#towongfoo

“To Wong Foo, Thanks For Everything, Julie Newmar” is a 1995 movie about three drag queens who go on a road trip headed toward a drag competition but end up having to take a detour. The queens find themselves in a predicament when they have trouble with a police officer and their car breaks down forcing themselves to spend time in a small town for a few days. The town views the queens as women, never suspecting they are actually men which is cause for several comedic moments. In the end, the town embraces the queens after their secret is revealed and they overcome the obstacle of the police officer as a team. Although this movie is fun and comedic, there are several problems of representation with the drag queen characters as they are represented as “drag queens” but live as though they are actually transgender, the issue of presenting the drag queens as deceitful by trying to hide their gender, and the issue of using straight actors to portray queer characters.

The movie begins with a scene showing Noxeema Jackson (played by Wesley Snipes) and Vida Bohemme (played by Patrick Swayze) transforming from men into drag queens. This scene is important in this analysis because it is the only scene in the movie that shows these characters as men. The rest of the movie Noxeema and Vida are dressed as women, act as women, present themselves as women, and use female pronouns. They also have a protégée named Chi Chi who is never shown as a man. In my opinion, this movie is not accurately representing what drag is, but rather is showing characters who more closely resemble transgender individuals. When they go car shopping, they are dressed as women and the car salesman calls them “ladies”. When they arrive in the new town, they introduce themselves to the people as women and give their drag names and the town believes them to be women. When they go to bed, they do not get out of drag but rather remain dressed as their female personas. An article from Everyday Feminism explains, “…the most prominent difference between trans women and drag queens is that drag is a style of performance, while a trans life is just that – daily life” (McClouskey, 2014). I argue that the “drag queens” represented are not performing 24/7 but rather are living their day to day life as their female personas. This is problematic in that “To Wong Foo” is not accurately representing drag queens or transgender women. The butt of the joke is that these men are living as women, and in order to maintain that joke, the movie keeps them in drag 24/7 blurring the lines between drag queens and a transgender lifestyle.

The character Noxeema even has a moment where she describes to Chi Chi the difference between drag and transsexual (it was the 90’s after all): 

I find this scene to be problematic because it is giving the audience (presumably straight people) the wrong information about queer lifestyles. It was clearly written by a straight person for a straight audience and is not informative at all. This scene is problematic because it is giving the audience (presumably straight people) the wrong information about queer lifestyles. It was clearly written by a straight person for a straight audience and is not informative at all. As Cavalcante says about mediatized linked fate, “the fates of transgender individuals and communities are understood as intimately linked to the films’ representation of transgender” (2017). Although the characters are not explicitly transgender, the film is still offering a representation of a community (be it drag or trans) that is inaccurate and the audience will receive that information and make their own assumptions about what it means to be a part of that community based on that misrepresentation.

“To Wong Foo” also has an underlying theme of these characters deceiving those around them due to the way they are presenting themselves. There are plenty of moments where Noxeema, Vida, and Chi Chi catch themselves from making a mistake that would give away that they are not “real” women. At one point the character Carol Ann, a towns person, says men are awful and Vida responds with something like, “Well we—I mean they aren’t all bad”. Vida feels she must hide her identity from the town’s people, presenting queer people as being deceitful. There is another moment in the film where Vida chastises Chi Chi for leading one of the boys on (begin at 0:47):

The problem with this clip is not only the fact that the film presents Chi Chi as being misleading and deceitful, but that the way Vida talks about it is as though Chi Chi will never find a man that understands her lifestyle and how another straight, cisgender girl is in love with the boy and Chi Chi needs to respect that. At one point Vida says, “I will not allow you to play games with other people. There are rules by which we operate sweetheart.” What are these rules? It seems that they involve a queer person not being able to find love because the other won’t understand them as well as needing to be respectful of the straight, cisgender people before caring about their own needs. This is another example of a dialect that plays into heteronormativity as a queer person chastises another queer person about their queer desires. Benshoff and Griffin talk about how it was common for queers to be represented as having lives that were “empty, lonely, pitiful, and all too often deadly” (2004, p. 8) in early cinema, but “To Wong Foo” appears to follow this narrative as this scene shows from Vida alluding to the queer person not being able to have love.

Lastly, the casting choice for “To Wong Foo” features actors who are typically seen in action roles and who are not queer themselves. The trailer even chooses to focus on how Swayze and Snipes have been seen in traditional, masculine roles and how they are about to face “the most physically challenging roles of their careers”. It is interesting that the casting director chose two hyper-masculine men to play Vida and Noxeema when the goal is to have men who can effectively present the illusion of being a women. But, that likely was not the goal and rather the goal was to cast two men who would be funny in a drag queen role and Swayze and Snipes fit the bill, following best actor discourse which states, “identities are tied up in cultural understandings of what the identities look like and, more important, how the identities can best be represented” (Martin, 2018, p. 286-287). The casting director wanted someone who would not fit traditional drag stereotypes for looks, but could “act” like a gay man would because the two contrasts of masculine and feminine is perceived as funny. Thus they picked two action stars who were able to portray gay stereotypes effectively. This is problematic because it lends to these stereotypical notions of what is “gay” without offering any credibility or truth while also not giving jobs to actual gay actors.

“To Wong Foo, Thanks For Everything, Julie Newmar” may be a fun, comedic movie, but where there is fun there is misrepresentation and the perpetuating of stereotypes. Had this movie been made today, I would hope there would be some significant changes.

References:

Benshoff, H.& Griffin, S. (2004). “Queer Cinema, The Film Reader”.

Cavalcante, A. (2017). “Breaking Into Transgender Life: Transgender Audiences’ Experiences With ‘First of Its Kind’ Visibility in Popular Media”.

Martin, A. (2018). “The Queer Business of Casting Gay Characters on U.S. Television”.

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