kamorth:hussyknee:darkshrimpemotions:impossiblemonsters: aqueerkettleofish:aqueerkettleofish: musica
kamorth:hussyknee:darkshrimpemotions:impossiblemonsters: aqueerkettleofish:aqueerkettleofish: musicalhell:brehaaorgana:andreii-tarkovsky: To Wong Foo Thanks for Everything, Julie Newmar (1995) Dir. Beeban Kidron This was such a formative movie This shit was revolutionary for the mid-90s. Among other things it helped me understand that transgender and cross-dressing were completely separate things. 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. 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. 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 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. 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 “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.”This is what is meant when people say “Listen to Queer Elders”. This is the full paragraph around every “Learn your Queer History” ever angrily punched into this site. My mother was OBSESSED with Swayze. When she was pregnant with my brother she knitted a dress with his face on the front. This was in the 80s so we didn’t have a computer at home, but she had found an ad in a knitting magazine for a service that turned your photos into knitting patterns. She cut out this picture from Women’s Day or something and sent it in.That was knitted into the fabric of the dress, on the front, and she embroidered the names of his movies on the sleeves and back. Fangirls aren’t new, they’ve just adapted to changing technology. I have never been a fan of Dirty Dancing (not for anything problematic, it’s just not my kind of story is all) but for a few years and against my will I could recite the whole bloody thing.We watched To Wong Foo together. I was old enough for those kinds of movies then. I think it was because my best friend had absolutely GORGEOUS long hair that he was very proud of and my mother was starting to pick up on cues we were too young to notice or care about. Our focus was immediately the fact that Chi-Chi didn’t seem to fit because the other two were clearly in drag but she was obviously just an actual woman (so John got that across VERY well because this is the first time I’ve read that he played her as a trans woman instead of a drag queen).But Mum never wore the dress after that. I don’t even know if she’s still got it. The cheeky framed pictures cut out of magazines and framed and slipped in jokingly to the collections of family photos on the walls were taken down so quietly I didn’t even notice they were gone for a while. I don’t know what movies he did after To Wong Foo, I don’t know if it’s because it was his last or because Mum stopped getting excited about them. Part of me doesn’t want to know. I barely talk to Mum any more as it is. I don’t know how I would react if she turned out to be a transphobe. When he died, she just said he deserved it for smoking as much as he did and moved on to another conversation.This movie was a HUGE deal. It could have killed their careers. It showed the humanity in a part of society that was so reviled at the time that “Won’t Somebody Think Of The CHILDREN” still jumps into my head to make my skin crawl when I see drag queens just being fabulous. (To be clear, since people have enjoyed reading everything I say in bad faith lately, it’s the voice and the words that make my skin crawl, not the queens)Yes, it probably would be seen as bad rep if it was made the way it was in today’s world. I’m struggling to think of a reason why, outside of “the lead roles should have gone to trans women”, but if that had happened I never would have seen it. I never even would have heard about it. It would have been so much easier to squash the film from the outset if it hadn’t been for the fact that Swayze and Snipes were in it. Those two are probably the only reason it DID get as much billing as it did. That was what our world looked like then.That was WHY people were fighting.This film being made when it was and the way it was was A GOOD THING. It was a VICTORY.STOP SHITTING ON THE PAST VICTORIES THAT HELPED BUILD THE WORLD YOU LIVE IN NOW. -- source link