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.
It matters that this happened in 1995. It wouldn’t fly today, wouldn’t be the right choice, we’ve moved past it, but it mattered and was important that it happened the way it happened today. It’s one of the stepping stones.
LAWTON, Okla. (KSWO) - A woman has been found guilty of First-Degree Manslaughter at the Comanche County Courthouse.
The jury returned around 6:30 today with the verdict in Brittney Poolaw’s case.
The jury began deliberating around 3:45 p.m.
An autopsy report stated Poolaw’s child died at 17 weeks gestation.
The report showed it tested positive for methamphetamine, amphetamine and another drug in the liver and brain.
An OBGYN testified on the stand Tuesday as an expert for the state.
The doctor confirmed the fetus was at the gestational age of about 17 weeks and that methamphetamine use can have an effect on the pregnancy, though he said it may not be the direct cause of death for the fetus.
A nurse and medical examiner both testified to seeing congenital abnormalities on the fetus.
[ID: a white person in a blue FBI t-shirt, with long blonde hair and pink eye makeup, with the TikTok handle @elysian_cosplay. They sign as they speak, throughout the video. At some points, images appear behind them, of sources for the things they are discussing.
The CCs say: “Hey, I want to cover something important. As some of y'all know, I am deeply engrained in the Deaf culture because I want to be an interpreter, and I have Deaf family. The world is slowly becoming more accessible, and I am proud of our progress.
However, I want to discuss this school. This is the Memphis Oral School for the Deaf. The school will be opening soon, but they do not let their students sign, they discourage it. And now they require masks, which means Lipreading is out the window.
This article [there is an article on screen behind them] points out that even without masks, teachers would often cover their mouths when they spoke. So they couldn’t lip read. Their reasoning? To ensure that their students were “listening with their EARS”. Read that again.
You’re taking away their [Deaf children’s] language, they are not being given Dynamic Equivalence. They have nothing. When are y'all gonna learn that Deaf kids don’t need to be fixed? Please spread for awareness.“
End ID]
☝️ Straight from their own website. What the actual fuck.
[ID: A paragraph of black text with a blue header above it. The headers reads,
“Does MOSD use sign language?”
The paragraph reads,
“MOSD does not use sign language. Our mission focuses on the oral approach to deaf education. With early identification, early amplification, and early intervention, even the most profoundly deaf children can build the listening and language skills needed to mainstream into kindergarten with their hearing peers.”
End ID.]
Cool cool cool, so they’re actually located in Germantown, which is not actually Memphis.
And also, their history is fucking bullshit, ‘cause they claim the closest oral school in 1950-whatever was “more than five hours away”, however, not two and a half hours down the road is the Arkansas School for the Deaf in Little Rock that’s been here since before the Civil War in various iterations.
AND the ASD teaches both oral and ASL, as well as other lessons in just general life skills, which is more than I got in the regular LRSD.
They literally work every day with very ill cancer-stricken kids who can’t get the vaccine.
This makes 100% sense.
If you’re an employee of a world renowned hospital and are anti-vax, you didn’t deserve to be hired to begin with because that hospital tends to hire people who understand evidence-based medicine and apply that to clinical practice. If you’re an anti-vax healthcare worker, you aren’t practicing evidence-based medicine and are therefore a danger to patients.
pulling stunts that strengthen the public’s perception of gay people as satanic perverts is a shitty thing to do. the end
counterpoint: it’s really funny.
lil nas x: i was demonized from a young age because of the unique intersection of my blackness and queerness within the church and now im reclaiming that for myself and showing young queer people that they always have a place where they’ll be accepted, even if they have to carve it out of the hell they were promised
random shitforbrains tumblr users: actually portraying queer people, including yourself, as sexually empowered or subversive in any way makes the homophobes mad :/// maybe just act normal??? idk pulling that “”stunt”” is kinda homophobic
OP’s statement implies that there is a way of acting that will convince the bigots that gay people are not satanic perverts.
There isn’t. Every single method has been tried: Being quiet. Blending in. Acting like middle class suburban straight couples. Being closeted and only finding partners who will keep the secret. Having one partner publicly take the role of another gender. (And then acting like a suburban straight couple.) Being ALONE, and just pining quietly for years.
None of it works. When the straights figure out who the gay people are, even if they are abstinent and solitary, there’s a swarm of bigots ready to denounce all queer people as evil, as corrupting children, as causing the downfall of society. A swarm of bigots ready to physically attack them to drive them off.
There is no polite enough, no ordinary enough, no invisible enough to keep us safe.
So fuck that.
Queer people should act like they want to act. If part of that is going all in for the “I am your worst hellscape nightmare” tropes, that’s part of reclaiming the right to be full members of society.
And queer people of color have at least twice as much right to ignore all the stupid “don’t do that because you’ll offend people!!!” rules.
What offends those people is queer people of color existing, not whatever they did that got them noticed. The bigots just like to pretend that the issue is “I don’t want to see it” instead of “I don’t want the person who did that, to exist.”
Because if the issue is “I don’t want to see it” - just don’t watch the video.
Specially, LIL NAS X tried that. Y’all remember his first his? Old Town Road? With the lyrics:
Cheated on my baby
You can go and ask her
My life is a movie
Bull riding and boobies
Cowboy hat from Gucci
Boy was STEALTH. AND WHAT DID THEY DO TO HIM????? They OUTED HIM. OUT OF REVENGE FOR BEING BETTER AT THE GAME THAN THEY WERE. FOR BEING A BLACK QUEER MAN WITH A HIT. THEY. OUTED. HIM.
