dear people who didn’t grow up christian: if your christian or raised-christian friends say “hey i wanna show you something from veggietales,” 99.99999% of the time they are not trying to use it to preach to you, they just want you to feel like you’re high for the duration of the silly song they’re boutta pull up
this video specifically is the reason i have this sense of humor
There is a Veggietales LOTR parody called the Lord of the Beans, and it is the best parody of anything created ever.
The Silly Songs with Larry from that movie is an Elvis parody that sets up the line “You’re no elf! You’re an Elvish impersonator!”
Every character name is a glorious pun. The Gollum character lost his magic bean when he used it to summon a 300-pound marshmallow peep and fell into a sugar coma. I don’t even know
If you are taking the car to Chicago, can you even call yourself a feminist. There are Women on that train who want to have gay sex with you but canât because you are taking a fucking car to Chicago
Right now there is a very buff Butch woman all alone in the Cafe car and she could be having steamy gay sex with you and be moving into your apartment if you were just willing to take the train to Chicago
Iâm busy trying to get more lesbians to ride the train instead of taking their Subarus to Chicago
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, Iâm not done feeling about this.
If youâre 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 didnât just agree to do a movie where the only time heâs 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 manâs voice, and itâs not during those three minutes.
When Vida sits down in front of the mirror, she sees a man. And she doesnât like it.
Then she puts her hair up, and her face lights up.
âReady or not,â she says. âHere comes Mama.â
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 sheâs 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 doesnât 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 wasnât constituted a radical and potentially dangerous act, you donât 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 donât have to like it. You probably arenât capable of âgettingâ it. And to be honest, I donât want you to! I am glad that young queer people will never know exactly what it was like âback then.â 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 Snipesâs role Noxeema and John Leguizamo as Chi-Chi Rodriguez.
âI grew up in the â70s and even within the street culture, there was a lot of flamboyancy,â Snipes told TODAY of his perception of drag before filming. âPimps wore the same furs as theprostitutes wore.
âSome of the great musicians of the world, like Parliament-Funkadelic, were very androgynous. So it wasnât really new for me to see men dressed as women or men dressed as drag queens.â
Snipes attended the famed LaGuardia High School of Performing Arts and then State University of New York at Purchase. He wasnât a dance major, but most of his friends were. âThat exposed me to the world of glam, vogue, drag, transgender and gay people, LGBTQ⊠but it wasnât in fashion those days. But it existed and I was around it.â
Not only did âPriscilla, Queen of the Desertâ pave the way for âTo Wong Foo,â so did films like the 1968 documentary âThe Queenâ and âParis Is Burning,â 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, Snipesâ portrayal of Noxeema wasnât the first time he played a drag queen. In 1986, he made his Broadway debut in the play âExecution of Justice,â playing Sister Boom Boom, a real-life AIDS activist and drag nun who acted as the showâs voice of conscience. Snipes pointed out, âSister Boom Boom did not have Noxeemaâs makeup kit.â
On whether he got any pushback for stepping into Noxeemaâs pumps, he said, âNot so much professionally but the streets werenât feeling it, and there were certain community circles. The martial arts community⊠they were not feeling it at all.â
âIn 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, âNow you donât got the full count!ââ
Lesser-known than his co-stars at the time, Lequizamo didnât really anticipate becoming a transgender icon, but he did know that they were working on something special when they started filming.
âDrag didnât really exist in movies,â Lequizamo, who was nominated for a Golden Globe for his portrayal, told TODAY. âThere 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.â 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 â90s as trans representation in media was limited.
âChi-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,â Cayne explained.
âIt 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,â Leguizamo said. âThey didnât feel like they were seen, so that was a beautiful gift from the movie.â
Lequizamo also articulates that if âTo Wong Fooâ 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.)
âAnybody can play anything, but the playing field is not fair that way,â he said. âNot 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 donât. In the project Iâm doing, Iâm 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.â
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 doesnât cost a damn thing to give. i know plenty of people who arenât 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 theyâd even heard of them, seemed a little more relatable, and very human.
weâre all just people.
snipes, swayze, and leguizamo were willing to play people a lot of their fans didnât respect yet or didnât even know how to respect and demand they figure it the fuck out.
This is a HUGE reblog but I watched this as a little girl on cable TV and Iâm so glad I did. GO WATCH THIS AS SOON AS YOU CAN
Iâd love it if To Wong Foo was inescapably broadcast once a year, like A Christmas Story.
For every terf that sends me anon hate, I just reblog this post again.
again i want to say that non-queer and non-trans actors (although first of all, it is not up to you or me to write that identity for or over people we have never met and do not owe it to us) are fucking important. A lot of these actors have taken career hits. Theyâve taken hits for the queer community because they could stand to take hits that we could not.
and i am so fucking grateful for these people and iâm grateful when we can do re-makes, but never forget that we are able to do those because others took shots that were intended for us. and that we have taken shots in the past.
and nobody owes you their identity. It is utterly insane to ask actors to disclose their sexuality or gender to play a character on the screen. it is utterly important to cast queer and trans people and to have that representation. these thoughts can and do coexist.
1995. âTo Wong Fuâ was released in 1995. For those of you who are my age and younger, understand this: âAce Ventura: Pet Detectiveâ was released in 1994. âAce Venturaâ very famously features a scene where the protagonist/title character experiences what can best be described as âgay panicâ in the true sense of the term.
The villain of âAce Venturaâ is a closeted trans woman who has assumed the identity of a deceased cis woman. Itâs a mystery film and the mystery is resolved when the title character realizes the police lieutenant (the aforementioned trans woman) heâd kissed earlier in the film is the same person as a man who had gone missing some years before. On realizing heâd kissed a âman,â the title character enters a state of extreme anger, disgust, and panic in a scene meant to be comedic.
In a time and a place where a legally accepted excuse to murder me was played for a joke, Iâll take Patrick Swayze and Wesley Snipes in dresses with good intent any fucking day.
(btw, this is why I fucking hate you immensely if you say âgay panicâ or variations thereof for any reason besides contexts like this.)
To be clear, thatâs not gay panic, thatâs trans panic. Similar beasts, but distinct legally, as gross as that is.
And yes, thatâs exactly why âgay panicâ as a cutesy little thing makes me really angry. Ace Ventura came out during my junior year of high school, and I had to listen to everyone laugh about how funny it was. This? A breath of fresh air by comparison.
I need younger folk to know that I only found out about this movie this year, and I wish Iâd had access to it when I was a teenager in the 90s.
I watched Silence of the Lambs and Ace Ventura, but they were not (to my knowledge) airing To Wong Foo anywhere I could easily see it.
Silence of the Lambs and Ace Ventura aired on TV all the time. They were big hits! It was easy to watch trans or cross-dressing characters be the villains or the butt of a joke. It was not easy to be exposed to any kind of positive messaging.
I think I watched Priscilla on a late night airing for film buffs. Channel 4 used to do that kind of thing. Maybe To Wong Foo was aired similarly at some point, but it would have been post water-shed and not BBC1 or ITV, I can tell you that for free.
It took me SO LONG to learn about trans people - let alone non-binary people - in a positive way or at all in a way that reflected real stories.
And - I cannot stress this enough - they are trying to dial it back right the fuck now. Think about the laws in Florida. People could be arrested RIGHT NOW for filming something like this. Itâs NOT trivial. Context matters.
And you have to know I will not click on any fic that has âgay panicâ in the tags. Thatâs still a legal defence of murder in a lot of places. Thatâs CURRENT. RIGHT NOW.
If you want to say someoneâs a gay disaster, say they are a fucking gay disaster, donât label it gay panic. Get some education.
1 hour ago
