Steve Grand and Arno Diem | Disciple / 2019 [music video]

his savior

by Douglas Messerli

 

Steve Grand (composer and lyricist), Steve Grand and Arno Diem (directors) Disciple / 2019 [5 minutes) [music video]

 

It seems like several of the new breed of gay singers have issues with religion: David Archuleta and his mother both left the Church of the Latter Day Saints as it became more and more publicly apparent that Archuleta was gay; in 2022 singer John Duff faced down the church itself to wonder if Is It a Sin to love God as a man, hinting at the analogy of loving another manifestation of God’s love, Duff’s love of other men; and three years before Duff, Steve Grand went head-on with the manifestation of Jesus in Disciple, turning him into a kind of “daddy” figure with whom he actually has sex. And that’s to say nothing about Lil Nas X’s J Christ of 2024, which some have described as the nadir of his remarkable career to date.

      Writing in Pride, Taylor Henderson describes the early and middle parts of the dramatic musical narrative of Disciple:

“The music video opens with Grand left beaten and bleeding on the beach. He's found by an older man who nurses him back to health. ‘Jesus be my daddy,’ Grand croons in the song's opening line.

     ‘Mary bows her head, tell it once again / Now I am just a man, but me and Jesus, we weren’t just friends.’

     The two lovers get some heavy make-out scenes and with the help of his "daddy," Grand battles an ongoing alcohol addiction. But when he falls off the bandwagon and his inner demons are set free—quite literally with a Steve Grand doppelganger—things quickly take a bloody turn.”

     The appearance of the doppelganger—what I have argued throughout these queer volumes is quite common in gay cinema  and literature—recalls scenes right out of Jean Cocteau’s Orpheus, particularly when the other comes directly out of the mirror when the disciple touches it.

     And with a little help from alcohol, in this instance Grand and his doppelganger participate in a kind of threesome with the Christ figure.

     The video lyrics end with a terrifying story that implicates the singer/disciple himself was partially responsible, through his behavior, for his daddy Christ’s death, now wanting and even demanding that he be permitted the full love (and deserved death) he previously sought in the older man’s arms:

“And now he’s dead, and now he’s dead, and now

     he’s dead

I pushed that thorny crown a little deeper in his

     head

I gripped that rosary, tied around his lifeless neck

Jesus, my final savior in the desert

I want to die, I want to die in your arms tonight

I want the peace, I want the quiet I couldn’t find in this life

Absolve me from the consciousness of every man

     that I touched

Even the ones wise enough to scoff my love

Rape me, rape me, ‘till I’m dead

Rape me, rape me, until there’s no blood left

Rape me, rape me, because that’s all you’ll get

I’ll just die happy to never hear your words again

I’ll die happy to never hear your words again

I’ll die happy to never hear your words again”

     In the interview with Henderson, Grand explains his personal connection with the song and its religious symbolism:

 

"I think we all know what it’s like to have internal conflict, regardless of the scale," explained Grand. "Sometimes that conflict can feel so overwhelming, that it almost feels physical. My partner at the time used to say that sometimes, in the moments where I was really struggling internally, he felt like he was witnessing one person split off into two. That has always stuck with me, so I wanted to give some voice to the way I imagined it was for him in those difficult moments.

     I grew up in a Catholic family that went to church every Sunday. So all that sort of imagery; all of those stories, have been embedded within me since before I can remember. So when I’m trying to convey the idea of a 'savior,' for instance, it’s natural for me to draw on the stories and the images of Jesus I have seen throughout my life."

     Obviously, like Archuleta, Duff, and even Lil Nas X, Grand has mixed feelings about religion, and particularly in this case, imagery that so calls up homoerotic scenes, several of which are played out in the video itself.

 

Los Angeles, July 6, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (July 2025).