In 1995, Wesley Snipes was a bankable action hero on par with Sylvester Stallone. Patrick Swayze was a heartthrob who’d melted audiences in Ghost and Dirty Dancing. AIDS was the leading cause of death for Americans ages 25 to 44. It was also the year both stars donned frocks and wigs for what became one of the decade’s most beloved camp classics, To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar. On May 28, Shout! Factory will release an extended edition of the film, with additional footage, commentary, and a making-of featurette just in time for Pride month and the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall Riots.
Though the sweet, wise-cracking comedy hardly deals in polemics, To Wong Foo marks a watershed moment in queer representation on screen, as a studio movie headlined by major stars — not just playing gay, but in heels — that topped the box office in its first two weeks. Written by playwright Douglas Carter Beane, the road-trip caper follows Swayze’s maternal Vida, Snipes’ sardonic Noxeema, and their tag-along turned protégé Chi-Chi (a role written specifically for John Leguizamo) from Manhattan to Hollywood to compete for Drag Queen of the Year. When their car breaks down in a middle-of-nowhere town, they spend a weekend gussying up its women and strong-arming its men into line, fostering connections across race, class, and gender lines like fairy godmothers of the Dust Bowl. The title comes from a signed photo of actress Julie Newmar that Vida plucks from the wall of a Chinese restaurant before they hit the road. Cameos from queer icons abound, from RuPaul, Lady Bunny, and Candis Cayne to a blink-and-you’ll-miss-her Naomi Campbell.
It’s not that Hollywood leading men hadn’t done drag before. Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis dolled up in 1959’s Some Like It Hot, and Dustin Hoffman was the envy of classy career redheads in 1982’s Tootsie. Robin Williams had just made Mrs. Doubtfire three years before he advised Steven Spielberg to produce To Wong Foo, but passed on starring in it (reportedly because Williams thought himself too hairy to play Vida). But To Wong Foo was different. The characters are actually drag queens, rather than straight men using women’s clothes as a disguise to get what they want (which is usually the girl). Though Leguizamo’s Chi-Chi is the only one to have a love interest (in Jason London’s aw-shucks Bobby Ray), all three men are understood to be gay. To Wong Foo also couldn’t escape comparisons to The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, an Australian road-trip comedy about two drag queens and a trans woman that came out the year prior, though To Wong Foo had already been in production and was the first Hollywood release of its kind.
When the trio of queens pick out a vehicle to whisk them across the country, an age-old decision must be made, as Vida says, between “style or substance.” To Wong Foo relishes the former over the later, as evidenced by the fact that its characters are never seen out of drag following the opening sequence (and yes, they wear nightgowns and wigs to bed). If they had revealed themselves to the townspeople as men — and in the case of Noxeema and Chi-Chi, as Black and Latinx gay men, at that — we’d have an entirely different movie on our hands. As it is, To Wong Foo plays on viewers’ suspension of disbelief (Swayze and Snipes, in particular, are clearly recognizable under their women’s garb) and indulges the fantasy that a drag queen personas have separate, fabulous lives from the men beneath them. It’s the kind of heightened imagination that marks many stories about gay men released when so many were dying in the real world.
That To Wong Foo’s drag performances remain completely unbroken throughout the film’s entirety heightens the movie’s extreme emphasis on beauty and artifice. The queens cringe when their hostess (played by Stockard Channing) flips on the overhead light in their room. They drape its walls in colorful throws in a makeover montage set to the Wonder Woman theme song. Channing’s character is beaten by her husband, and Chi-Chi is nearly gang-raped by a herd of menacing locals. But villains quickly get their comeuppance at the hands of our Hollywood strongmen in disguise, and the story never lingers in dark corners for long.
