To Wong Foo, Thanks For Everything! Julie Newmar
Growing up in a religious Hispanic household in the south, I never had much experience with queer culture. It wasn't something my family ever talked about, other than the occasional joke or snide comment. My family was never openly homophobic, but they weren't exactly accepting. I didn't even know same-sex attraction was possible until I was exposed to mainstream media.
Looking back, it's a wonder my now devout Christian mother adored this movie, or even let me watch it. One of the advantages of having a teenager for a mom, I guess. "Advantage" being a loose term.
I suppose she thought I was too young to understand what was happening on screen, or was too enthralled with my toys as she let the film play out on the living room tv. In a way, I was. My mother saw a comedy. Men in drag - what a riot! I saw three beautiful, strong women, unapologetically being themselves.
For a 1995 film, it portrays the drag queens in a shockingly respectful light. John Leguizamo (Chi Chi) said, "I felt that...because we were three straight actors, that we really had to bring a lot of integrity to these roles. We needed to represent correctly." The leading men, two of which (Wesley Snipes and Patrick Swayze, who play Noxeema and Vida respectively) were already prominent actors, noted for their masculinity, even took to attending drag clubs and gay bars to authentically depict the characters.
Yes, there are gags and dated jokes, but the heart of the movie is each of the women - Noxeema, Vida, and Chi Chi - asserting their femininity and style in their own unique ways. They even find and help a community of small town folk who, much like me, were completely oblivious to a world where you define who you are.
Watching the movie again in my early adulthood solidified a lot of principles and beliefs that I had to learn on my own. Namely, that gender is an expression. In the film, Noxeema is quoted saying, "When a straight man puts on a dress and gets his sexual kicks, he is a transvestite. When a man is a woman trapped in a man's body and has a little operation, he is a transsexual. When a gay man has way too much fashion sense for one gender, he is a drag queen." Like I said, dated. But the spirit is there.
Noxeema is a gay man that loves to feel beautiful. There's no conflict in her identity. She knows who she is. Vida, on the other hand, shows more signs of being aligned with what we know today as being transgender. There's a moment in the film where her wig is pulled from her head, and you can see that her identity is stripped with it. She isn't "technically" a she, and we feel the pain that Swayze portrays in the character's shame at that fact. By the end of the film, she finds a friend that sees her for who she truly is. "A lady friend who just so happens to have an Adam's apple." Then there's Chi Chi, a sort of protégé to the two more experienced drag queens who dreams of finding love despite knowing her innocent suitor may not be aware of her true gender. In the end, she accepts that lying to her gentleman caller would be wrong, and is determined to find someone who will love her for her.
Discovering my own identity was confusing, liberating, and painful. It's an ongoing process, and one that I surprisingly found could be tied to my autistic identity as well. As more people are empowered to embrace who they are, both in the sense of sexuality and gender, and of accepting that they're neurodivergent, more links are being shown that there is a correlation between the two, though more study is needed.
For deeply personal reasons, I came to the conclusion that I am nonbinary. I don't identify as a woman, though my sex is female. My pronouns are they/them, and I often refer to myself with masculine terms, though my style and mannerisms are inherently feminine. Not everyone accepts or understands this, and that's okay. Much like the protagonists of To Wong Foo, I accept myself, and that's enough for me.
