Save Rock and Roll

Kid one the bus next to me whose backpack starts moving and it turns out he's got three chickens and a painted turtle he caught in there? This is Perfectly Normal. Humans have been catching small game and transporting it home in whatever they had since we invented bags to put chickens and turtles in.

I traded him three king-size snickers bars I had on me for the turtle because I vaguely remembered that many freshwater turtles were toxic to eat (incorrectly, as it turns out, but this was when I still had a Nokia Brick that lived a blissful, internet-free existence), and didn't want him accidentally poisoning his family, but didn't want to just. Steal his hard-won turtle. This is Perfectly Normal. Humans have been cautious about poisons, looking out for strangers kids and bartering shit since before we were technically humans, probably.

Having acquired a turtle, I now needed to transport the turtle to the on-campus pond that effectively served as an Invasive Freshwater Turtle Containment Zone, but did not have a bag that could adequately contain him so I had to sit the rest of that bus ride, at the station and all through the next bus ride holding the turtle like the world's angriest hamburger. Multiple people were curious about and delighted with the turtle. This is Perfectly Normal. Humans love an animal, especially one that is capable of appearing grumpy, and hands are for holding things.

By the time I got back to Campus, the anthropology and child psychology building that the Invasive Turtle Containment Pond was in had closed, so I had to figure out how to climb the tree over the wall and get down off the roof while holding The World's Angriest And Sharpest Hamburger. I eventually ended up having to briefly shove the turtle into by bra to get up to the initial branch and off the roof without breaking an ankle. This is Perfectly Normal. Humans are, as a species, a bunch of barely-evolved arboreal frugivores and really good at Tree Physics, and I don't know a single titty-having bitch out there that hasn't used their bra as Emergency Pockets at least once, if not daily.

I released the turtle into the Turtle Containment Pond and then had to solve the problem of getting back OUT of the locked building, but Nokia Brick never loses a signal or drops a call (including that time I accidentally dropped it off a 13-story building in the middle of a call to my parents and the damn thing BOUNCED but kept the line open. I miss that phone every day.) and while campus security has been carefully trained to not let people IN to places without proper ID and a call to someone inside, they assume that if you got locked in somewhere, that you got in by legitimate means and not Lemur Shenanigans, so i just called them, apologized that I'd been working late with headphones on and didn't realize I'd been locked in. This is Perfectly Normal, people have been lying to cops since laws were invented, and will continue to do so because all cops are bastards.

To Wong Foo Thanks for Everything, Julie Newmar (1995)

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.

“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.”

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.

“It was all about accepting my ethnicity in it. I had my face done really light all the time. I have family members who have issues with self-hate and race and so their skin will be five times lighter than the color of their neck, and that always tripped me out, so I wanted to put a little bit of that into it,” he said. “At the end of the movie, my neck and my face matched. My face is much darker. So that was the arc. Chi Chi becomes polished but accepting of herself, mature, romantically grows. Instead of a taker, she becomes a giver.”

boccs

monzterzack

Dec 16, 2023

“Mermaid" 

Published in Sadie Magazine 

I was misdiagnosed with asthma when I was 12 and took asthma meds daily for seven years, and then it turned out I hadn’t had asthma in the first place; I actually have a different breathing problem. I don’t think the doctor who told me I had asthma (my pediatrician, who I was no longer seeing by that point) ever found out she’d been wrong. (This is one of at least four misdiagnoses in my life, from a variety of doctors, that I can think of off the top of my head.) Similarly, my first therapist told me she didn’t think I was autistic because I wasn’t obsessed with trains. I don’t think she ever found out that I am, in fact, autistic, because I wasn’t seeing her by the time I was diagnosed.

I get that it might be demoralizing to have someone contact you specifically to tell you that you messed up, but I think it would be useful for doctors to have data on how often they misdiagnose patients, especially since some doctors tend to think the patient is generally wrong when attempting self-diagnosis. It would be useful for my former therapist to move me from the mental column of “people who erroneously think they’re autistic” to “people whose autism I did not notice when they were right in front of me.” It would be useful for my pediatrician to realize she needed to look more closely and listen to kids when their breathing symptoms weren’t the classic asthma ones.