mulligone reblogged
Funny goofy signs I made with this site.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
It’s also worth noting Leguizamo has gone on the record to say he brought his own experiences to the role; Chichi is wearing makeup too light for her natural skin tone through most of the movie, and swearing to stop doing so is part of her growth. Leguizamo based this on observation of his own female family members growing up.
“It was all about accepting my ethnicity in it. I had my face done really light all the time. I have family members who have issues with self-hate and race and so their skin will be five times lighter than the color of their neck, and that always tripped me out, so I wanted to put a little bit of that into it,” he said. “At the end of the movie, my neck and my face matched. My face is much darker. So that was the arc. Chi Chi becomes polished but accepting of herself, mature, romantically grows. Instead of a taker, she becomes a giver.”
sleepwithgiggli
Important tags:
Dec 16, 2023
mulligone reblogged
YOU MUST TRY TO LOVE YOURSELF WHEN NOTHING ELSE DOES. THIS WILL BE THE HARDEST PART
mulligone reblogged
Anders Andersen-Lundby (Danish, 1841-1923)
mulligone reblogged
medical malpractice? not to me. not if it’s you.
top 10 sex positions that will leave naught but ash in your wake
mulligone reblogged
thinking abt couples kissing in front of klimt's kiss
mulligone reblogged
A cosmic tribute to my current favourite comment in YouTube history
mulligone reblogged
all of us strangers is about all the could have beens would have beens should have beens we never got the chance to live and explore and develop because we were too afraid to take the first step to let someone in to allow someone to cut through our shadows to hear us talk. queer isolation is a perfect prison we build for ourselves
mulligone reblogged
SHU QI 舒淇 as Vicky ─ Millennium Mambo 千禧曼波, 2001
mulligone reblogged
Happy Leland Melvin Day!!!
Happy Leland Melvin Day!
Happy Leland Melvin Day!
Happy Leland Melvin Day!!!
Happy Leland Melvin Day!!!!
mulligone reblogged
Love the argument "oh but if you transition you'll have to deal with being trans your whole life" because first of all there is nothing bad about being trans and second I'm still gonna be trans even if I don't medically transition I'll just be trans and miserable instead of trans and happy
Every time I hear someone say something like this I remember that one exerpt from that one book in which the author considers Gomez Addams as a trans man specifically because he has the energy of a guy who wakes up every day absolutely over the moon to discover that he gets to be a man with a family and a moustache and a wife who's taller than god yet again, and it becomes painfully apparent that people who say these things don't understand transness at all.
EDIT: I found it! Here it is!
An excerpt from the essay “Powerful T4T Energy in Steve Martin’s The Jerk” by Daniel M. Lavery, from his book Something That May Shock and Discredit You.
Absolutely amazing addition I love this and personally I can't wait to be proudly trans for the rest of my life!
ID: One gets the idea, watching Gomez, that he delights in getting to be a man, short and boisterous and nurturing and bursting with hope and pocket watches. He's especially delighted to be a man married to a woman, particularly when that woman is Morticia Addams. It's hard to get the same idea watching Herman Munster, or indeed lots of non-trans men both on and off the screen; maybe Herman is willing to be a man, or simply resigned to the idea. Possibly he merely considers it sufficient compensation for also being a monster of Frankenstein, but it doesn't seem to strike him with renewed absurd glee every morning when he gets to wake up and be one. One can imagine Herman Munster waking in a spirit of tolerance, at most willing to get out of bed and face another day as the head of a family. Whereas it's very easy to imagine Gomez's inner euphoria-driven monologue when he wakes up every morning: Ah, how wonderful! Another stormy day! Ahahaha! Once again, I'm a short and stocky husband and father, with a wife as tall as God! What luck! Why else would he spend a thousand dollars a month on cigars, or own so many bathrobes with exquisitely-designed lapels, or tend to carefully to such a thin moustache? /End ID.
mulligone reblogged
Virgil Rainer, Pietà, ca. 1910
Source: sammlung.belvedere.at
mulligone reblogged
the fact that eric kripke isn't even christian really adds something to the way christianity is depicted on supernatural. because its really not about being christian at all, but about living in america, a country dominated by christianity, and having to decide for yourself how to handle that. faith is huge in supernatural, and the mythology of the show is very bible-centric, but notably, christ is never there. even sam, who starts out revering the angels, who once said he prays every night, doesn't actually call himself a christian or imply that he believes in jesus--the show is steeped in christianity and biblical lore and yet neither sam nor dean are christians. in fact, over and over again the church itself is depicted as a haunted house that sam and dean will only ever enter as strangers, as outsiders. priests, preachers, faith healers, chapels, crypts, etc. are all just iconography that create an intense sense of unease that sam and dean respond to instantly. as a jew, its very relatable. an essential part of living in america when you're not christian is that exact sense of unease, of knowing that the culture of your country has ensured that you'll get knocked over by christianity no matter where you go, that you'll see hundreds of people truly believing they're good people while doing awful things in the name of their god, and you have no choice but to confront that. kripke gets it
