The Host of Pittsburgh’s Match Gayme Wishes We Could Return to a Time When Acceptance Was a Sparkling Ideal
OPINION: By SHARON EBERSON
Joe King was having a back to the future moment, and he wanted to talk about it.
He was “a young gay boy” from the North Side, working at Kennywood, when To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything!, Julie Newmar, was released 30 years in movie theaters ago. It came on the heels of 1994’s The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, an American companion to the 1994 Australian road-trip comedy, based on the lives of three real-life drag queens.
If you don’t know Joe, he’s the host of Pittsburgh’s long-running, live Match Gayme and the relatively newer Wheel of Drag, lately seen at City Winery, both showcases for local queens and kings, joined by theater artists and drag enthusiasts.
The shows are part of a robust Pittsburgh scene that has nurtured celebrated queens such as Sharon Needles, crowned on RuPaul’s Drag Race as “America’s Next Drag Superstar” in 2012, and Alaska Thunderf*ck, who this year was an Obie and Outer Critics Circle Award nominee for off-Broadway’s Drag: The Musical.
Joe had DMed me, asking if I would chat about To Wong Foo’s anniversary, and the way drag is perceived today.
He was hankering for the good old days.
“It takes me back to a different era, when drag was entertainment,” Joe says over lunch at the Square Cafe in East Liberty, site of the first Wheel of Drag, in 2018. “Now it’s been politicized to the point where people are facing losing their gigs and having their job taken away. I just don’t understand how we have come around to having some of the best entertainers in the world just perform in drag, from Robin Williams to …
“Milton Berle!,” I interject.
“Yes. But that was a long, long time ago,” Joe says.
To Wong Foo, with its Hollywood stars side-by-side with the likes of RuPaul and other drag stars, was a revelation
“It meant representation,” Joe says. “Not that I wanted to be a drag queen, but I’d always been fascinated by queens. I think that they are some of the bravest people, and it represented the freedom to allow self-expression.”
The movie not only has marquee names, but also includes “real” drag queens. RuPaul, not long after her appearance as Jan’s guidance counselor, Mrs. Cummings, in The Brady Bunch Movie, appeared as herself in To Wong Foo – almost 15 years before we were introduced to the Emmy-winning RuPaul’s Drag Race.
Joe noted that top billing went to Wesley Snipes (White Men Can’t Jump, Demolition Man; Blade would follow) as Noxeema Jackson, who in the opening scene is crowned Drag Queen of the Year by RuPaul. Patrick Swazye as Vida Boheme was on the heels of Dirty Dancing, and actor/comedian/voiceover artist John Leguizamo completed the Hollywood trio as Chi-Chi Rodriguez.
The screenplay has a theater pedigree – it’s by five-time Tony-nominated playwright Douglas Carter Beane (Sister Act, Xanadu) – and when To Wong Foo was released wide in North American theaters, on September 8, 1995, it was No. 1 at the box office for two straight weeks.
Per Rotten Tomatoes, critics weren’t on board, but it is rated fresh by audiences, at 72%.
Bill Clinton was the president at the time, and we were at the beginning of the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” years (discriminatory policies that prohibited openly gay, lesbian and bisexual people from serving in the U.S. military was repealed in 2010).
It seemed critics wanted more than a PG-13 movie about changing minds and winning acceptance in small-town America.
The esteemed Roger Ebert wrote, “I cannot be quite certain, but I believe To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar” is the first movie about drag queens to be rated PG-13. And it earns that PG-13 rating by being so relentlessly upbeat, wholesome and asexual that you walk out of the theater thinking of the queens as role models; every small town should be as lucky as Snydersville, and have its values transformed by them.”
He notes that the movie tiptoes around sex and controversy, but he mainly flags a lack of originality.
The movie includes spousal abuse, attempted sexual assault and all the stereotypical small-town and big-city prejudices a couple of hours can hold. And yes, it is also an upbeat story, in which three well-known straight actors face homophobia and win people over?
And no one has sex? How dare they! …
I say to Joe that it’s a movie that couldn’t be made today. It would get killed from two sides: Queens who would fight straight actors playing roles written for them, and the right-wing anti-drag bloc who believe any exposure to drag queens is somehow harmful and contagious.
On the first point, in an interview for the 25th anniversary of the To Wong Foo, Leguizamo noted that, although not specified, his character was perceived as transgender.
“We have to make amends,” he told NBC News. “Anybody can play anything, but the playing field is not fair that way. … It is important for trans actors to get a chance to act.”
