To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar came out in 1995, and follows three drag queens as they make a cross-country roadtrip from New York to Hollywood. On the way, they break down and are forced to stay in a small town in the middle of nowhere, where they befriend and help the people of the town with some of the things they’ve been struggling with. This film was directed by Beeban Kidron and stars Wesly Snipes, Patrick Swayze, and John Leguizamo as the three main characters. While this movie is without question a road trip film, just how queer it is is up for debate.
For one thing, I believe that Vida, one of the three drag queens, is transfeminine, and that Sheriff Dollard is a closested man attracted to other men. This is of course coupled with the inherent queerness of drag – the two are inseparable from one another. With that being said, how queer the movie is is a different matter.
It is a bit difficult to compare this movie to something like The Living End, or The Adventures of Priscilla: Queen of the Desert, given that both of those movies are rated R, and this one is PG-13. Obviously, it is limited with what it is able to do, comparatively. For that reason, it is slightly harder to do some of the things that are in the other two movies – violence and anti-assimilationism is more difficult to portray when one is making a Hollywood movie for as wide an audience as possible, and the result is that this film is decidedly assimilationist.
As Amy Borden explains in“Queer or LGBTQ+: On the Question of Inclusivity in Queer Cinema Studies,” there is a difference between Queer and LGBTQ+ movies – this is perhaps one of the latter. There is a level of unconformity that is a staple of a queer movie – take The Living End, for example. That movie is a queer film because it was not made with the audience’s comfortability in mind, but with the message first – a message of strength and defiance. On the other side of the scale, as Borden states on page 102, “LGBTQ+ cinema 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.” One does not need to be a film theorist to see how this movie fits into this description – the narrative closure of Chi-Chi winning the drag competition at the, the spatial and temporal coherence of the small town, and the cause and effect plot of the car breaking down, trapping them in the town. In the same paragraph, Borden states that some films attempt to “normalize an individual’s identity within a community that views [their] gender identity as an aberration.” Is this not what happened in this movie? The townspeople originally did not like drag queens, and by the end of the movie, they did – their identities were normalized.
With all that being said, I believe there is potentially more queer representation than may be initially obvious.
In the opening scene of the movie, Vida and Noxeema are getting into their drag. While both performers are obviously enjoying getting into drag, Vida by comparison looks deeply unhappy when she inspects her face in the mirror, prior to putting on any makeup or anything. As soon as she puts on the headband however, her face lights up – as soon as the first piece of her feminine persona goes on, she is delighted. Later in the scene, there is a sense of awe when she puts her wig on and the look is completed – she is seeing herself as her feminine persona – seeing herself as Vida – and she is awestruck by it.
Now, of course one could argue that she simply enjoys drag, and like how she looks while in it, but if you consider the scene in Bala Cynwyd, where she is rejected by a woman implied to be her mother, it perhaps becomes metaphor for the lack of acceptance from their families that many trans people face. With that, the scene at the end of the movie where Carol Ann reveals that she knew they were drag queens, but accepts them as her friends regardless – not in spite of, but as a part of them. This too parallels many trans people’s experiences, and implies that perhaps Carol Ann not only sees but accepts Vida as a woman.
To pivot for a moment, it is possible, or even likely, that Sheriff Dollard is a closeted – or perhaps wholly unaware – man who is attracted to other men. The scene of him sitting in the bar describing men is a rather good indication of how he seems to subconsciously feel about other men. Unlike the drag queens however, he represses his attraction, perhaps due to his own feelings about queer people, or perhaps due to the way the other officers at the station feel about them. In the scene set at the station, the three officers make fun of him for getting ‘beat up by a girl,’ and call him ‘Mrs. Dollard,’ calling his masculinity into question and inadvertently accusing him of not being a ‘real’ man. He, of course, grows defensive, and sets out on his hunt from here. If you consider this moment as the starting point of his journey, and couple it with the scene in the bar, then perhaps his story is one of self-discovery, but not self-acceptance.
If you compare the two experiences and how the film portrays the endings of each, there is an argument to be made about authenticity. The drag queens find their authenticity in their drag as both an exploration or expression of gender, and as their artform. Sheriff Dollard continues repressing himself, not accepting the possibility that he could be attracted to men, and he is run out of town as a laughingstock.
Overall, this movie is decidedly assimilationist, but with a decent message to live as your authentic self. As in all things, there are both good and bad elements – effective and ineffective pieces. There is no perfect queer movie, there is no perfect representation, but the message isn’t bad, so perhaps that counts for something.
- Araki, Gregg, director. The Living End. Cineplex Odeon Films, 1992.
- Borden, Amy. “Queer or LGBTQ+: On the Question of Inclusivity in Queer Cinema Studies.” The Routledge Companion to Cinema & Gender, edited by Kristin Hole et al., 0 ed., Routledge, 2016. DOI.org (Crossref), https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315684062.
- Kidron, Beeban, director. To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar. Universal Studios, 1995.
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