Hey, here’s my latest piece on my memories of gay cinema in 1995 and a reassessment of To Wong Foo. Longtime readers will be well aware of my Swayze obsession but you might be surprised at my realizations about his work and his character’s origins. You can listen, scroll down to read the transcript, or do both! It could be like one of those read-along records we used to have in the 70s!

I woke up this morning with To Wong Foo on my mind and through a series of coincidences, I think I’m meant to talk about it today. After I thought about it, my husband put on a Patrick Swayze t-shirt and then we heard “She’s Like the Wind” on the car radio.

So yes, I have a bit of an obsession with Patrick Swayze, only since I was ten when North and South was on TV. So just a little bit.​This was not my favorite gay movie of 1995. My favorite one was The Incredibly True Adventures of Two Girls in Love. It was a year of long titles, but this was the big gay movie that summer and I went all the way to Texas to watch it, where everything is bigger.

I have to say, after re-watching it today, I love a good title sequence and I was really impressed with the very beginning, sort of cold opening. We see Patrick Swayze just walking out of the bathroom in a towel after a shower, and it’s very 70s Hollywood New Wave. There’s no music. He sits down in front of the mirror, turns on the radio, and starts doing his makeup. With an opening like that, you would think that this would be a more serious movie, but it’s not. It’s kind of a just a fun, campy comedy. I think it might have been better as a musical. It probably is a musical at this point, I don’t know. I think everything’s a musical; I might be a musical by now!​

But I wanted to talk about, first of all, I have a question for you: What do you think makes someone a good actor? I’ve told you about my love for Patrick Swayze. I don’t think he was the best actor in the film. I think every time you see him, he’s still Patrick Swayze, no matter what he’s in. But he is believable in the emotions that he’s having at the time that he’s acting them out. And I don’t see him as Patrick Swayze in drag in the movie, so it’s not like he’s that unconvincing. I believe in Vida Boheme and the background that they give the character, coming from a wealthy family that rejected them.

​Of course, John Leguizamo, being the comedic actor, steals the movie. But the best actor in this movie is surprisingly Wesley Snipes. I haven’t seen a lot of Wesley Snipes movies—I think of him as an action hero—but he’s quite a good actor in this film because, and this is my criteria for someone being a good actor, I have to forget that it’s them and really believe that it’s that person. As I think the only name we had for the character was Noxeema Jackson, which is obviously a drag name, but I never was taken out of the film by this performance of Wesley Snipes at all. I think he should be known as being a better actor.​

I think I realized today for the first time that Vida is playing a sort of Emma character, which was also done that year in Clueless—the Jane Austen Emma, the person that’s trying to fix everyone else’s problems but their own.​

I guess I’ll tell you how I came to be seeing the movie in Texas. It’s kind of a funny story. I had a friend who I went home with in college, and we were not out of the closet to her mom. So, it was terribly funny to us that we went to go see the big gay movie with her mom. My friend was like, “Well, we’ll just tell her that we’re into Patrick Swayze.” The joke’s on her—I was into Patrick Swayze, and I am!

​So, that’s all I have to say about To Wong Foo. It’s a very fun movie. You can’t take it seriously. It has its problems. If you haven’t seen it in a while, as I hadn’t, give it another look. There’s some witticisms, and it may make you feel good if you don’t think too deeply about sort of the missing inner lives of the drag queens. I’ll leave that to the academics, of which I am not one today.​ Have a good night. Happy Pride!