To Wong Foo Thanks for Everything, Julie Newmar (1995)
Dir. Beeban Kidron
This was such a formative movie
This shit was revolutionary for the mid-90s. Among other things it helped me understand that transgender and cross-dressing were completely separate things.
To this day, I am in awe of the fact that Patrick Swayze not only campaigned hard to get the audition, not only auditioned in dress and makeup, but spent most of the day leading up to the audition walking around LA in dress and makeup.
This was a man who could sing, dance, act, ride a horse, fight, and walk in heels, he had nothing to prove to anyone, and he is MISSED.
Okay, I’m not done feeling about this.
If you’re younger, you may not know Patrick Swayze; he was Taken From Us in 2009. But Patrick Swayze was an icon of masculinity. Men were willing to watch romantic movies because Patrick Swayze was in them.
Patrick Swayze was fucking beefcake.
And this man didn’t just agree to do a movie where the only time he’s not actually in drag is the first three minutes, which involve stepping out of the shower, doing make up, and getting Dressed. He has ONE LINE that is delivered in a man’s voice, and it’s not during those three minutes.
And if you watch those three minutes, you see a stark difference between his portrayal of Miss Vida Bohéme and Wesley Snipes as Noxeema Jackson. (I am not criticizing Snipes’ performance. They were different roles.) Noxeema was a comedy character. Chi-Chi was a comedy character. But Miss Vida Bohéme was a dramatic role, played by a dramatic powerhouse.
When Vida sits down in front of the mirror, she sees a man. And she doesn’t like it.
Then she puts her hair up, and her face lights up.
“Ready or not,” she says. “Here comes Mama.”
And while Noxeema is having fun with her transformation (at one point breaking into a giggling fit after putting on pantyhose), Vida is simply taking pleasure in bringing out her true self. And when she’s done, she sees this:
And you can FEEL her pride.
All of this from an actor who, up to this point, walked on to the screen and dripped testosterone.
the fact that some of you history-ignorant children in the notes are trying to shit on groundbreaking historical queer cinema because it doesn’t meet 2021 standards is infuriating. sit down, shut the fuck up, and listen to the elders in the room for fucking once
This. If you have never lived in a world where queerness was universally pathologized and criminalized to the point that even IMAGINING a world where it wasn’t constituted a radical and potentially dangerous act, you don’t have any business judging those of us who have for how we survived it and how we found (or still find) comfort in the few imperfect representations we got.
You don’t have to like it. You probably aren’t capable of “getting” it. And to be honest, I don’t want you to! I am glad that young queer people will never know exactly what it was like “back then.” But what you also will not do is refuse to learn your own history and then shit on everything that came before you, because like it or not what came before you is the reason you will never have to get what it was like back then.
On Wesley Snipes’s role Noxeema and John Leguizamo as Chi-Chi Rodriguez.
“I grew up in the ‘70s and even within the street culture, there was a lot of flamboyancy,” Snipes told TODAY of his perception of drag before filming. “Pimps wore the same furs as theprostitutes wore.
“Some of the great musicians of the world, like Parliament-Funkadelic, were very androgynous. So it wasn’t really new for me to see men dressed as women or men dressed as drag queens.”
Snipes attended the famed LaGuardia High School of Performing Arts and then State University of New York at Purchase. He wasn’t a dance major, but most of his friends were. “That exposed me to the world of glam, vogue, drag, transgender and gay people, LGBTQ… but it wasn’t in fashion those days. But it existed and I was around it.”
Not only did “Priscilla, Queen of the Desert” pave the way for “To Wong Foo,” so did films like the 1968 documentary “The Queen” and “Paris Is Burning,” the 1990 doc that chronicled ball culture of New York and the various Black and queer communities involved in it.
Even though he was known for his action roles, Snipes’ portrayal of Noxeema wasn’t the first time he played a drag queen. In 1986, he made his Broadway debut in the play “Execution of Justice,” playing Sister Boom Boom, a real-life AIDS activist and drag nun who acted as the show’s voice of conscience. Snipes pointed out, “Sister Boom Boom did not have Noxeema’s makeup kit.”
