For Pride Month, Patrick Sproull celebrates 30 years of the outwardly celebratory To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar with the queer classic’s director Beeban Kidron, writer Douglas Carter Beane, and the Letterboxd community.
In January 2025, British politician Beeban Kidron was giving a keynote address on children’s rights in the digital age to the National Congress of Chile when someone asked her about To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar. Three decades later, the former film director has come to expect fans of the iconic drag queen road movie around every corner. “I don’t think that for the last 30 years more than a couple of months have ed before someone says, ‘Oh, my god, that’s my favorite film’ or ‘There’s a group of us who watch it every Christmas’ or ‘That film helped me come out,’” she tells me. “It makes me feel absolutely gorgeous.”
For screenwriter Douglas Carter Beane, it’s the same situation. “I can’t walk down the street in New York without seeing someone wearing a T-shirt with ‘Little Latin boy, why are you crying?’ on it,” he says. “It’s so joyful. It’s just wonderful to see.” Beane’s brilliantly bitchy script has been a key part of To Wong Foo’s endurance, and it’s a testament to his writing that the most popular review on Letterboxd is that very same quote: “Look, that little latin boy in drag is crying. Find out why that little latin boy in drag is crying… little latin boy in drag, why are you crying?”
Whether it’s in the Chilean parliament or the streets of New York, To Wong Foo’s legacy remains timeless and far-reaching. It’s a film beloved by the Letterboxd community, recently crossing 100,000 logs and sitting with a sterling four-out-of-five average at the time of writing. “Wouldn’t even need to take antidepressants if I could just watch this film every day,” writes Sarah in her five-star review. During the Wicked press tour, Ariana Grande cited it in her Four Favorites—Cynthia Erivo, of course, chimed in with her praise: “It’s the best in the world!”
To Wong Foo is a queer classic, as comforting and reliable as a pair of old drag heels ed down from generation to generation. An old-fashioned road movie, it follows three drag queens—the prissy Vida Boheme (Patrick Swayze), the sharp-tongued Noxeema Jackson (Wesley Snipes) and the insecure baby queen Chi-Chi Rodriguez (John Leguizamo)—as they crisscross middle America to a pageant in LA. After breaking down in rural Nebraska, they quickly set about transforming the lives of locals, including Carol Ann (Stockard Channing), a housewife trapped in an abusive relationship, who finds solace in Vida. It’s the type of familiar, cozy movie that has been around since the dawn of time; “Cars (2006) but with drag queens,” writes Brooke. Or you could suggest, like Dick, that “It’s like Seven Samurai but gay.”
Kidron stepped back from filmmaking in 2012, when she was appointed to the British House of Lords. She now works as a tenacious advocate for stricter regulations on AI using copyrighted material. But back in the ’90s and early ’00s, she was a prolific director of thoroughly British fare—Antonia and Jane, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit and the second Bridget Jones film—and she’s been married to playwright and Billy Elliot screenwriter Lee Hall for two decades. But she still has a particular soft spot for To Wong Foo. “I feel an incredible sense of pride and warmth to be associated with something that provokes all kinds of positive reactions,” she says. “If it doesn’t sound too sentimental, I am full of gratitude for people keeping it alive and for it to be a flame of connection for them.”
To Wong Foo was the first Hollywood film to center drag queens—The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, an Australian production, premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in 1994, two months before cameras rolled on To Wong Foo—and it remains beloved and oft-referenced by drag performers and queer people around the world for its authentic portrayal of queenly glamor and acidic one-liners. As Beane notes, of all the ’90s drag-led films, like Priscilla and Mrs. Doubtfire, To Wong Foo was the only one written by a gay man. “It had a gay sensibility that the others didn’t have,” he posits.
Indeed, while To Wong Foo doesn’t linger in the New York queer scene, the brief window we get into that mid-’90s era of chintzy nightlife and first-class genderfuckery is invaluable. Allowing audiences in cinemas worldwide to witness icons like RuPaul, Lady Bunny, Coco Peru, Hedda Lettuce, Widow Norton and Quentin Crisp all in the same room (which, Beane reveals, was originally intended to be filmed at the legendary transgressive Pyramid Club) feels like a historic moment.
