To Wong Foo is a delightful, feel-good film centered around three drag queens as they attempt to drive from New York to Hollywood for a drag competition. The film is incredibly over-the-top visually (the outfits are stunning) and narratively. The film is a quintessential queer road-trip film because it perfectly hits every trope of a road narrative. Unlike in some of the films, the queens have a set destination. This has physical significance since it is a important competition to all three main characters, but it also has another layer of significance: Chi-Chi is hoping to get on the radar and feel like a true drag queen there. Of course, Chi-Chi’s development, as in all good road trip narratives, happens on the journey. It hits every other narrative beat: the car breaks down, they get lost, they meet new people, and their relationships with each other change for the better. Anything you would expect from a road trip is here.
The film, with its over-the-top use of tropes and its focus on drag, is what I would consider camp. I will draw on examples of different notes of Sontag’s famous “Notes on Camp” to illustrate this. Drag always relates to camp: Sontag describes camp’s taste in people as being drawn to “the markedly attenuated or strongly exaggerated,” meaning both androgyny and hyper-performance of masculinity or femininity (4). Drag exists to perform gender, so separating camp from a drag film is impossible. Sontag’s next note claims that “Camp sees everything in quotation marks. It’s not a lamp, but a ‘lamp’” (4). Our class discussed that many elements of this movie can be seen in quotation marks, as objects playing an exaggerated role in a narrative larger than the movie. An example discussed in our queer road-trip film class is the car that the queens take: they pass up a more functional car for a Cadillac that they see as an iconic symbol of the road trip.
I feel that the three queens are also playing a role in quotation marks: they are “drag queens.” The three characters perfectly encapsulate the outside expectations of the drag queen. In her ethnographic study of drag queens, Katie Horowitz describes a specific form of femininity that drag queens perform:
Queens celebrate what sociologist Raewyn Connell might call hegemonic femininity: the dominant temporally and culturally specific ideal. In contemporary US culture, the hegemonic norm is straight, white, wealthy, able bodied, and, regardless of domestic and career choices, unambiguously female in appearance. (Horowitz 306-307)
These queens, especially Vida and Noxeema, conform to this hegemonic femininity (although Noxeema is Black, most of her looks are reminiscent of white old Hollywood stars and the like. While they project a femininity that is desirable and sexy, Noxeema and Vida are not overtly shown as sexual beings and never experience desire, as Horowitz notes about queens in general: “the sexuality performed by drag queens refers only to itself rather than to any external sex act or object of attraction” (309). Chi Chi is unique from the other queens in that her costuming evokes icons of Latina beauty and she shows romantic interest in a local boy, Bobby Ray. However, she is also the character who is still becoming a true drag queen, and these are traits that the other queens condemn.
Additionally, the queens play a role in quotation marks easily because they have very little personality outside of their roles in a profession and identity that centers around performance. They are never seen outside of drag and never go by their birth names. They seem magical: Where do they fit all of those clothes in their car? How did they decorate their room and find on-theme outfits for the whole town? Bits of their personal lives are clear, such as Vida’s strained relationship with her parents, but all of their lives center on drag, and by extension, performance, or as Sontag calls it, “being-as-playing-a-role.”
This treatment of the drag queen characters without much realism may be incredibly campy, but also raises some issues related to the impact of this film. It fails to depict drag queens, who are marginalized in their queerness, as whole people, and does not give its largely cisgender, heterosexual Hollywood audience real tools to understand and accept differences. It approaches its intent to increase acceptance for drag queens through an assimilationist ending, where the women of the town all identify themselves as drag queens just as in Spartacus to protect Noxeema, Vida, and Chi Chi. It shows that even though the queens did not fit into the small town at first, really, they were not so different. To Wong Foo can be interpreted as a piece of LGBTQ+ cinema as defined by Amy Borden, in that it carries a central theme of community acceptance that a largely heterosexual audience can clearly pick up through marketing. She defines LGBTQ cinema as cinema that “draws from classical Hollywood style—narrative closure, spatial and temporal coherence, and a cause and effect plot—to build mainstream and community-oriented films that work to normalize LGBTQ+ characters” (Borden 102). The queens in this film are normalized, and thus stripped of their queerness and deviance. This is mainly evident in the women of the town’s identification as drag queens, but this also pervades the rest of the film. For example, Chi Chi’s relationship with Bobby Ray is judged by the queens but is not questioned as something queer. If the a member of the heterosexual audience of the film encountered a drag queen in real life, not just during a performance but in day-to-day life, the goal of the movie may not be accomplished: the drag queen would be a real, queer person who is queer and a member of a transgressive subculture. The two people will inevitably have differences.
While drag performers have real differences in their experience of the world that marginalize them, the ignorance of this, although difficult to reconcile, perhaps makes this film line up more closely with Sontag’s definitions of camp. She describes camp as “disengaged, depoliticized—or at least apolitical” (2). The film is not making a new or deeply impactful point. It simply leans into performance, tropes, and aesthetic.
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