On whether he got any pushback for stepping into Noxeema’s pumps, he said, “Not so much professionally but the streets weren’t feeling it, and there were certain community circles. The martial arts community… they were not feeling it at all.”
“In fact, when the movie came out and they would come down the street, I would see them in Brooklyn sometimes, they started listing all my movies. I noticed they would always skip that one. I would correct them, ‘Now you don’t got the full count!’”
Lesser-known than his co-stars at the time, Lequizamo didn’t really anticipate becoming a transgender icon, but he did know that they were working on something special when they started filming.
“Drag didn’t really exist in movies,” Lequizamo, who was nominated for a Golden Globe for his portrayal, told TODAY. “There were straight men pretending to be women to get out of trouble or into trouble but this was not that. I was trying to make Chi-Chi a real life trans character and Patty and Wesley were trying to be real drag queens.” Never fully articulated in the film, Chi-Chi Rodriguez has always been perceived as transgender, something that ending up making an indelible mark on LGBTQ people in the late ‘90s as trans representation in media was limited.
“Chi-Chi was a trans icon, but she also showed us that gay men and trans women can both perform and work in drag side by side, and that those relationships are symbiotic,” Cayne explained.
“It was a powerful thing. I get lots of fan mail from LGBTQ teens telling me how my character helped them come out to their parents,” Leguizamo said. “They didn’t feel like they were seen, so that was a beautiful gift from the movie.”
Lequizamo also articulates that if “To Wong Foo” were cast today, a trans actor should be cast in his role. (And that just may happen, since Beane is developing a musical for Broadway.)
“Anybody can play anything, but the playing field is not fair that way,” he said. “Not everybody is allowed to play everything. So until we get to that place, it is important for trans actors to get a chance to act which they don’t. In the project I’m doing, I’m making sure that the person playing trans is a trans person so we can make it legit, make it real. That just needs to be done right now.”
a monumental film in the library of queer history.
it was formative for modern society, too.
there are a lot of action fans out there who learned from their idols that respect doesn’t cost a damn thing to give. i know plenty of people who aren’t queer saw trans women and drag queens presented as people to them for the first time in wong fu. suddenly, strange and foreign queer identities that had only been presented to them as jokes if they’d even heard of them, seemed a little more relatable, and very human.
we’re all just people.
snipes, swayze, and leguizamo were willing to play people a lot of their fans didn’t respect yet or didn’t even know how to respect and demand they figure it the fuck out.
This is a HUGE reblog but I watched this as a little girl on cable TV and I’m so glad I did. GO WATCH THIS AS SOON AS YOU CAN
I’d love it if To Wong Foo was inescapably broadcast once a year, like A Christmas Story.
For every terf that sends me anon hate, I just reblog this post again.
again i want to say that non-queer and non-trans actors (although first of all, it is not up to you or me to write that identity for or over people we have never met and do not owe it to us) are fucking important. A lot of these actors have taken career hits. They’ve taken hits for the queer community because they could stand to take hits that we could not.
and i am so fucking grateful for these people and i’m grateful when we can do re-makes, but never forget that we are able to do those because others took shots that were intended for us. and that we have taken shots in the past.
and nobody owes you their identity. It is utterly insane to ask actors to disclose their sexuality or gender to play a character on the screen. it is utterly important to cast queer and trans people and to have that representation. these thoughts can and do coexist.
1995. “To Wong Fu” was released in 1995. For those of you who are my age and younger, understand this: “Ace Ventura: Pet Detective” was released in 1994. “Ace Ventura” very famously features a scene where the protagonist/title character experiences what can best be described as “gay panic” in the true sense of the term.
