Here I mostly reblog Queer stuff, Steven Universe stuff, Intersectional Feminism stuffs, Pretty fashion stuff, fun film stuff, and of course random internet things. for comedy, visit slaggy4.tumblr.com. Hope you enjoy.
TW for strobing lights
Hey y'all, you may or may not have seen one of my previous blazed posts regarding this awesome game I’ve been working on with my friend, Sea of Choices. I am happy to announce after over 5 years of work it is finally available for Early Access Purchase on Steam, so check it out!!! Enjoy some gifs including: an intro with Mowmer, an “Anomaly”, and in case you missed them before, introducing: Indigo the Lon Lon, Commander Vedra the Clow Clow, Clara the Ika Ika(who I voiced), and your main character’s Mother, another Lon Lon.
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.
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
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.
This is a HUGE reblog but I watched this as a little girl on cable TV and I’m so glad I did. GO WATCH THIS AS SOON AS YOU CAN
I’d 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.
around when I first started dating my boyfriend i bought myself this novelty blanket that looks like a photorealistic tortilla because I am SUCH A SUCKER for novelty shit. when he saw it in person for the first time his eyes lit up, which should have been a warning sign for the indignities to come.
so he’s a first responder and his day shifts start obnoxiously early as far as I, a pampered corporate asshole, am concerned. almost invariably when he’s at my place there will be an alarm at an hour that is downright unconscionable that will make him wake up and roll out of bed to get ready and will simultaneously make me burrow under the pillows grumbling about how surely nobody actually NEEDS their lives saved this early in the morning, after which I will promptly attempt to go back to sleep
he is a clever man and he knows this is when i am most vulnerable to attack.
every single time we do this dance, he quietly dresses, packs up, goes about getting ready to leave, and then when i have juuuust fallen back asleep, he returns with the tortilla blanket. He finds it no matter where I have hidden it.
He then creeps silently up to my side of the bed and uses his superior speed, strength, and reflexes to wrap me up in it incredibly tightly while i am still dazed and sputtering, so that i cannot move my legs or arms and am reduced to humiliating halfhearted magikarp flops that do not deter him from at least attempting to kiss my forehead.
then he goes to my bedroom door, opens it, then pauses, turns around, looks at me, the soft human filling of the facsimile of an enormous burrito he has just constructed, and says in his best romantic lead voice “I’ll see you soon, beans.”
you cannot understand how devastating it is to my ego that i am beans.
It was already bad! It started as a Mormon-owned company that probably used your data to sell you Jesus ads and posthumously baptize your heathen family. This is just a turd on a turd
“Authors should not be ALLOWED to write about–” you are an anti-intellectual and functionally a conservative
“This book should be taken off of shelves for featuring–” you are an anti-intellectual and functionally a conservative
“Schools shouldn’t teach this book in class because–” you are an anti-intellectual and functionally a conservative
“Nobody actually likes or wants to read classics because they’re–” you are an anti-intellectual and an idiot
“I only read YA fantasy books because every classic novel or work of literary fiction is problematic and features–” you are an anti-intellectual and you are robbing yourself of the full richness of the human experience.
“you are functionally a conservative” is such a good and clarifying insult
Literally right after I saw this post, I saw another post in a discord chat for BOOK EDITORS in which an outspokenly liberal editor talked about how Nabokov should have never been published because he wrote about p*dophiles and described women’s bodies in ways that made her uncomfortable. She described his writing as “objectively terrible” and said she wanted to burn his books. And other editors were bringing up classics they didn’t like and talking about how they wanted to throw them in the trash. This wasn’t like a light “unpopular opinion!” conversation. This was actual book editors talking about how books should be destroyed and censored.
There is something so scary and toxic in global culture right now. The revival of fascism is influencing everyone’s mindset and approach to art, regardless of where they fall on the political spectrum.
I see far more books being censored today than when I was a kid. Librarians handed me The Catcher in the Rye, The Sexual Politics of Meat, and Animal Farm when I was literally 8-11. My mom would never have taken a book away from me. I read everything from the Tao Te Ching to the Qur'an to atheist texts under my desk at school. Teachers thought nothing of it or encouraged it. Books seemed universally acknowledged as sacrosanct to me.
Now I can’t find any adults who don’t hesitate or want to make exceptions when it comes to censorship. Even the most liberal social activist librarians I know go, “well except for book X…”
Functionally conservative. It’s so important to have the language to express that.
Thank you for this addition!
And, following up on the previous post …
“This makes me uncomfortable” is NOT a valid reason for censorship
These fucking book editors should remove themselves from the profession ASAP 😡
The only reason a book should be removed, the ONLY reason, is “we are keeping it in the restricted section for research because its only intended function is to cause harm.”
And to be clear, when I say this, I’m talking about shit like To Train Up A Child and The Protocols of Zion. One is a text responsible for the deaths of multiple children because it’s an abuse how-to, and the other is entirely fabricated “protocols” from a group that never actually existed but is claimed to represent all Jews, and it’s basically one long antisemitic screed.
And even these should be available. Just. Not where they’re gonna be used to start a white supremacist cult.
Someone who applied to rent my second room is a vet student and you know what that means, Rebel? I could soon have professional in house backup when you throw a fit about not wanting your claws trimmed.
“Cut a chrysalis open, and you will find a rotting caterpillar. What you will never find is that mythical creature, half caterpillar, half butterfly, a fit emblem for the human soul, for those whose cast of mind leads them to seek such emblems. No, the process of transformation consists almost entirely of decay.”
— From Regeneration by Pat Barker (via percybysshes)