_To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything, Julie Newmar_ reviewed by Cynthia Fuchs It's hard to get past Wesley Snipes' arms. In Beeban Kidron's drag-queens-go-west comedy, these arms stand out: they're seriously sculpted, literally bulging beneath Snipes' bright red-and-yellow, tight-sleeved costumes. They're constant reminders that the role of urban diva Noxeema Jackson is a very temporary departure for Mr. Major Action Star. To be sure, Snipes' biceps are only one (exceptionally visible) example of _To Wong Foo_'s anxiety over gayness and genderfuck. On the one hand, it wants to be a primer on diversity and tolerance: see how three Delightfully Outrageous Queens - Vida Boheme (Patrick Swayze), Chi Chi Rodriguez (John Leguizamo), and Noxeema - drive from New York to Hollywood in a '67 Cadillac convertible, stopping long enough to instill a sense of style in a repressed small town. On the other hand, the movie (produced by Spielberg's Amblin Entertainment) wants to appeal to non-queer viewers... and it assumes that such viewers can only take so much Alternative Lifestyle-ness: honey, this is about assimiliation, not revolution. And assimilation means that the preconceptions-boat can't be rocked: the familiar categories of male and female, and gay and straight, remain intact. This is what Snipes' arms are all about: they announce repeatedly his "real-manliness.'' For all his lips- pursing and hips-sashaying (and where did he get his drag lessons anyway?), you're assured, he's not gay, he's not gay, he's not gay. Consider, for example, one of _To Wong Foo_'s trailers (the one targeting that presumably anxious "straight'' audience): Snipes and Swayze are first shown shooting, leaping, and macho-man-grimacing. You've seen them kick ass, now watch them take on the "most physically challenging roles of their careers!'' Cut to the three stars posed in scarlet gowns. (Posing in heels: we're talking severe physical challenge.) Or consider the movie's opening sequence, where Noxeema and Vida dress for a Drag Queen of the Year contest (much like the credits sequence for a previous, perhaps less overt, drag queen movie, _Dangerous Liaisons_, this one suggests preparations for battle): intercut shots show Vida stepping from the shower and reaching for a towel (see Swayze's thigh, hear viewers whistle and sigh out loud), then putting on make-up and gown, and Noxeema applying major- glitter eyelashes, a red wig and lipstick, pointing her painted toes as she dons nylons. How 90s-guy courageous! It's obvious that, for all its efforts to look racy and provocative, _To Wong Foo_ is caught between a couple of hard places, between making a statement and making money. Even if, as this week's _Entertainment Weekly_ proclaims, we're into "The Gay 90's'' (and please, if _EW_ is there, you know it's ancient history and, more importantly, safe to assert), the statement-profits tension will never be resolved in favor of any radical change-of-attitude. Instead, the movie sustains a tedious terrestrial order: drag queens are from another planet and interspecies copulation is not an option. You're encouraged to have compassion for these clearly marked aliens - they have bitchy spats, they're funny, Leguizamo has good legs, Swayze has a certain testy charm - but don't even think about them having sex. Given that queen style has everything to do with sex - as in, performance, desire, ambition, self-expression, comedy and drama - this thematic repression leads to some problems for the plot. Once their car breaks down in Snydersville (set somewhere in the "Midwest,'' actually shot in Nebraska's Loma, population circa 80), the queens set out to re- educate the backwards locals (stop me if you've heard this story before). They "liberate'' the women by delivering them into Style (everyone puts on sixties clothes and feels much better, especially after observing Anne Baxter in _The Ten Commandments_) and reform the men by teaching them to be nice to their women. The women include abused wife Carol Ann (Stockard Channing); Clara (Alice Drummond), who hasn't spoken in years; Beatrice (Blythe Danner), pining away for some passion; and virginal teen Bobby Lee (Jennifer Milmore): all are transformed by the discovery that everyone's a drag queen. In itself this makes sense (women acting like "women'' are dragging), but it's not an idea that takes the protagonists somewhere: as the townspeople drift off into dancing (all straight couples), the queens look on and wave from their balcony. "Sometimes,'' says saintly Vida, "it just takes a fairy.'' But their conspicuous separation from the couples below raises the question: why can't any of these generous spirits can get laid? No surprise, the movie's men have a tougher time of it; in order to make the potentially scary drag queens unquestionably sympathetic, the whiteguy smalltowners have to be absolutely stupid or mean or both (the one black man in town, played by Mike Hodge, is already "good,'' he just needs a little push to seek interracial romance). Carol Ann's always- muttering and cruel husband, Virgil (Arliss Howard) gets a predictable lesson from Vida (doing her Terence Stamp imitation); a gang of menacing teens need only see Noxeema grab one set of balls to be terrorized into complete congeniality; and an exceedingly naive boy (Jason London) who falls for Chi Chi receives his own lesson in strictly heterosexual "romance'' when Chi Chi does the "right'' thing and gives him up (no chance that the kid might actually be attracted to Chi Chi *because* she's a he, gay sex being unthinkable and all). Easily the most egregious antagonist is Sheriff Dollard (Chris Penn), a creep whose badge is misprinted "Dullard'' so you know what to think of him. His obsessive tracking of the queens (who've accidentally humiliated him) takes him to a series of places where "homosexuals'' congregate (flower shops, ballet studios, etc.): ha ha. Then he has a weird moment in a bar, when, having had too much to drink, he holds forth on the offensiveness of gay sex: "men acting like women.... manly hands touching swirls of chest hair." This is the movie's most compellingly complicated scene, as it exposes his own confusion, his phobia mixed with titillation. Again, the movie makes clear enough its negative points (prejudice is bad, especially when it's drunken and loud), but can't quite get to potentially irregular positive ones, like, gay men might have something else to do, in addition to teaching the behind-the-times rest of the world all about friendship, loyalty, and respect. Which brings me back to Wesley Snipes' arms. The attention to his arms makes his performance into a kind of overwrought het-drag (which may go some distance toward alleviating the worry Will Smith went through when playing a gay character in _Six Degrees of Separation_; as he told _Premiere_ magazine, Denzel Washington warned him, "Don't be kissing no man''). _To Wong Foo_ seems determined to remain ignorant of any intersections of racism and homophobia, both in Snipes' heterosexualization and Leguizamo's Rosie Perez-like hyperbole. (That is, the movie seems not to have paid much attention to the way these intersections were laid out by Jennie Livingston's _Paris Is Burning_ [1991].) This isn't to say that queens don't ever cultivate muscled arms. It is to say that the movie insists on the distinction between Snipes- the actor and Noxeema-the-character, and makes sure that everyone watching understands that Snipes in a dress is the (safe) draw, not the drag queen. It is also to say that the movie's version of smalltown USA, to which it condescends repeatedly, is a cheap device to get the audience feeling superior and in collusion with the drag queens (though their apparent belief that anyone would mistake them for "genetic" women suggests that they don't get out much). Here this town looks like an interracial drag show just waiting to happen, temporary, entertaining, riskless. And yet, if you don't blink, you'll notice a character at the very beginning of _To Wong Foo_ who offers a different observation: RuPaul makes a brief and glorious appearance at the New York contest, as a stunning queen wearing red, white, and blue, and named Rachel Tensions. Unfortunately, the rest of the movie isn't as brave as this moment. Cynthia Fuchs teaches film/media studies and is coordinator of the queer studies project at George Mason University. Copyright by Cynthia Fuchs. All rights reserved. Please do not reprint this review without the permission of the author. This review originally appeared in the Philadelphia _City Paper_.