“I think I agree with that,” Joe said. “But back then, it was meaningful to have people who were known quantities in movies to do it,” he says.
To have Snipes, who was building his career as an action hero, and Swayze, as a Hollywood sex symbol, was a boost toward acceptance.
Leguizamo told NBC News that the message at the heart of To Wong Foo is one that still resonates.
“It’s called the United States of America, right?,” the actor said. “You see that in this movie. You see that when we get along, we’re stronger than when we’re divided.”
And that is the point, Joe says.
He can’t fathom the animus toward drag queens and the attempt to cancel them – from libraries, from the Kennedy Center, people who dress up as a gender other than the one on their birth certificate are under attack. Death threats are not uncommon in certain places. In 2019, the Morgantown Public Library in West Virginia canceled an event featuring drag queens reading to children, due to multiple threats of violence against the performers.
For International Drag Day on July 16, Pittsburgh’s Persad Center posted a video titled: From the Shadows to the Spotlight: Celebrating Drag Culture’s Rich Legacy, writing, “At Persad Center, we honor the vibrant history of drag and its pivotal role in LGBTQ+ advocacy. We celebrate the courage it takes to come out, the joy of self-expression, and the strength found in community.”
When President Trump announced that he was naming Ric Grenell as interim executive director of The Kennedy Center, “the leader of the free world” said on Truth Social that Grenell “shares my Vision for a GOLDEN AGE of American Arts and Culture, and will be overseeing the daily operations of the Center. NO MORE DRAG SHOWS, OR OTHER ANTI-AMERICAN PROPAGANDA — ONLY THE BEST. RIC, WELCOME TO SHOW BUSINESS!”
How on Earth drag represents “anti-American propaganda” is beyond me. (BTW: You can watch Trump motorboating Rudy Giuliani in the then New York mayor’s drag persona as Rudia, in a skit the two of them made back in the good old days, when those two guys were just having fun, and the president wasn’t wooing his MAGA base. But I digress.)
Joe wanted to look back, to a film that inspired him and perhaps others, and ahead. He will mark the To Wong Foo anniversary on August 9, 2025, with a “Red & Wild Drag Brunch” edition of Match Gayme, in which he produces and performs host duties, a la TV’s Match Game. Based on contestants trying to match celebrity answers to suggestive questions, the show currently is making a 2025 summer on ABC-TV, in primetime, with Martin Short as host.
Joe King’s version of the game is themed (The Golden Girls, Pee-Wee’s Playhouse, etc.), and includes theater performers and special guests. The brunch show at City Winery features Indi Skies as Vida, Lady Diamond as Noxeema, Raymon Carrington and Alejandra J-love as Chi-Chi, with Missy Moreno as Loretta, Marcy Metelsky as Carol Ann, and Ronald C Thompson as Sheriff Dullard, plus special guests.
King likes to say, “If you’ve ever put on a Halloween costume, you’ve done drag.” I compare it to cosplay, an elevated form of costume creation, often accompanied by representative personas.
Drag incorporates character creativity, musicianship and theatricality, and often (but not always) adults-only content. It’s fun; it’s sparkly. Drag queens are some of the most talented and creative people I know, and they walk among us in day jobs, as well as brunches, bingos and showcases.
Some Like It Hot was a drag movie, in 1959. Tootsie was nominated for 10 Oscars in 1983. It starred Dustin Hoffman as an actor who can’t get a job, until he dons drag and gets a role meant for an actress. (There are so many things wrong with that sentence, I don’t know where to begin.) Bugs Bunny was portrayed in drag. Every Shakespearean performer until the 1660s was played by a white man. Et tu, Juliet?
To Wong Foo portrayed men who lived their lives in drag, and did good in the world.
How is drag so different today, Joe and I wondered?
Why is this form of expression and entertainment so threatening to some people that they lump it in to a scapegoat soup against gays, trans people and others?
“I just wish,” Joe says, “that, collectively, we could go back to that moment when acceptance seemed like it was at least possible, and we could go just go back to having a good time.”
TICKETS AND DETAILS
Match Gayme: To Wong Foo, Thanks For Everything! Julie Newmar Drag Brunch is at noon August 9, 2025, at City Winery. Tickets: Visit https://citywinery.com/pittsburgh/events/match-gayme-brunch-33ewd3.
Other upcoming City Winery drag shows include Wheel of Drag at 7:30 p.m. July 28 and Boozy Bingo with Kat De Lac, 7 p.m. August 4. Visit https://citywinery.com/pittsburgh/events.
Categories: Arts and Ideas, Our Posts, Show Previews
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