Emily Danforth’s The Miseducation of Cameron Post is one of the best queer YA novels ever written. We’ve talked about it a lot here on Autostraddle, so I’m very excited to say that it’s coming to the big screen with big name talent attached! According to the Hollywood Reporter, Chloe Grace Moretz, star of movies like Kick-Ass, 500 Days of Summer and Let Me In, will star as the titular Cameron Post, a gay girl growing up in Montana in the early ’90s who has her first love and then gets sent to a conversion therapy camp by her conservative aunt. Sasha Lane, from the recent film American Honey, will also star, playing Cameron’s best friend at the camp. Desiree Akhavan, the director of another queer movie, Appropriate Behavior, will direct, giving it even more of a queer female focus and, hopefully, a chance at being one of the better queer films of the lesbian movie canon.

This film is urgent; it’s set largely in a conversion therapy center and shows how intensely harmful those places are. Vice President-elect Mike Pence, as well as several people on Trump’s team, are big supporters of conversion therapy, where LGBTQ youth are tortured until they develop negative reactions to their attraction or gender and become “straight” or “cisgender.” Our country’s new leaders have pledged to work to overturn protections for LGTBTQ people across America. Hopefully the film will bring a spotlight to this incredibly serious issue that literally costs lives of LGBTQ youth.

Cameron Post author Emily M. Danforth agrees:

Not so long ago I was a closeted teen in cattle country queering every onscreen female pairing. This news is a dream https://t.co/wgAK2ijzOa — emily danforth (who is never here) (@emdanforth) November 18, 2016

(Also, here's to advance tickets for Mike Pence and those many other politicians who support harmful, pro-conversion therapy legislation.) — emily danforth (who is never here) (@emdanforth) November 18, 2016

The film also includes John Gallagher, Jr., Jennifer Ehle and Forrest Goodluck, who it seems might be playing a character who was Two Spirit (a gender identity in some American Indian cultures that’s not a part of the western gender binary) in the book, so it’ll be interesting to see if that part of the character is kept for the film. No casting has been announced for Coley Taylor, the rodeo queen that Cameron first falls in love with.

If you haven’t already read the book, now would be a great time.

It’s been a bleak couple of weeks, but this news coupled with the news that Gabby Rivera will be writing the new America Chavez comic book adds a little hope into our lives.