Kelly Collins narrates, as the camera follows her and several other early-2000s teenagers while they perform a knock-off version of rhythmic gymnastics. ‘One Girl Revolution’ by Superchick blares. Kelly leaps and twirls with her ribbons, shamelessly donning purple hair extensions and a wooly red skirt. The Man will have you believe this is the story of a young straight woman, but I’m not fooled. The obscure art practice, the pop punk aesthetic, the obsession with controlling your own narrative? This, my dear reader, is lesbians.
Cadet Kelly came out in 2002, when I was nine, and Lizzie McGuire was in its prime. Kelly is decidedly not Lizzie-- she’s sure of herself, constantly talking, and would sooner pat Gordo on the head like a dog than kiss him under the fireworks in Italy. Kelly confounds her mother and her soon-to-be stepfather with her stackable bracelets and her lack of boundaries (read: her unquestionable, unseemly gayness). And what do you do when it’s 2002 and your gay child won’t behave? You send them to military school! Eat my shorts, kid!
Perhaps I remembered Cadet Kelly as a secretly lesbian film due to its mirroring of my own adolescent incubator for teen gay feelings, my all-girls Catholic school. Though George Washington Academy is co-ed, the barracks are single-gender; the girls all wear uniforms, pine desperately for boys not pictured, and moon over dress options for the upcoming dance. Fittingly, it is in the barracks where Kelly meets Captain Jennifer Stone for the first time, and the movie, finally, begins.
Rewatching Cadet Kelly as an adult, I realize I was wrong. Cadet Kelly is not a secretly lesbian film. Cadet Kelly is a screamingly lesbian film. Cadet Kelly bought a rhinestone denim jacket at Goodwill, wore it to the Dyke March, took jello shots with your ex, slept with her, then sent you a text apologizing in the morning. Cadet Kelly flawlessly built an IKEA desk without looking at the instructions and then bought herself a fanny pack to celebrate. Cadet Kelly once saw Kate Moennig at a bar in L.A. and paid for her drinks anonymously.
We hear about Captain Stone before we meet her (later we learn her first name is Jennifer, but we will refer to her as Captain Stone for the purposes of this essay, because duh). “We’ve got Captain Stone again,” one cadet laments. “She’s going to dismember us.” A CADET SHOULD BE SO LUCKY, I howl to the indifferent wind.
Friendly soft-butch Carla warns Kelly, “She’s the one who tells us what to do, and when to do it.”
“We’ve got brains! We’re thinking people,” cries Kelly, pretending to be repulsed.
“Not around her you’re not,” Carla says.
Reader, you hear the boots first. The hard heel clacks on the ground, the leather crinkles, the toe taps. Then, in expert angry-top fashion, Captain Stone yanks Kelly’s non-regulation, RAINBOW blanket from her bed. She stomps “the ratty, old thing” and kicks it away, an undeniable high point of the film, and the rawest material for my first and vaguest gay fantasies. Listen, this was a time before The Favourite. Christy Carlson Romano was the closest Disney got to Rachel Weisz.
“You’re on my list, maggot,” Captain Stone tells Kelly, inches away from her face, breaking every heart in the room.
“You’d be on mine if I had a list,” Kelly tries to flirt back, failing. Baby gays never know when to quit.
One gets the sense Captain Stone has done this before. She whispers in Kelly’s ear, shouts in her face, brags about wrestling crocodiles (???, but also, aspirationally lesbian). She inspects Kelly’s uniform without a hint of self-consciousness. I imagine Captain Stone as a career lesbian, fabricating crushes on boys as a cover for her near-constant womanizing. She will be the first to tell you she has never once considered the romantic potential of men. She reads a lot of Eileen Myles, and always goes down first.
Technically, there is a love interest for both girls, “Brad,” who is a toe with a face. Brad is not important; there is a reason there are no men on the movie poster. This is the grand romance of Cadet Kelly and Captain Stone. The girls perform crushes on Brad in order to compete with each other for his attention, aka to block the other from compulsive heterosexuality and spend more time together. Brad takes Captain Stone to the big dance, and Kelly stumbles in, late from finishing an obstacle course, covered in mud. She collapses into Captain Stone, ruining her white party dress and, arguably, her chances with Brad. Later, Kelly paints Captain Stone’s hair rainbow in her sleep, for which she receives a court martial. Cadet Kelly is sure the cadet court will find her innocent, as it was, in her words, “a crime of passion.” The court finds Kelly guilty; fortunately, George Washington Academy does not condone nonconsensual outing, and agrees that Captain Stone is totally out of her league.
The rest of the movie is mostly unwatchable, as it is dominated by men, guns, and overt celebration of the military, with Gary Cole grimacing down on it all. Things pick up again when we get to the campus fight-dancing scene between Kelly and Captain Stone that inspires the silver medal-winning gun-dance number at regionals. Captain Stone is practicing her drill team routine in the quad, and Kelly starts following her around, doing the same moves. Then the dancing becomes an impassioned dialogue. Captain Stone pushes Kelly, then, literally, barks at her, in case you forgot she was the top. The girls hear clapping, and are both surprised to see Brad standing nearby, transfixed, evoking memories of various straight men who told my high school girlfriend and I that they “just wanted to watch.”
We climax with the regionals performance, the only scene where Captain Stone truly smiles. It is not as rewarding as Captain Stone screaming “MAGGOT” at Kelly as she crawls under barbed wire, but still mostly worth it. The girls finally hug, and in an unforgivable and homophobic twist, we learn that Captain Stone’s father has been transferred to Europe (where in Europe?? never specified), and that she will not be returning to George Washington Academy next year. I just have to say, why do this? What is the purpose of squashing the potential of this relationship? Was the Disney Channel terrified of children and millennial lesbians taking to the streets, demanding a Cadet Kelly 2? I believe the screenwriters could not account for what they had created with Kelly and Captain Stone, and while they didn’t want to completely heterosexualize the characters, they needed to make clear there would be no uHauling-ever-after.
Take a chill pill, Disney. In my Cadet Kelly fan-fiction, Kelly and Captain Stone remain pen pals throughout high school, sending detailed letters about drill team and male suitors they don’t like. Kelly takes a senior trip to the general continent of Europe, and when she deplanes, Captain Stone is there. She’s in her uniform, holding roses, and a little stuffed bug. “For you, maggot,” she snaps through a lesbian grin, and they crumble into a kiss beyond Lizzie and Gordo’s wildest dreams. Hey, what do you want from me? Some stories just have to be told.