The villain of “Ace Ventura” is a closeted trans woman who has assumed the identity of a deceased cis woman. It’s a mystery film and the mystery is resolved when the title character realizes the police lieutenant (the aforementioned trans woman) he’d kissed earlier in the film is the same person as a man who had gone missing some years before. On realizing he’d kissed a “man,” the title character enters a state of extreme anger, disgust, and panic in a scene meant to be comedic.
In a time and a place where a legally accepted excuse to murder me was played for a joke, I’ll take Patrick Swayze and Wesley Snipes in dresses with good intent any fucking day.
(btw, this is why I fucking hate you immensely if you say “gay panic” or variations thereof for any reason besides contexts like this.)
To be clear, that’s not gay panic, that’s trans panic. Similar beasts, but distinct legally, as gross as that is.
And yes, that’s exactly why “gay panic” as a cutesy little thing makes me really angry. Ace Ventura came out during my junior year of high school, and I had to listen to everyone laugh about how funny it was. This? A breath of fresh air by comparison.
I need younger folk to know that I only found out about this movie this year, and I wish I’d had access to it when I was a teenager in the 90s.
I watched Silence of the Lambs and Ace Ventura, but they were not (to my knowledge) airing To Wong Foo anywhere I could easily see it.
Silence of the Lambs and Ace Ventura aired on TV all the time. They were big hits! It was easy to watch trans or cross-dressing characters be the villains or the butt of a joke. It was not easy to be exposed to any kind of positive messaging.
I think I watched Priscilla on a late night airing for film buffs. Channel 4 used to do that kind of thing. Maybe To Wong Foo was aired similarly at some point, but it would have been post water-shed and not BBC1 or ITV, I can tell you that for free.
It took me SO LONG to learn about trans people - let alone non-binary people - in a positive way or at all in a way that reflected real stories.
And - I cannot stress this enough - they are trying to dial it back right the fuck now. Think about the laws in Florida. People could be arrested RIGHT NOW for filming something like this. It’s NOT trivial. Context matters.
And you have to know I will not click on any fic that has ‘gay panic’ in the tags. That’s still a legal defence of murder in a lot of places. That’s CURRENT. RIGHT NOW.
If you want to say someone’s a gay disaster, say they are a fucking gay disaster, don’t label it gay panic. Get some education.
the gimmick blogs are like tumblr’s rogue gallery. yes we’ve got some heroes, yes we’ve got some villains, but more importantly if you look over here you will see some freak who devotes all their time to counting the number of “t’s” in a post
T Count: 15
Letter Count: 198
Your T Percentage: 7.58%
Average T Percentage: 6.95%
You used the letter T 1.09 times as much as average!
YOU EXIST???
Sometimes you create a guy and it turns out they already exist
Stopped dead in my tracks in the parking lot of my co-op by the ‘MILF’ sticker but it’s the ‘please let me merge’ possum that made me pull out my camera.
For those that don’t know, David Leatherwood is a former official for the anti-trans LGB organization Gays Against Groomers (GAG) who just left because it came out that the leader, Jaimee Michell, of the organization is on DeSantis’s payroll and the organization is now essentially acting as an arm of DeSantis’s campaign.
In his parting statement, he reiterated he is still extremely anti-trans and anti-drag, “there is a MAJOR difference between regular gay people who love America and Alphabet extremists who push radical woke ideology.”
He’s still a bigot, still an asshole, and he just shifted from the Leopard’s Eating People’s Faces Party to the Cheetah’s Eating People’s Faces Party.
I know it’s not hard to point out reactionaries hypocrisy when it comes to like safe spaces or hug boxes or whatever but genuinely how much of an echo chamber do you have to exist in for you to think this is a reasonable thing to say
reblog if attacking fascism is really the hill you want to die on
this is literally like one of the most justified and honorable hills you could die on??? lol??
every time this post comes around, my favorite part is the “I know it’s the Mets” qualifier at the beginning lmao like how baseball that this zillion note posts starts with “sorry for putting this hellteam on your dash, bUT”
Y’all have no idea how hard I was trying not to laugh in class at that poor bird