To Wong Foo was, for Beane, “a political statement and a bit of sly propaganda.” After watching The Gay Agenda, a Christian fundamentalist anti-gay propaganda film, as a joke, he was inspired by its proposed nightmare scenario of drag queens taking over a small town. “I thought, it would be the best thing to happen to most towns if drag queens invaded them and got a little color and oomph into their lives,” Beane says.
Knowing that, as a young New York playwright, he would struggle to grab Hollywood’s attention, he gave his eventual script the most outré name he could. “It’s set up from the title that it’s a weird movie, that you’re not in for your usual experience,” he explains. And it worked: To Wong Foo landed in the lap of an executive at Amblin Entertainment, who ed it along to Steven Spielberg. The film’s tale of outsiders transforming the lives of small-town Americans struck a chord with the legendary director, a noted fan of tales about outsiders transforming the lives of small-town Americans, and he greenlit production.
Spielberg paired up Beane and Kidron, having flown the British director out to Hollywood after iring her work on Antonia and Jane. With Spielberg’s backing, To Wong Foo suddenly attracted a laundry list of stars (Kidron won’t name those who auditioned, but Tom Cruise, Robert Downey Jr., Willem Dafoe and Robin Williams have been rumored over the years). Many of these “household names” did screen tests in full drag. “They said one of two things,” Kidron recounts. “They either went ‘Fuck me! I’d like to fuck me’ or they went ‘Oh, my god, I’m beautiful!’” Each dragged-up auditionee had a Polaroid photo taken—while Kidron doesn’t know where they are, some unwitting production member might have a gold mine stored in their attic.
Beyond foregrounding drag queens for the first time ever, To Wong Foo stood apart from its contemporaries because it was a queer film that was pointedly sunny and lighthearted. Unlike major Hollywood dramas of the time, like Philadelphia and My Own Private Idaho, it didn’t linger on gay tragedy. “At a Q&A when it opened, there were people who said, ‘I can’t believe you made this movie and you wouldn’t mention AIDS,’” Beane recalls. “I said, ‘Well… I didn’t. There are other things besides it. We all know it’s there, but we focused on an expression of joy. Don’t come and ruin my party!’” As Allison writes, “The positive energy radiation from this film is unparalleled.”
Like so many now-cult classics, To Wong Foo was tepidly received upon release, in this case by both mainstream critics and queer viewers. Roger Ebert levied that it was too cautious and lacked originality, and gay actor Michael Kearns accused it of “insidious homophobia” in a lacerating op-ed. (Letterboxd have been far kinder to it: Sydney confirms, “Cinema peaked in 1995 with the release of To Wong Foo. I am an expert in the cinema and know these things.”)
Beane has made peace with its initial critical reception. “No one will turn on you faster than a gay audience,” he says, smiling. “There was a sense of joy and delight when it was first announced, but when it came out I think [queer] people were miffed that it wasn’t shocking. They wanted their drag queens scary and throwing fecal matter at people on the streets.” And while the queens of To Wong Foo wouldn’t last five minutes in a John Waters picture, their good-natured makeover and matchmaking of the townspeople offer an alternative, now very familiar vision of drag as a transformative force for good.
While the first wave of press from major cities and “jaded sophisticates” disliked To Wong Foo, there was an outpouring of love for it when it reached middle America. It was such a cultural moment that Oprah Winfrey dedicated an episode of her talk show to the film. For Kidron and Beane, the movie had reached its intended audience: people who were far less likely to cross paths with a drag queen. “The tone and intention was to be a film that could play in Nebraska, as well as be made in Nebraska,” Kidron says.
The blueprint To Wong Foo laid down for drag culture is one that continues to be followed. The premise of HBO’s We’re Here, a 2020 reality TV series that sent real queens into Bible Belt towns to transform locals into queens for the day, is ripped wholesale from Kidron’s film. And you could argue that RuPaul’s Drag Race owes a debt to it, too; the opening competition sees contestants eagerly await the grand entrance by the host, played by RuPaul, dressed in a now-legendary Confederate flag dress (“Ru says she still has that dress, and that it still fits,” Beane says).
Beane is well aware of the similarities to the queer TV shows that followed in To Wong Foo’s high-heeled footsteps. “I always joke that RuPaul made a fortune out of the first ten minutes of my movie by turning it into a career. Because there were no drag queen contests like that.” Kidron is similarly lighthearted about it: “I mean, it’s so much better that RuPaul now owns that space and not some straight white woman from England.”
