Experiencing & Appreciating @goetheslibraryofleaves - Tumblr Blog

“Let no one be slow to seek wisdom when he is young nor weary in the search thereof when he is grown old. For no age is too early or too late for the health of the soul.”

— Epicurus, Letter to Menoeceus

thememedaddy

crazy-brazilian

same bro

danskjavlarna

Source details and larger version.

I have some rather fun vintage bear imagery collected here.

life-on-our-planet

Western jackdaw removing bugs from a sheep. ©

artofelanor

Have you seen the new movie? It's on library. It's literally on the library. It's on library without ads. It's literally on your local public library. You can probably ask for it on your library. Dude it's on your library. It's in the original case too. It's on library. You can watch it at the library. You can go to your local library and watch it. Register onto your local library right now. Go to your library. Dive into your library. You can watch it. It's on there. Your library has it for you. Your library has it for you.

dailyclassicart

Petrus van Schendel - "Evening at the Vaux-Hall, Brussels Park"

elodieunderglass

Exciting and topical BirdNews(TM) for you: a European robin has somehow ended up in Montreal. Nobody knows how. This is apparently the first time we've had one visit Canada, hopefully it will be okay in our winter!

Canada's first European Robin has caused a stir after its discovery in Montreal. The bird was found close to the banks of the St Lawrence Ri

I love that people came running to Stare

loubatas

This is quite funny because right now in France we have a Belted Kingfisher, the very first time we've had this iconic North American species visit the country. No one really know how it got here either (got lost during migration? hitched a ride on a boat?). People are coming from all of western Europe to watch it

Maybe they just switched places with the robin

elodieunderglass

Exchange students

1989nihil

Exchange student might be quite right. Afaik Canada is a member of the EU Student Exchange Programm Erasmus+

iamheavymeta-lll

theunfortunate-author

my daily affirmation as an author

misidentifying-animals-in-posts

best animal names: unnecessarily judgemental edition

andreii-tarkovsky

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

Dir. Beeban Kidron

brehaaorgana

This was such a formative movie

musicalhell

This shit was revolutionary for the mid-90s. Among other things it helped me understand that transgender and cross-dressing were completely separate things.

aqueerkettleofish

To this day, I am in awe of the fact that Patrick Swayze not only campaigned hard to get the audition, not only auditioned in dress and makeup, but spent most of the day leading up to the audition walking around LA in dress and makeup.

This was a man who could sing, dance, act, ride a horse, fight, and walk in heels, he had nothing to prove to anyone, and he is MISSED.

aqueerkettleofish

Okay, I’m not done feeling about this.

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.

All of this from an actor who, up to this point, walked on to the screen and dripped testosterone.

impossiblemonsters

the fact that some of you history-ignorant children in the notes are trying to shit on groundbreaking historical queer cinema because it doesn’t meet 2021 standards is infuriating. sit down, shut the fuck up, and listen to the elders in the room for fucking once

darkshrimpemotions

This. If you have never lived in a world where queerness was universally pathologized and criminalized to the point that even IMAGINING a world where it wasn’t constituted a radical and potentially dangerous act, you don’t have any business judging those of us who have for how we survived it and how we found (or still find) comfort in the few imperfect representations we got.

You don’t have to like it. You probably aren’t capable of “getting” it. And to be honest, I don’t want you to! I am glad that young queer people will never know exactly what it was like “back then.” But what you also will not do is refuse to learn your own history and then shit on everything that came before you, because like it or not what came before you is the reason you will never have to get what it was like back then.

hussyknee

On Wesley Snipes’s role Noxeema and John Leguizamo as Chi-Chi Rodriguez.

“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.”

Source: How Hollywood heartthrobs and Steven Spielberg helped make a drag queen cult classic

fedorahead

a monumental film in the library of queer history.

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.

snipes, swayze, and leguizamo were willing to play people a lot of their fans didn’t respect yet or didn’t even know how to respect and demand they figure it the fuck out.

jam-etc

This is a HUGE reblog but I watched this as a little girl on cable TV and I’m so glad I did. GO WATCH THIS AS SOON AS YOU CAN

hollyevolving

I’d love it if To Wong Foo was inescapably broadcast once a year, like A Christmas Story.

animentality

For every terf that sends me anon hate, I just reblog this post again.

1shirt2shirtredshirtdeadshirt

So when I was about 7, my mom rented To Wong Foo from the convenience store up the road.

And when I say that movie changes my life, I mean it.

As a closeted queer kid in a bible belt, never had I seen people like that represented anywhere.

Drag queens amazed me.

It was as though they had this superpower to seamlessly glide through gender. To be male or female at will. I was fascinated.

Vida also had such a massive impact on me as a person. I cannot stress that enough.

She was the first true role model I remember aligning with as a proud queer person. It amazed me how fearless and powerful she was.

This movie changed my life.

It became my favourite movie as a kid, I knew all the songs, and I rented it so much from that convenience store that they eventually just gave me the copy as I had “more than paid for it”. I remember being so enthralled by that.

Anyway, this film was a magic discovery for a queer kid in the Bible belt. And even beyond that, Vida taught me so much in that film about how to love and accept other people exactly as they are.

Vida forever.❤️

jaidspo-deactivated20250929

politely reminding you to reclaim parts of you that are still attached to people you don't vibe with anymore by doing those things with new people or buying things that aren't linked to them or finding new things that have no connection to them. every time you take back a bit of your old life through mixing it with your new one, you reclaim it as yours. every time you find a new hobby, artist, song, routine, etc you become further disconnected from that past life. reclamation will guide you into your new self.

redlipstickresurrected

Hugo Simberg aka Hugo Gerhard Simberg (Finnish, 1873-1917, b. Hamina, Finland, d. Ähtäri, Finland) - The Wounded Angel, 1903, Paintings: Oil on Canvas