(no subject)

[olivermoss]

* Damn Patrick Swayze goes hard in Too Wong Foo, Thanks For Everything, Julie Newmar. So did Wesley Snipes and John Leguizamo and most of the cast. But, Patrick's very natural and not-overdone femme gestures and voice are insane.

The movie has a heap of problems including being deeply confused on what the differences between gay men, drag queens and trans women are, but weirdly a lot of stuff out of Hollywood at the time did. Some lovely moments and also, seriously, those performances.

* That's all I got. My week and also Saturday were exhausting. Today I laid around and drank a peach sour and watched Too Wong Foo and some Trixie Mattel videos.

Comments

[mistressofmuses]

It's been too long since I saw To Wong Foo, but I remember really being pretty impressed with it - especially the cast and their commitment to the roles - at the time I saw it... which was probably near 15 years ago.
There are a lot of even very wildly queer-positive films that I recall having a weird concept of the difference between gay man vs. drag vs. trans. And I suppose for some people there are overlaps in those venn diagrams, but broadly speaking they aren't as interchangeable as some stuff portrays.

[olivermoss]

The whole idea that if you are Super Gay you become a woman is such a weird Hollywood thing, I've never come across the idea anywhere else.

[mistressofmuses]

Right? Like... yes, flamboyant gay men exist, and there's an aspect of femininity to *some* expressions of queerness, whether that includes drag or not. But uh... it's a pretty serious feature that gay men are *men*, ha.
I really haven't seen that outside of hollywood, or maybe from some clueless randos who likely got the idea from hollywood. I think it's a misunderstanding of what that sort of flamboyant or femme presentation is when it comes to gay men... an outsider with no lasting connection to the queer community sees "oh, this gay man acts in a way that *I* do not see as classically masculine, therefore he is actually sort of a woman, and the gayer he is the womaner he must be". It's a weird pattern, but one that's definitely there.

[olivermoss]

Yeah, I just have no idea where it comes from and I've studied historical concepts of queerness, including ones that broke my brain. It's like one big writer in hollywood decided it and everyone followed the trope for some reason.

It's like a weird horseshoe theory, where if gay people are gay enough they become het again via sex changes?

[mistressofmuses]

Right? I can't tell if it was a situation where one person made one thing that influenced everyone after, or if it came out of the history of how things were queer-coded without being overt, or what. It really feels like an outsider's misunderstanding of how gender and sexuality and presentation intersect.

But it is very much that - be gay enough, and you become a women, so not gay anymore? (I guess butch lesbians often get the same treatment - they're man enough to not be women, so now they're basically straight.)

There are plenty of femme gay men and masc gay women, but... that doesn't make them trans, and it doesn't make them straight. But there are probably a lot of things that feel obvious from having been part of the queer community that are immediately misunderstood by someone lacking context.

[olivermoss]

Yeah, it's like a total failure to understand that a guy could want... a guy. No, must be as opposite as possible!

[mistressofmuses]

Right? "Guy no like guy... so if guy like guy... guy must be woman??" lmao