Adam’s Family

Difficult to imagine, but the original cheerleaders were all men. 
Period: mid-1800s. Sport: gridiron football at Ivy League colleges and universities in the US. In The Manly Origins of Cheerleading, Lisa Wade says the activity was all about gymnastics and stunts.

Go P-O-T-U-S: Wade mentions how US presidents Eisenhower, Roosevelt and Reagan were all cheerleaders at some point

Getting Eve(n) 

Towards the end of the 19th century, as large stadiums were constructed, cheerleading became a more structured activity and appeared in sports other than football. Cheerleaders helped control crowds too. In the 1920s, women began joining cheer squads. With World War II and droves of young men joining the army, more women joined the cheer squads.
Go G-I-R-L-S: Jane Fonda’s 1960 Hollywood debut, Tall Story, saw her play a cheerleader opposite Tony Perkins who plays a basketball player. 

High Split 

But when the men returned from war, there was an attempt to ‘de-femme’ cheerleading. Reason proffered: it was too masculine for women. But it didn’t work. Cheerleading went from being athletic to “something cute” with, as Wade points out, some cartwheels and splits thrown in. Vinyl pompoms were introduced in 1965. The trend, however, took a beating in the 1970s and ’80s courtesy the second wave of feminism. 
GO H-E-R-K-I-E: Physical instructor Lawrence Herkimer created the pompom to add more colour to the fields, and eventually patented it

Grey Area 

The women stayed. With the advent of the TV Age, cheerleading and certain sports became inextricably linked across the globe. The soaring popularity led to great innovations. But gaze is embedded in one’s cultural context. The adoptive cultures came to regard the activity as titillation and the actors as sex objects. In 2008, India too got a taste of cheerleading thanks to the IPL. Despite stray attempts to Indianise it, cheerleading here remains a “white girl thing”.
Go C-H-I-N-A: In the paper, The Gendered Performance at the Beijing Olympics: The Construction of the Olympic Misses and Cheerleaders, Hongmei L. mentions that Beijing trained more than 2,00,000 cheerleaders for the 2008 Olympics. Whatever be the backstory, in public they were treated with respect.

Upala Sen