Medved claims one scene, 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.
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. The film fell into obscurity, and in fact, no one seems to be able to locate a copy film critic and later culture warrior Michael Medved even claimed it was a hoax (huh?). 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 ad shows a guy in a tuxedo, not clothing one associates with Jews in 1st century Palestine. The spiritual delights of being married to Jesus often look and sound orgasmic, even sadomasochistic.Īnyway, the film also played at Chicago's Bijou Theater in January and February of 1975. Actually, not that unusual a theme, for goodness sake… just open any Catholic devotional work or story about the saints (usually female).
Now, I initially 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. Louie and featured a mural artist named Tava Von Will as Jesus. The film was directed by someone going by the name Ed D. 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.
I'm not going to get into the detail about all the speculation above, and I also think all the speculation about this 1974 movie ends up going around in circles. 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. 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…). Think Holy Blood, Holy Grail, The DaVinci Code, and the controversial Terrence McNally play Corpus Christi. Him! Him! (What a title … it reminds me of that giant ants horror flick of the 1950s, where someone screams the title Them! Them!) But it's the title of the much sought-after, famously lost 1974 Jesus gay porn film.įirst of all, it's almost become a trope of Western culture: speculation about Jesus' sexuality.