QUEL DRAG!

By RICHARD CORLISS

Inside every gay man, the drag queen's fantasy credo goes, there's a beautiful woman just dying to accessorize. Take Vida Boheme (Patrick Swayze), the regal doyenne in To Wong Foo Thanks for Everything Julie Newmar. Vida is a Victoria among drag queens; she could be the perfect ad for sisterhood out of a 1947 Good Housekeeping. And Swayze, maintaining equipoise between camp and bathos, is every inch a lady.

Vida and her friend Noxeema Jackson (Wesley Snipes, another stud star who looks swell in Dynel) are on the road with a third dragster, Chi Chi Rodriguez (John Leguizamo, who is not so much a queen as a saucy serving wench). They stop for repairs in a nowhere town where all the men are brutes or louts, and all the women worn out trying to survive. That these Dust Bowl wallflowers are played by some of the most sophisticated actresses around (Stockard Channing, Blythe Danner and Melinda Dillon) suggests role playing weirder than any mere gender switching. It's as if a PBS cast of The Three Sisters got stranded in Oskaloosa.

To Wong Foo (whose unpunctuated title means...oh, nothing very much) has its larkish side, when the male stars are doing their struts and their dish. But it soon goes sappily didactic. Director Beeban Kidron and scripter Douglas Carter Beane want you to believe that the drag queen, because he is at ease with his ersatz sexuality, is a true liberator: he can teach feminism to women and manners to men, in this awful place called Middle America. The movie has its own fantasy credo: that heterosexuals are the real objects of pity and scorn. And gay men? Poor them! In Hollywood films, they are either invisible or tortured--unless they dress for success.