Where other comedies featuring crossdressing found humor, awe and voyeuristic horror in the back-and-forth transformation between man-to-queen, To Wong Foo has a more tangled, unorthodox relationship to gender. After the opening scene, all three queens remain in drag for the duration of the film, even going to sleep in a full beat and wig. It propels To Wong Foo into high-fantasy territory—these are drag queens so professional that they never step out of the character—but given advances made around gender identity since its release, this state of perma-drag gains a deeper meaning.
The heightened world of To Wong Foo (which Beane describes as “a gay fantasia”) has left a lot open to interpretation, and Letterboxd have had plenty of fun with their readings. Henry writes, “It’s definitely a drag movie—but just for the sake of the plot there were choices made that really added some trans flavor.” Hari Nef announces that “John Leguizamo in drag has ing privilege,” while Aja writes, “Let’s get one thing straight: Wesley Snipes was playing a woman, Patrick Swayze was embodying a woman, and John Leguizamo was being a woman. No I will not be taking any questions…”
In the first scene, we meet the Swayze we know from Dirty Dancing eight years earlier, the lantern-jawed face of squeaky-clean ’90s masculinity, but he swiftly disappears under layers of foundation and false eyelashes. “There was a decision early on that once you saw them in drag, you never see them [out of it] again,” Kidron explains. “That was partly because they were out in the middle of nowhere and they couldn’t afford to be seen. They were ing in the broadest sense.” The queens’ personas were treated as the characters, not the people underneath, and going back and forth would have undermined the viewer’s relationship to them.
Beane notes that trans people have developed a particular fondness for To Wong Foo, especially the moment Vida, upon being told that Carol Ann loves her, says, “I’ve waited my whole life to hear those words said to that name.” He didn’t write the script with that interpretation in mind, but he’s happy for it to be taken that way. “I wish I could say I was a visionary, but trans was a very small part of that [community] at that time,” he says. “Drag was very much about gay men.”
Any 30-year-old film that tackles gender and queerness runs the risk of aging poorly, but not To Wong Foo. “Hadn’t seen this since its theatrical release. I was honestly stunned by how relatively not dated it is,” Matt its. Indeed, To Wong Foo’s total lack of judgment has allowed its politics to remain fresh. When it becomes clear that Vida isn’t a cis woman—an incredible premise when Vida, Noxeema and Chi Chi are so ostentatious and artificial in their presentation—Carol Ann says, quietly and powerfully delivered by Stockard Channing: “I know that I am very fortunate to have a lady friend who just happens to have an Adam’s apple.” It’s a line that exists out of sync with the rest of the film; a sentiment so potent and prescient that it’s difficult to imagine it being written today, let alone 30 years ago.
Anti-drag hysteria continues to dominate contemporary US politics and states like Tennessee, Texas and Montana have enacted bans against drag performance, utilizing vague language and equating drag to sexual ‘cabaret performance’. To Wong Foo’s eccentric, sentimental optimism feels even further removed from reality than it did on its release, and we live in a world far more toxic than in 1995. “Homophobia and anti-drag are huge now in ways that weren’t even that bad back then,” Beane says. “It was just unthought of, there wasn’t an aggressive desire to squelch it.”
As such, it’s unlikely that a film like To Wong Foo would get off the ground today. For Kidron, there are too many conflicting elements. “There’s the world right now, there’s money, there’s distribution, there’s streamers killing the movie business,” she says. “Steven Spielberg was a producer on this film. He gave it a lot of cover.” However, drag hasn’t disappeared from the movies: recently, British cinema has been preoccupied with it: Everybody’s Talking About Jamie, Femme and Layla. But it’s difficult to imagine a similar Hollywood heavyweight going to bat for a movie about drag queens today. So much of To Wong Foo’s appeal lay in Snipes and Swayze’s decision to happily drag up at the height of their leading men careers—it was a mainstream stamp of approval, still yet to be replicated.
Beane, now a Tony-nominated playwright, turned To Wong Foo into a musical, which was on for a brief run in Manchester in 2023. His response to whether you could make the film today? “When I talk to people and to theaters about the musical, I get suggestions of things to cut that were already in the movie,” he says. “That’s all you need to know.”