Y’all DO NOT get to tell him to sit down and shut up about his gayness when he LITERALLY DID THAT AND WAS OUTED. what happened to the quiet polite gays, you ask?
Y’all killed, bullied and outed them so you’re stuck with us. Deal with it.
THIS ☝🏾☝🏾☝🏾☝🏾☝🏾☝🏾☝🏾☝🏾☝🏾
Performative Purity has never kept any person of color, queer folks, and ESPECIALLY queer persons of color safe in the eyes of a society that WANTS to hate us for existing as is. NEVER.
This should go without saying, but everyone being miserable all the time isn’t natural. The human mind didn’t evolve to be too depressed to move and constantly contemplating suicide - if this was our natural state, humanity wouldn’t have survived long. In a natural environment, there wouldn’t be nearly as much mental illness
So we need to ask ourselves why we perpetuate the structure of our society. What is its purpose if it makes us more miserable than hunting and gathering in the woods would? If all this shit is supposed to improve our quality of life, to make us happier, why is it actively making us miserable? Is that not self-evident proof that it’s an enormous failure?
And I’m not saying that we should go back to hunting and gathering, necessarily. I’m just asking you to question the world around you, and how much of it is actually helpful. Question why you work 40 or more hours a week just to contribute to an economy that makes us all miserable. What could you be doing that would be more productive? What kind of environment would you be happier in?
Whenever I see people afraid of crossing the 25 year mark in their lives I want to tell them to cancel their subscription to societal expectations and start befriending actual old(er) people. Then you’ll realize how fortunate you are to be growing w time, how much life is surrounding you, waiting for you to do whatever you want w it
Now that the Tokyo Olympics is underway, let’s talk about Olympic medalists Sohn Kee-chung (손기정) and Nam Sung-yong (남승룡) - who were forced to compete under the Japanese flag during the 1936 Olympics.
As you may know, Japan was an imperial power during WWII and colonized Korea (as well as many other countries). Sohn Kee-chung and Nam Sung-yong were ethnic Koreans who were forced to change their names to Son Kitei and Nan Shoryu so they could compete as “Japanese” athletes.
Sohn won the gold in the marathon and Nam won bronze, but as you can tell from the awards ceremony photos, neither were happy about their victory as they had to stand in front of the world not as Koreans but as Japanese subjects.
Sohn specifically used the laurel plant he received as gold medalist to hide the Japanese flag on his chest. Nam recalled being jealous of Sohn - not because he won gold - but because he had something to cover the flag with. You can see Nam clenching his fist in photos instead.
Sohn was forced to give a victory speech that was pre-written for him praising the Japanese Empire. You can listen to a record here. Around the 2:39 mark - you can hear a voice threatening Sohn: “Louder. Read louder.”
Unable to celebrate his win, Sohn sent a postcard to a friend post-match that simply read: “I am sad.”
Korean newspapers Dong-A Ilbo (동아일보) and Joseon Joong-Ang Ilbo (조선중앙일보) edited out the Japanese flag when reporting on Sohn and Nam’s wins. The Japanese government responded by arresting Korean journalists and putting Sohn under surveillance.
Both Sohn and Nam have repeatedly asked to be remembered as Korean athletes, not Japanese ones. But to this day, official Olympics records still use Japanese names and the Japanese flag for them.
In fact, the JOC has been introducing Sohn and 8 other Koreans as “Japanese” athletes in order to promote Tokyo 2020. These athletes competed under the Japanese flag not by choice, but by imperialist force.
There have been many attempts to fix this. Noted example is Korean politician Park Young Rok who visited Germany for the 1970 Olympics and broke into the Berlin Olympic Stadium at night to fix Sohn’s country to Korea. He fled to Korea with the letters J-A-P-A-N in hand.
In the beginning the Japanese national team wanted to kick Sohn and Nam out because they did not want to show the world that Koreans were better than Japanese athletes. When Sohn and Nam ranked 1st and 2nd respectively in the Olympic trials, they demanded a retrial in Berlin and added TWO more Japanese runners in hopes of disqualifying Sohn and Nam. Some of the Japanese players actually left the course and tried to take shortcuts to beat them. Sohn and Nam noticed this while running and swore that they would beat them no matter what.
it would be cool if fat dudes without big beards were considered hot sometimes too.
I realized today that the main reason for the “hot fat dude must also include beard” thing is part of the whole “fat people are required to perform a higher and more perfect expression of gender”.
like usually this sort of thing is more easily identifiable in fat women, who have to be hyper feminine to be considered “attractive” by the mainstream. but I sort of blinked today and realized, oh. fat men must have beards to be attractive for the same reason fat men must wear suits and look dapper to be attractive, just like fat women have to have perfect eyeliner and wear cute pinup clothing. higher, more intense expression of gender, executed perfectly and without flaw is required for fat people to be seen as attractive.
bi women who lean more towards men r literally so strong this isn’t even a joke the biphobia they face for literally no reason is fucking crazy
so many people in the comments completely missing the point…. “plus they have to deal with MEN disgusting men are so gross!!” like bro that’s an example of the biphobia we’re referring to!!!!!
