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" John Leguizamo has a new HBO special, in which he reminisces about To Wong Foo, the nineties drag queen comedy, calling Patrick Swayze a &amp;quot;fugly&amp;quot; woman. My dad was on the set for that film, and felt the same way about Swayze. But he felt a bit different about Leguizamo&amp;#039;s appearance.    Loma, Nebraska, the real &amp;quot;Snydersville.&amp;quot; (Loma photos by Rachel Plummer.)  In 1995, Leguizamo, along with Wesley Snipes and Swayze, starred in To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar, a movie with an ungainly title about New York City drag queens on a road trip to Hollywood for a pageant. (Before embarking on the cross-country trip, Swayze steals an autographed photo of Julie Newmar from a Chinese restaurant, which is where the film&amp;#039;s title originates.) During much of the movie, the drag queens get stranded in the fictional Midwestern small town Snydersville, where they deal with locals&amp;#039; ignorance of drag, take the townswomen shopping for new clothes, and engage in other novelty plot twists you&amp;#039;d expect from this sort of campy film. &amp;quot;Snydersville&amp;quot; is actually Loma, Nebraska, a community of maybe thirty people about six minutes (we measure by minutes, not miles, where I&amp;#039;m from) from my hometown. Loma is a bar, a church, an old schoolhouse, a handful of houses, a cemetery, and... that&amp;#039;s really it. Honestly. Driving through the town&amp;#039;s strip (there&amp;#039;s just the one) gives a feeling of Walker Texas Ranger meets the Great Depression. While I like interacting with people back home and have genuinely enjoyed drinking Boone&amp;#039;s Farm and Busch Light at pasture parties near Loma, the fact is the place hasn&amp;#039;t changed since Tom Joad headed Californee way.      Which is why people there still talk about the time Leguizamo, Snipes, and Swayze stopped in town for their drag gig, twenty years ago. But it&amp;#039;s not just in people&amp;#039;s memory that the movie remains alive. Several buildings, including the Catholic church, received paint jobs, new wiring, and fixed-up storefronts from the movie and most haven&amp;#039;t been touched up since. A building made for the movie that says &amp;quot;Welcome to Syndersville&amp;quot; still stands and is used by a family as a storage shed. And in my closet back home, as in many other people&amp;#039;s closets from Butler County, &amp;quot;Loma Goes Hollywood&amp;quot; t-shirts hang as relics of a bygone era. Loma exists today as a time warp. It knows not globalization, subprime mortgages, or Bitcoin exchange rates. What it knows is hard-working folks that like their church, beer, and Husker football. To residents of fast-paced, high-density cities like New York, it&amp;#039;s probably shocking Clint Eastwood Western-like saloon towns like Loma still exist. Even people from Omaha can&amp;#039;t believe it as evidenced by this bar reviewer who got his mind rawdogged when he visited the town&amp;#039;s bar.  Evidence of To Wong Foo&amp;#039;s time in Loma. I&amp;#039;ve talked to people who were extras for the movie or who owned land that was used in the filming. They are always eager to talk about their brief film experiences. My dad is no different. As the area&amp;#039;s heating and air conditioning repair man, my dad got called when Leguizamo&amp;#039;s trailer had a malfunctioning AC. While my dad fixed the AC, he saw Snipes, Swayze, and Leguizamo walk out the trailer and down a ramp wearing high heels, skirts, and bright red lipstick. &amp;quot;Snipes was the ugliest. God he made an ugly woman,&amp;quot; my dad told me. &amp;quot;Swayze. He was a man. He had broad shoulders. And his face looked so masculine. There was no fooling anyone. It didn&amp;#039;t matter what outfit they put on him. This was a man.&amp;quot; My dad is right, Swayze was a man indeed. But he wasn&amp;#039;t just a man. He was the man in the late &amp;#039;80s and early &amp;#039;90s. He was the mysterious bouncer who saved a town from business corruption by kicking ass without a shirt and wooing the sultry yet considerate town doctor in Road House. He was also a heartthrob so tender and caring that he ignored Demi Moore&amp;#039;s butch haircut during cuddle-pottery sessions in Ghost. But don&amp;#039;t let that sensual scene set to &amp;quot;Unchained Melody&amp;quot; fool you. Compassion alone can&amp;#039;t make a hunk look like a chick, as my dad noted.  I was around for the filming of To Wong Foo, and I got this t-shirt. While Snipes and Swayze in drag didn&amp;#039;t catch my dad&amp;#039;s eye, I was surprised by his take on Leguizamo. &amp;quot;Leguizamo looked like a woman. He was decent-looking actually.&amp;quot; For my dad to admit a man was &amp;quot;decent-looking&amp;quot; and show some sort of drag-queen tolerance is like Archie Bunker coming to grips with racism and sexism. Although Dad&amp;#039;s comment isn&amp;#039;t shocking in itself, especially when you consider that Rolling Stone said Leguizamo &amp;quot;looks hot enough in drag to give Rosie Perez a run for parts,&amp;quot; it&amp;#039;s largely out of character for him. Because my dad is Hank Hill. He grew up a rural farmboy who&amp;#039;s now nearing his mid-60s. He&amp;#039;s plain, straight, ordinary, blue-collar, and old-fashioned.  To be fair, my dad is no different from other men from his time and era. Growing up in Nebraska during the &amp;#039;50s and &amp;#039;60s, he learned to love guns, cars, and sports. There wasn&amp;#039;t much gay acceptance being discussed. And while he loved women, well at least my mom anyways, there wasn&amp;#039;t much open acknowledgment of those feelings either. Feelings and sexual orientation were assumed. Not discussed or expressed. Which is what&amp;#039;s intriguing about the filming of To Wong Foo. If someone actually cross-dressed from my hometown, they&amp;#039;d be scorned by the community over much coffee-shop gossip. Yet To Wong Foo, a movie celebrating drag,is one of the main entries on Wikipedia if you search for my hometown area. But rather than upset people, the movie is a source of nostalgia. The only thing I can do when faced with this dissonance is smile that there exists a condition in small-town Nebraska where cross-dressing has brought joy, not to mention a little renovation. Thanks for everything John Leguizamo. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/entertainment/movies/a28046/to-wong-foo-loma-nebraska/>