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 Him! Him! (What a title … it reminds me of that giant ants horror flick of the 1950s, where someone screams the title Them! Them!) First of all, it's almost become a trope of Western culture: speculation about Jesus' sexuality. Think Holy Blood, Holy Grail, The DaVinci Code, and the controversial play Corpus Christi. Either Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene (or at least some kind of attraction between the two occurs), or Jesus was gay, because he hung around with a bunch of guys (Uh … Peter we know was married, because his sick mother-in-law was cured by Jesus, not that being married always makes a difference, but still …). And then there's the speculation about Jesus and the Beloved Disciple, who may or may not have been John, because of certain cuddly iconography of the two.  I'm not going to get into the detail about all the speculation above, and I also think all the speculation aka fake news (yes, much of it is) about this 1974 movie ends up going around in circles. There is no (and probably will not be) a definitive answer. Starting with Wikipedia (a well-documented article, and I checked the cites), we do know that there was a film of that title that premiered on Mary 27, 1974, at the 55th Street Playhouse in New York, at that time becoming more of a porn house than an art house. The film was directed by someone named Ed. D. Louie (sounds like a pseudonym) and featured someone who used to paint murals named Tava as Jesus.  Now, I intitially thought it was some kind of sword and sandals knock-off, Jesus wandering around having sex with the disciples, but it actually told the story of a young guy with an erotic fixation on Jesus. Actually, not that unusual a theme, for goodness sake … just open any Catholic devotional work or story about the saints (usually female). The spiritual delights of being married to Jesus often look and sound orgasmic, even sado-masochistic.  Anyway, the film also played at the Bijou Theater in Chicago in January and February of 1975, with the title as … Him. The ad shows a guy in a tuxedo, not clothing one associates with Jews in 1st century Palestine. Why? Maybe to avoid controversy, but no one remembers much of a fall-out, even in the still very much underground LGBTQ world of that time.  The film fell into obscurity, and in fact, no one seems to be able to locate a copy, and in fact, film critic and later culture warrior Michael Medved claimed it was a hoax (huh?). Peter Malone in his book Screen Jesus: Portrayals of Christ in Television and Film, actually quotes Medved, who claims it is tasteless (how would he know? Did he see it?) but also innovative. Medved claims one, a “low point in the history of cinema” involves a handjob in the confessional as the young man confesses to the priest his erotic fantasies about Jesus. (I wouldn't actually call that scene that innovative in the world of porn.) But them Medved in his 1980 book Golden Turkey Awards implies that among the bad movies he and his brother Harry review in his book, one was a hoax, and people have since speculated that the hoax movie in question was Him. The beginnings of an urban legend? A number of years ago, the late porn star/director Gino Colbert was trying to find out if the film was a hoax, and contacted Bijou Video as part of his research. We could not verify. Yet, something by that title played in New York and Chicago and in other places. We will probably never know. In the meantime, keep a watch out for our upcoming compilation, For the Love of God, which contains scenes from our films that explore the complex connection between sexuality and religion.  |
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The Destroying Angel
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