To Wong Foo – Thanks for Everything! – Julie Newmar

I never bothered to watch this film – I’d seen “Priscilla Queen Of The Desert” which was universally acclaimed and had, at times, moved me to tears – until I decided recently to crank up Kodi and stream it from outer space, or wherever old films go to hide these days. Back in 1995 my collector’s mania for all things trans hadn’t kicked in and I had already adopted the Australian Outback as my image of the wide open spaces where drag was meant to spread its fantastic wings. I was heading there mentally (and arrived in 2001) – America, highways and mean streets, were already under my belt. But here I was at last one winter night with Patrick Swayze in my sights, making up, on my laptop. I’m not a film-buff but I was for once giving myself the filmic experience. I expected very little – drag queens, a car, some humour, some embarrassment – so I should have been ready, but really! There was almost no music, no show routines, no set-piece over-the-top visual flamboyance, no social opposition, no sex, nothing sleazy. I boggled at the fact that our three drag heroes never took off their faces and their frocks and had an unfeasibly big wardrobe in bags the size of vanity cases. Drag, but not as we know it, Jim. Then I gagged on the steady drip-feed of messages and uplift – believe in good things, be honest, be yourself, believe in yourself, respect yourself and others, sacrifice your dreams to the needs of others if you want them to come true. Come on now! Eventually I understood what I was watching – I was watching an American take on “drag”. I’ve seen a lot of American drag – (mainly “old” drag though here Rupaul does get a look-in) - and at its most routine it’s about technique, about competition, about out-shining others, it’s about impersonation and vaudeville, it’s about ”acting” in the most filmic sense of the term. And American film is about plot, a whole train of happenstance which delivers up a particular kind of instructively happy ending. Characters, like actors in the Hollywood machine, are there to serve the greater purpose – national morale, positivity and the American Way. And here I am – I’ve argued myself into a corner as usual. The film is all of the above and disappoints for those reasons, but as a study in the cultural application of trans – if such could interest you as much as it interests me – it is fascinating. A lot of American films about trans – most in fact – are based on a suspension of disbelief. In “White Chicks” (2004) it’s preposterous, in “Hurricane Bianca” (2016) it’s brilliantly outrageous, in “Some Like It Hot” (1959) it’s farcical genius. Whatever – you’re expected to sit back and watch people not noticing what’s really going on. And the impersonations, as you might expect from American drag, are actorly, very professional. Wesley Snipes does look like a big-boned whore and Patrick S a proto-Justin Bond with only one song, but they both have style, and John Leguizamo pulls it off as a sassy Latino swerve. In fact the most quoted line in the film is about just that,- “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. And when a tired little Latin boy puts on a dress, he is simply a boy in a dress!” Therefore in a moment of deliberate filmic self-denial it’s the “little Latin” who wins the Final and the drag crown. It was style wot won it, not any show-biz talent. But plot justice has been done. And the gender paradox, the destiny of us all? Patrick S is sussed due to his Adam’s Apple (like we noticed…..) but he’s waved off, they’re all waved off, with the idea that their ally back in the tiny town which they have transformed and made happy again doesn’t think of a drag queen as a woman, or a man, but an angel! Well, apart from John L’s Chi-Chi flirting with the idea of “love” (a creature need she bravely abandons), which is the nearest to sex we get in the film, the rest is parable. I wanted less daylight, and a real take-down of Hollywood, some smudged mascara and somebody other than the bad cop and the bad husband quite damaged. Guess I wanted some deep self-realization not just a few unselfish thoughts. For God’s sake, self is what we’re made of – bring it on! And now it fades into the collective memory again, part of our history, - one step along the way to, hmmmn, “The Danish Girl”? Well maybe it’s forgiven then. After all time spent with transness is never time wasted, is it?