reverent and blasphemous crucifixions: the perfect homosexual, a triptych
by Douglas Messerli
Yēšūa of Nazareth was the perfect homosexual. Even before his birth, people
perceived him as potentially being someone different and special, prophesying
that fact and offering him tributes for his exceptionality even as a new-born
baby. His woman-hating cousin John had been talking about his impending birth
for years.
He
grew up feeling far closer to his mother than to his father, living his life
with the suspicion that the man described as his father was not of his own
blood. As a youth he was bookish, known for his intelligence and beauty. He
could argue with the best of his elders and appeared to be apart and aloof from
his siblings and his contemporaries.
As
he grew older he gathered around him 12 men, with whom he regularly traveled in
what today we might describe today as a gang, a pack, an entourage, or a group
of especially close same-sex friends. His friends and particularly Yēšūa
were extremely witty and well spoken, Yēšūa spending a great deal of his
energies proselytizing against the current church and state laws, social
beliefs, and their repercussions. Love was their central message. But the
language he and his friends used often appeared to be abstract and coded.
Evidently, he was an expert at throwing good parties, knowing the
secrets of how to entertain large gatherings on very tight budget, able even to
turn water into something that tasted like wine. He had the trick of being both
a wonderful host and guest at parties. At one such event he even aroused an
apparently dead man back to life again.
Nearly all the Christian iconography (pictures painted of him by memory
and from word of mouth) present him as stunningly beautiful, exceptional, and
different—so very pale and lean—from those around him. Everyone, men and women,
were immediately attracted to him.
But gradually his gathering of friends and their shady reputations got
him into great trouble with the local police, who constantly threatened to
arrest and imprison him, mostly to keep him from gathering round him such large
groups—much larger than what today we might describe as block parties. He was
certainly seen as a threat to moral and social order. And eventually these
love-fests grew so rowdy and out-of-control that authorities perceived it would
be better simply to do away with the gentle but disorderly public queer, whose
followers claimed was simply doing wonders everywhere he went.
Not having a mugshot in their police records, the Roman authorities paid
one of his best friends to go up to Yēšūa in public
and plant a good kiss on his lips—clearly something which was a regular
occurrence with those among his group—so that they might identify him. He’d
held a long dinner bash with these friends just previous to the arrest.
With all the rumors about his wild behavior, it was easy to trump up
charges leading to the proper punishment for such unruly behavior in those
days. His jailors mocked him for the fancy and strange names his friends had
heaped upon him and for his eccentric behavior just as they would mock any
obvious fag today. Evidently, in those days, a queen was called a “king.” And
this one had illusions of being the son of a god, and not only a decent Roman
one but a Hebrew idol. With other common criminals, the queer boy was nailed to
cross and planted in the sun do die of blood loss, infection, and starvation,
however long it took. Like most of his kind, he died young, and quickly was
perceived as a kind of martyr, who had disappeared from the scene all too quickly.
Those of you who express faith, will excuse my hastily sketched and
obviously blasphemous statements while I might hopefully recognizing the
underlying truths that they expose. Although from a religious perspective, the
son of God, in his attempt to redeem mankind, may have absolutely nothing to do
with a rowdy queer man, from only a slightly different viewpoint there are just
far too many similarities to go unnoticed, of which literary recreations have
long taken note.
And
it is to be expected that throughout the short history of cinema, Christ has
been portrayed in numerous ways that recast him in the role of a contemporary
social and sexual outcast, portraying him as being a kind of Marxist
proselytizer, a simple man of the people, a hippie, and, yes, an incidental
queer, some of these depictions being satiric but others seemingly quite
serious in their assessments.
Given the long, long history of the sacred portrayal of the Son of God,
I hardly think I need not recount that tradition. I have chosen rather to
concentrate of just three cinematic depictions of Jesus Christ in this essay,
all three proffered by gay directors, two of them by the same man, Italian
cineaste Pier Paolo Pasolini, the other by British erotic filmmaker Peter de
Rome. Two of these are generally defined as blasphemous, while the other is
considered a reverent depiction; but I will leave it up to the reader to
determine which of three is blasphemous and which is reverent.
Los Angeles, July 30, 2021
Reprinted from World Cinema Review (July
2021).
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