Know Your Herstory: Giving ‘To Wong Foo, Thanks For Everything! Julie Newmar’ Its Due

Perhaps it’s that I’ve been watching The Assassination of Gianni Versace lately, or that the thrill of watching gay Olympians has me thinking of the gay media representations of my youth, but I’ve been thinking a lot about homophobia in the 1990s. Being the age that I am (none of your business, that’s what!), there’s a temptation to view the ’90s as THE all-important decade, and we should fight against that. But attitudes toward and depictions of gayness in the ’90s marked a crucial and important turning point. The decade began with problematic notions of queerness like The Silence of the Lambs (an excellent film that regardless presented its killer as a deviant wannabe “transsexual”) and ended with the mainstream comedy Will & Grace.

The ’90s were when I experienced my first gay people on TV, from the proudly feminine Rickie on My So-Called Life to the eye-opening gay men on the early seasons of The Real World. I still carry indelible memories of the AIDS crisis via shows like The Real World and General Hospital. Every bit of representation was crucial, yet major networks and film studios still seemed so tentative. We’ve come a long way in 2018, when gay-themed movies are Best Picture nominees without much (if any) angst and RuPaul’s Drag Race reigns supreme among TV’s reality competitions.

Which makes the drag boomlet of the mid-’90s all the more fascinating. RuPaul’s hit single “Supermodel” made her “America’s Next Drag Superstar” long before she was crowning younger queens with that distinction. And then there was the back-to-back-to-back movie trio of The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert in 1994, To Wong Foo, Thanks For Everything, Julie Newmar in 1995, and The Birdcage in 1996. I’ve written about the latter here before, and The Birdcage is really only tangentially about drag. But Priscilla and To Wong Foo were these two very specifically drag-focused films that opened within a year of each other. Priscilla got the better reviews (94% on Rotten Tomatoes to the frankly unfair 39% that To Wong Foo got) and the Academy Award for Best Costume Design, but To Wong Foo was the one that more people saw. On September 8, 1995, To Wong Foo, Thanks For Everything! Julie Newmar, a movie about three drag queens on a cross-country road trip with an inscrutable title opened on more than 1200 screens and finished #1 at the box office. For 1995, that’s remarkable.

Here and now, from my perch in 2018, I recognize that Priscilla was a groundbreaking movie that pushed boundaries with its depiction of drag queens and their interior lives and loves and struggles. I recognize how much of drag culture owes a debt to Paris Is Burning, the pivotal 1990 documentary that went inside the drag-ball culture of 1980s New York City. But I was a 15-year-old closeted little know-nothing in 1995. I didn’t know about Australian movies that played at art-houses, and I sure didn’t know about documentaries. What I knew were mainstream comedies that were advertised all over the television, starring Patrick Swayze and Wesley Snipes. Too Wong Foo got dinged for being too broadly mainstream, for being a queer movie starring desperately straight people, for playing hopscotch around notions of actual gay sexuality. All very fair! But this was also a mianstream comedy that opened on a thousand screens where the heroes were a trio of drag queens who championed a town of battered and bullied women, and none of them had to die in order to make straight people value life more. It was proto-Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, only it was the stars of Road House and Passenger 57 giving Rizzo from Grease a makeover, and that is deeply valuable, and it’s streaming on Netflix right now, and you should watch it.

The story — in a screenplay written by playwright Douglas Carter Beane (The Little Dog Laughed; Xanadu) — is that drag queens Miss Vida Boheme (Patrick Swayze) and Noxeema Jackson (Wesley Snipes) tie for the win at a “Drag Queen of the Year” pageant in New York, and their prize is a trip to Hollywood to compete in Miss Drag America. They decide to road trip it, along with baby gay Chi Chi Rodriguez (John Leguizamo). There’s a good older/younger dynamic at play there that you actually see reflected on Drag Race these days. The bulk of the story is about the queens playing fairy godmothers, but there are a few crucial scenes of the queens mixing it up with each other that are honestly pretty forward thinking about diverse subcultures. The real story begins when, on the road in the middle of America, the trio get pulled over by an absolute pig of a cop (Chris Penn), who attempts to assault Vida, gets knocked the hell out for his trouble, and with the girls thinking they’ve killed a cop, they hightail it down the road a few towns over, where their Cadillac breaks down, and they have to hole up in backwater Snydersville. There, they befriend the women of the town, help them plan their Strawberry Festival, and somehow, inexplicably, never let on to anyone that they’re actually men (with a few exceptions).

An unordered list of further reasons to celebrate To Wong Foo:

• RuPaul shows up within the first ten minutes, playing drag queen Rachel Tensions (!), donning a Confederate flag evening gown that would leave a parallel set of flaming hot takes like she’s the DeLorian in Back to the Future if this were made today. 

• The supporting cast in this is just phenomenal. The women in the town are played by Stockard Channing, Blythe Danner, Melinda Dillon, Alice “the library lady from the beginning of Ghostbusters” Drummond, and Marceline “Kathy Geiss” Hugot. It’s like Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean with drag queens. Which is honestly an idea whose time has truly come. 

• The drag itself … could use some work. The makeup is way too spare (all the better to see the famous faces of our stars), and it’s frankly insane that these ladies are in day drag very much at all, much less all the time.

• Both Swayze and Leguizamo were nominated for Golden Globes, and while I silently weep for Snipes, who is genuinely very funny in this movie, it once again gives me the opportunity to remind everyone that more often than not, the Golden Globes make some very welcome choices.
• Stockard Channing saying “Adam’s apple”is one of the great line readings of all time.
• The drag-queens-giving-makeovers concept was truly a precursor to RuPaul’s Drag U.
• The scene where the queens turn the ladies out with the help of a trunk of bright, loud clothes from the ’60s was one of the great commentaries on drab ’90s fashions.
• Jeremy London and Michael Vartan as two of the town’s young men who find themselves in the queens’ orbit in one way or another, are quite the snackables, if I do say so myself. I find myself lingering on Vartan’s single earring (in the “straight” ear, a concept I was fairly obsessed with in 1995, but whatever) for a while. 

This is a broad-strokes film that, if weren’t about drag queens, would be groaningly typical. But of course it is about drag queens, and that makes quite a bit of difference. And besides, it’s exactly the kind of middle-of-the-road comedy — with a good heart and a great cast and a fairy-tale ending — that makes for optimal weekend-afternoon viewing, be it on cable or on streaming. There isn’t a bit of condescension on the part of Swayze, Snipes, or Leguizamo in these roles, either. You’d never think of them as “allies,” yet each one of them jumps into their character’s skin with relish and plays them as proud, good people without any unnecessary distancing mannerisms. It’s a film, and a trio of performances, we should talk about more.

Stream To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar