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Could To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar get made today? This is a question I’ve seen posed recently in response to the violent anti-drag and anti-trans backlash that’s been sweeping the country as of late. Unlike in the mid-1990s, when the film was made, there are a significant number of drag queens that are popular on a national level, and one could even imagine the film getting an all-drag queen (or at least all-queer) cast. But, there’s another disheartening difference between culture today and culture thirty years ago. In 2023, the drag backlash is seemingly worse than ever, which begs the question of if a film like this would be successful right now. 

It may seem like a miracle that To Wong Foo got made at all, but the film’s journey to the screen isn’t as circuitous as one might expect. The film was written by Douglas Carter Beane, who initially envisioned the story as a play. He came up with the idea after seeing an anti-gay propaganda film called The Gay Agenda. “There’s a scene where they show drag queens going through a town, and the narrative is warning viewers that these people will take over your town and I thought Well, that would be fun,” Beane recalled. From there, the script was sent to Steven Spielberg, who would go on to produce the film. It didn’t take much to convince Spielberg of the film’s merit. He had the script with him while on a plane with Robin Williams, and when Williams did a cold read-through that had Spielberg enraptured, he was sold. British director Beeban Kidron was tapped to direct. 

The role of young queen Chi-Chi Rodriguez was written with John Leguizamo in mind, and Wesley Snipes was quickly cast as the sarcastic, no-nonsense Noxeema Jackson. The role of Vida Boheme, the graceful matriarch of the clan, was more difficult to cast. Many of Hollywood’s hottest actors auditioned, including Robert Downey Jr., Matthew Broderick, James Spader, John Cusack, Mel Gibson, Willem Defoe, John Turturro, Matt Dillon, Rob Lowe, Johnny Depp and Tom Cruise. The part eventually went to Patrick Swayze, a star known as much for his hunky good looks as he was for his acting prowess. 

Despite its ostensibly novel subject matter, To Wong Foo performed well commercially, debuting at number one at the box office when it premiered in September of 1995. It remained in the top spot for an additional week, until it was surpassed by Seven and then Showgirls. Despite this unprecedented success and seemingly easy entry into the mainstream, there were several bumps along the way. McDonald’s wouldn’t allow a scene of the queens eating french fries to be shot, so it had to be cut from the script. PepsiCo wouldn’t give permission for the characters to drink their sodas, and the Holiday Inn didn’t allow one of their signs to be hung during the sleepover scene. When it came time to promote the film, Jay Leno, among others, made several offensive jokes about Swayze in drag when he had the star on his talk show. 

To get a better understanding of how To Wong Foo emerged as part of a lineage of drag in this country, it might be helpful to take a trip down memory lane. According to author Frank DeCaro, the modern drag movement can be traced to Julian Eltinge, a vaudeville performer from the early 1900s.  “Eltinge sang as a female impersonator, or "femme mimic," but emphasized his masculinity offstage,” write Sam Sanders and Josh Axelrod. The idea was that these female impersonators didn’t actually want to trick the audience into thinking they were women for fear of stoking “homosexual panic.” Groups of drag performers toured around the country in the ‘50s and ‘60s, though this was a precarious time due to the laws that criminalized dressing as the “opposite” sex. On television, drag performance has a long history, with early TV stars like Milton Berle wearing women’s clothing for comedic effect. 

Things began to change in the 1980s when drag gained traction in the New York scene and more alternative forms of performance began to crop up. Lady Bunny was an important figure in this scene, and she founded the popular Wigstock festival in the East Village in 1984. By the early 1990s, there were several popular clubs in the village, with venues like The Pyramid Club showcasing a variety of more avant-garde, experimental work. The biggest turning point in the decade was in 1992, when RuPaul released her first single, “Supermodel,” which performed well on the charts. Another huge moment was when RuPaul appeared on The Arsenio Hall Show in 1993, marking drag’s entry into the mainstream. The media quickly became enthralled by this “new” form of entertainment (and celebrity) and it created something of a drag explosion. 

To Wong Foo was released in 1995, at the height of this explosion. Lady Bunny – who appeared in the film herself – called the release of the pitcture “a tipping point” for drag. “With that movie, you had a lot of the queens, including me, who were in it with male action stars in drag. And you knew that drag is mainstream. You're not something sick,” she explained. While the mainstream popularity of drag was at its height in the mid-1990s, by the latter part of the decade, the bubble had decidedly burst. RuPaul’s VH1 talk show was canceled in 1996, and the mainstream media decided it was time to move on from the “trend” that was drag. Mayor Rudolph Giuliani also shut down several popular New York City clubs in the late ‘90s, furthering drag’s decline. It wasn’t until RuPaul’s Drag Race premiered in 2009 that drag experienced another wave of popularity, one that we are still riding today.

One might think a movie about drag queens from the 1990s starring three straight men wouldn’t hold up in the present day, but it has aged surprisingly well.¹ The casting of the film is clearly very intentional. Leguizamo, though still fairly new in his career, had most recently played a gangster in Brian De Palma’s Carlito’s Way, a far cry from the lovably naive Chi-Chi. Though he hadn’t yet starred in the Blade series at this point, Wesley Snipes had become well-known as an action star in films like Passenger 57 and Demolition Man. As for Swayze, his career was on something of a downswing at this point, though he was still a recognizable star often lauded for his sensual masculinity. While casting these three masculine figures as drag queens was certainly part of the gag, the ideas being parodied here are not actually these instances of gender play. Indeed, the film could have very easily come off as a series of offensive caricatures, but sincere performances and sensitive directing give it a lot of heart. 

Our leading men play three drag queens who find themselves on a cross-country road trip after Noxeema and Vida win tickets to LA and decide to take the down-on-her-luck Chi-Chi with them. When their stylish but defective car breaks down in the middle of Nebraska, they are forced to take refuge in a small town nearby. Hijinks of the highest order ensue. 

Much has been said about the fact that the characters remain in drag for the entirety of the film, even when they go to bed. This is certainly not a realistic portrayal of drag queens, as critics have noted. But the film itself is a kind of heightened fantasy, and so-called “accurate” details are not the focus. Writer Douglas Carter Beane has said he wanted to create an illusion with the film, which means “the film itself is its own drag show.” As Naveem Kumar writes in Them, To Wong Foo “indulges the fantasy that drag queen personas have separate, fabulous lives from the men beneath them,” an illusion that the film maintains throughout. 

The only time we see Swayze as the hunk we know him to be is at the very beginning of the film when he gets out of the shower, his muscled torso on full display. He sits down in front of the mirror, examines his face, and announces: “Ready or not, here comes Mama.” This is where the fantasy begins. Though the three leads in the film are straight men, there are several other queens featured in smaller roles – most notably RuPaul herself, Lady Bunny, Miss Coco Peru, and Candis Cayne, who served as Leguizamo’s drag coach for the film.² The movie imagines a world where drag was more glamorous than it actually was at the time, with the queens performing at Webster Hall rather than one of the dingier clubs in the city. 

This fantasy continues as they leave New York, though there are some notable interruptions. On their way to LA, the queens start voguing in the car while driving next to the train tracks, and every passenger in the train inexplicably starts voguing alongside them. Shortly thereafter, the queens find themselves in serious danger. They are pulled over by Sheriff Dollard (Chris Penn), who, after hurling racist epithets at Chi-Chi and Noxeema – “I think he may be prejudiced,” Chi-Chi wisely notes – tries to rape Vida on his patrol car. Vida fights back and fears she may have killed Dollard (she didn’t), and the trio drive away, relatively unscathed. 

They end up in the small town of Snydersville, where they encounter some of the more unsavory elements of straight culture while still maintaining their glamorous fantasy. They meet Carol Ann (the brilliant Stockard Channing), a middle-aged woman who is being abused by her husband, Virgil (Arliss Howard). Vida immediately takes a liking to Carol Ann – the feeling is mutual – and tries to protect her from Virgil’s wickedness. The queens set about whipping the town into shape, giving the women makeovers, teaching the men how to treat women with respect, and helping to organize the town’s Strawberry Social. It’s a little bit like Queer Eye For The Straight Guy, with even more showiness. Meanwhile, Sheriff Dollard is on a mission to find these three drag queens, checking off items on a list entitled “places for homos” – one of many legitimately hilarious jokes in the film. 

The final scene in the film is the biggest fantasy of them all. Sheriff Dollard, having bumped into Virgil and come to the conclusion that the queens are hiding in Snydersville, arrives to try and arrest our three protagonists. The queens are “corrupting your way of life, changing the way things have always been,” the Sheriff proclaims, in one of the film’s few overt allusions to homophobic rhetoric. Suddenly, a glamorous figure – presumably Vida – dressed in all red and sporting a veil walks up to Dollard. Only it’s not Vida, it's Carol Ann, who proclaims that she is a drag queen. Soon, the rest of the town follows, walking up to the Sheriff and announcing that they too, are drag queens. Confronted with this wholesome show of support, Sheriff Dollard and Virgil drive away in a huff. 

The three main characters in To Wong Foo are presented as drag queens, but the nature of their gender identities has long been debated. Chi-Chi, for example, is often read as a trans character, a reading that Leguizamo agrees with. The way Candis Cayne sees it, “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.” With this reading in mind, Vida and Noxeema are now figured as trans elders teaching a young trans girl the ropes. 

Frankly, it’s pretty easy to read Vida as trans as well. The devastated face she makes when her wig gets ripped off in a climactic moment between the three queens is intense, and it feels like there’s a lot going unsaid here. The most cathartic moment in the film for Vida is her conversation with Carol Ann near the end. Carol Ann has since revealed that she’s known Vida was a drag queen – or at least not a cisgender woman – all along, and she supports her regardless. “I love you, miss Vida Boheme,” Carol Ann tells her. “I’ve waited my whole life to hear those words said to that name,” Vida responds, in what sure seems like a moment of trans affirmation.³ As she’s saying goodbye, Carol Ann further emphasizes how Vida’s gender identity doesn’t define how she feels about her. “I don’t think of you as a man, and I don’t think of you as a woman. I think of you as an angel,” she adds. 

These trans readings might complicate how we understand To Wong Foo in terms of its gender politics, as well as its casting choices. Though to be fair, even Leguizamo agrees that was the film made today, Chi-Chi should be played by a trans actor, rather than a cis, straight actor like himself. “We have to make amends,” he told NBC News. Regardless of how you interpret gender identity within the film, To Wong Foo very much exists in the realm of fantasy, and it still reads that way today. Notably, however, this fantasy element becomes more troubling when the film is seen as a trans narrative given that trans identity is often detrimentally viewed as “made-up.”

Reviews for the film were generally positive, though it wasn’t wholly embraced by all. One of the most frequent critiques lobbed at the film was that it was nothing but a rip-off of The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, an Australian film released the year prior that follows two drag queens and a trans woman on a road trip. This was not actually the case, as the two films were being produced at almost exactly the same time. Nonetheless, the comparison between the movies didn’t do To Wong Foo any favors, as Priscilla was seen as the more authentic of the two. Indeed, this purported lack of authenticity rankled some in the queer community who questioned the kind of fantasy the film depicts. 

As Alex Evans writes in the Journal of Film and Video, this distinction between authenticity and artifice might not be as clear-cut as we would assume. The mainstream nature of the film makes it difficult to read. Is it naive camp or deliberate camp – two categories defined by Susan Sontag – or maybe neither? It has frequently been noted that the three queens in To Wong Foo lack an element of sexuality, though Chi-Chi does have a prominent love interest for some of the film. But Evans writes that the characters in Priscilla are also denied explicit sex lives, and, as in To Wong Foo, the closest the film gets to a sex scene is an attempted rape. Despite the fact that Priscilla was an independent film and To Wong Foo was produced by a large studio, Evans argues that their politics are not as divergent as they may appear. 

To Wong Foo’s lack of sexual content was actually emphasized in the press surrounding the film, especially by its most vocal champion, Patrick Swayze. While all three actors appeared very committed to their roles, Swayze came off as the most gung-ho about the project, promoting the film with great enthusiasm. (He was even on the cover of The Advocate, going in-depth into the process of becoming Vida and repeatedly calling the interviewer “girlfriend” in an apparent display of playful camaraderie.) Considering the cultural climate in which it was released – as well as the political environment today – one of Swayze’s comments about the film really stands out. “For me, it's a drag queen movie that reinstates family values... We could never let this movie be about addressing sexual issues... otherwise it would fall flat on its face,” he argued. His assumption here is almost definitely correct, but these comments certainly didn’t endear him to the more progressive members of the queer community, and they also seem to validate critiques that the film is too Hollywood-ized to be truly authentic or meaningful. 

The initial discourse surrounding the film – and its absurd-yet-heartwarming content – takes on new resonance when you consider today’s cultural context. Drag culture is much different right now than it was in 1995. For one thing, it’s far less condensed (though local scenes still have their own sense of community), and social media has allowed drag queens to brand themselves on a larger scale. RuPaul is no longer the only queen who is recognizable on a national level, though it is also true that most of the queens who have found financial success got their start on Drag Race. But, while drag is more mainstream than it has ever been, we’re also seeing one of the most sustained attacks against drag in recent history. These attacks are part of a larger anti-trans and anti-queer movement that has been brewing at least since marriage equality passed in 2015. 

According to NPR, in 2022, “315 anti-LGBTQ bills were filed during state legislative sessions.” Though only 29 of these became law, the momentum has continued. Thirty-one drag bans have been introduced in 2023 so far, and one such ban was just passed in Tennessee. Tennessee has also become the seventh state to pass a ban on gender-affirming care, with at least 25 other states proposing similar bills. These legislators make little distinction between drag queens and trans people – populations that do overlap but are not synonymous – but both groups are seen as similarly perverse and dangerous. 

This legislative assault comes alongside violent attacks targeting trans and queer people around the country. James Grieg suggests that these extremists were “emboldened” by the failed January 6th coup, which may have sparked an uptick in transphobic and homophobic violence. He calls this hateful rhetoric and pattern of violence “stochastic terrorism,” which is a term that “refers to ideologically motivated acts of violence against minority groups, which are committed by individuals of their own volition but ultimately inspired by the rhetoric of media pundits and politicians.” Indeed, these events are not isolated incidents or fringe conspiracies. “According to one recent poll conducted by the Southern Poverty Law Centre, 42 per cent of people agreed, to some extent, that “transgender people are trying to indoctrinate children into their lifestyle,” Grieg writes. Swayze’s comment about family values becomes even more striking considering these conditions, though in his case the family rhetoric was used to defend a particular kind of wholesome queerness. 

Thinking about To Wong Foo in relation to the right-wing backlash we’re facing today, the film starts to look even more like a cultural relic. Nonetheless, its very existence is still rather stunning to behold. Conducting a deep-dive into the making of the film, Gwynne Watkins writes: “At a time when the AIDS crisis still loomed large and homophobia was the cultural default, a heartwarming, Steven Spielberg-produced comedy about gay drag queens opened as the No. 1 movie in America.” But, while the existence of the film might seem like something of a miracle, it also illustrates that progress is far from linear. 

Times don’t always change in an ascending fashion, and sometimes outdated forms of thinking – homophobia and transphobia, for example – persevere far better than we’d like. One does wonder how To Wong Foo would fare within the mise en scène of our current political conditions. Would there be protests at the theater? Would studios be too afraid to produce it at all? It’s a discouraging question to consider, but it can sometimes be useful to think of movies as a litmus test for cultural values, as imprecise as that measure may be. If anything has held up, so to speak, it’s the idea that drag is a powerful, incisive, and liberatory force, and we can’t let it be erased.