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 passed 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.
