The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (Latent Image Productions, Australian Film Finance Corporation, PolyGram Filmed Entertainment, MGM, 1994)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After the Oscars I finally caught up with a movie I first heard of on its initial release but hadn’t actually seen until now: The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, a 1994 tale about three Australians, two Gay men and one a Transwoman, traveling across the outback in a bus they call “Priscilla, Queen of the Desert” to get to a gig in the middle of nowhere. Our three hero(ine)s are Mitzi, true name Tick (Hugo Weaving, who five years after making this movie was the endlessly replicating Agent Smith, villain in the Matrix films, and later the anarchist hero of V for Vendetta); Felicia, true name Adam (Guy Pearce); and Bernadette, pre-transition name Ralph (Terence Stamp, who made it to overnight stardom in the 1962 film of Herman Melville’s Billy Budd and had an off-and-on career from which he bugged out to spend three years in India, after which he re-emerged as a character actor). They live in Sydney and dread making the cross-country trip through the Australian outback, not only because of the natural scenery and the isolation it keeps them in if anything goes wrong with their bus (as happens several times in the film, including at least one early scene in which it stops running in the middle of nowhere and in the next scene it’s moving again and writer-director Stephan Elliott doesn’t bother to explain how, as he does with some of its later breakdowns) but also the rough-and-tumble homophobes they’re likely to meet.

At one point the bus breaks down and Bernadette goes walking through the desert until he actually finds two people in a Jeep willing to drive him back and help out – only when they realize the other two people in the bus are Gay men, they drive off in a cloud of disgust. The only people who are willing to help out are a group of Aborigines and a man named Bob Spart (Bill Hunter) who runs a small garage they stop in on the way. Bob explains that the bus really needs a new gas tank, which he can order but it will take a week to arrive, which is too long for the Terrific Three since they need to get to their gig in six days. Bob tells them he can jury-rig something that will get them to the place where they’re supposed to perform, and he ends up pairing up with Bernadette (we’re told she’s already had her full surgery so there’s no chance of Bob being put out by any Crying Game-like surprises) after his obnoxious wife Cynthia Campos (Julia Cortez) bails on him after trying to crash the party Bob throws for his new friends at the local bar. The twist is that the person who’s hired the drag troupe to perform at her club is Tick’s ex-wife Marion (Sarah Chadwick). Naturally Tick’s friends are shocked, shocked! to find that he not only had a full sex life with his wife before he broke up with her to be Gay (I can relate to that because I had a nearly five-year relationship with a woman before I finally and definitively came out) but the two of them have a son, Benjamin (Mark Holmes), who suddenly finds he has a father even though he’s not exactly the sort of dad he had in mind.

Along the way they perform to a nice assortment of disco (including some of the few songs I liked way back when, like Alicia Bridges’ “I Love the Night Life” and Gloria Gaynor’s overpowering ode to resiliency, “I Will Survive”), pop (Adam is a huge fan of ABBA and even travels with a piece of shit in a glass tube, which he claims he fished out of a bathroom just after it had been used by Agnetha Fältskog) and some interesting and quirky older music, including a record of Mack David’s song “I Don’t Care if the Sun Don’t Shine” by Patti Page. (I’d known this song from the version Elvis Presley recorded for Sun, but the first record was by Tony Martin, the second by Patti Page, and the third by Dean Martin.) The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert is a visually stunning movie – the cinematography by Brian J. Breheny is rich with color and does justice to the outback scenery (including one shot that looked so much like the elevated mesa in John Ford’s Westerns I joked, “Monument Valley, Australia”) – and it’s also heavily dramatic when it’s not being richly, warmly funny.

The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert was a surprise hit in the U.S. – I remember it being promoted at the 1994 Pride Festival with so many pennant-shaped flags I didn’t realize at first it was a movie promotion: I thought it was someone running for Imperial Court Empress in Palm Springs – and the following year Universal and Steven Spielberg’s Amblin Entertainment essentially reworked it as To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything, Julie Newmar, also a fun movie but hardly in the same league as Priscilla. Like most U.S. attempts at Gay humor, To Wong Foo relied almost exclusively on camp; while the cnaracters in Priscilla have their camp aspects, they are also strong, tough, resilient people. For me the whole if-you-have-lemons-make-lemonade aspect of this film is one in which some homophobic vandals spray-paint the bus with slogans calling on all AIDS faggots to die – and Adam responds by repainting the bus and covering the graffiti with lavender.