The 1970s File: The one you can't watch

 

 

Title: Him

What Year?: 1974

Classification: Irreproducible Oddity

Rating: Guinnocent!!! (Unrated/ NR)

 

As I write this, I’m way behind on a range of things, including not starting my scheduled weekend review until after 9 PM on Sunday. After these hilarious setbacks, I decided it was time to do something new. It’s all part of a project I had pondered long before I created this blog, which previously figured here way back with (dear Logos) Ingagi. I speak of my “unmovie” file, the movies that were censored, suppressed, or flat-out lost to the void. I still haven’t decided just what I’m doing with this vast body of material, but with a 1970s lineup already in play, I decided it was time to cover the most infamous example of all. Here is Him, the original actual gay Jesus movie, and the real mystery is why there are people looking for it.

Our story begins, by the most reliable reconstructions, with a man having moderately indecent fun with a cat. We then transition to our protagonist, a young man of apparently Catholic upbringing and affiliation who is obsessed with Jesus. This is not just the usual religious fervor, but a fully carnal obsession. He will wander his way through modern life while continuing to either fight or nourish his fantasies of very worldly relations with the Son of God. And that is really about all we know, and did we need to know anything else?

Him was a 1974 LGBT erotic film by the artist Gustav Von Will, who starred as Jesus, and a director identified as Ed D. Louie. The film is believed to have been produced by and for the 55^th Street Playhouse, an independent theater that had been associated with Andy Warhol. It is believed to have shown for several months at the Playhouse, and was later shown at theaters as far away as San Francisco. The film received mixed to favorable reviews from underground magazines including Screw. The film was featured in the 1980 book The Golden Turkey Awards by Michael and Harry Medved, as part of a critical survey of offensive and “un-erotic” trends in adult films. If the Medveds’ account was based on first-hand knowledge, as implied if not explicitly affirmed, they may have been the last to view or locate a print of the film, which disappeared from all subsequent records. By the 2000s, skeptics including critics of Michael Medved questioned or denied whether the film had existed, based in part on the Medveds’ admission to have included a fictional film in the book. Contemporary records, including advertisements and reviews, repeatedly confirmed the authenticity of the film, while the admitted fabrication was confirmed to be unrelated. In 2010, a partner of Von Will released a photo said to be from the film. Von Will died of complications from HIV/ AIDS in 1991.

For my experiences, I suppose this one is a major reason I got interested in “lost” films. I read about it in the Medveds’ book, and remained intrigued by their challenge to identify the film they made up without really seriously considering that this could be the one. I was taken rather off-guard when I found the trail of controversy around the film and its existence, but I rode the thread all the way down. (See the troopers at Snopes, Lost Media Wiki and To Obscurity And Beyond for the real legwork.) Later, I even made it a running gag here in the adventures of Percy the robot cop. (I was further inspired to come up with the worst adult film in the multiverse...) In the midst of it all, I have come back to the question, why should we really care about this film? I will be the first to admit, I wouldn’t watch this movie if they did find it. But even I must admit a certain Quixotic draw. Someone cared enough to make this damn thing, even if it was for the patrons of an adult theater. If the thread of memory and evidence is thin enough for the newcomers to deny it even existed, I certainly care enough to see them proven wrong (or right!).

The counterpoint in all this is something I have ranted all along (see my video on my worst movie list): Among the actual “worst” films ever made, the true bottom of the barrel are the ones that are just plain gone, especially from the silent era through the 1930s. What we can know about this film gives an unfortunately plausible picture of what they would really have been like. In a further irony, it bridges the most predicable categories of offenders: Amateur erotica, political propaganda and religious media, already as paradoxically interdependent as the heads of a hydra fighting themselves. What’s further apparent is that the survival prospects of such things are poor even without the frequent role of official persecution. Indeed, the single most curious footnote in this strange saga is that the only public outcry plausibly connected with it came long, long after the film had gone to its fate. For the 1970s, the idea of portraying Jesus as gay was seemingly either under the radar or over it, if only because run-of-the-mill Puritans were still able to ignore the LGBT community in day-to-day operations.

It’s at this point when one might genuinely wish not for the film, which surely speaks for itself even unseen, but for some account of what those responsible really wanted. What makes it mindboggling enough to remember is that it clearly aimed for something higher than immediate gratification. (Well, in addition to that…) Was the aim to be as extreme, and on a certain level silly, as they could be for an already “fringe” audience? Were they hoping to shock or outrage any religious conservatives who wandered in, as the Medveds  eventually did? Did they actually see this is a symbolic reconciliation of gay rights with Christianity? Or was the extent of their ambitions to shake a fist at mainstream morality, and perhaps provoke its defenders into acknowledging that other paths existed? Even here, the answers one could imagine are all too likely to be more interesting than the reality. Such is the allure of lost media, that even an entry as inauspicious as this invites one to find something more than what it in all likelihood was.

With that, I’m wrapping this up. (A “one scene” is obviously out.) It’s just one trail among many in the world of lost films. For now, I deem it enough to represent the whole. My final verdict is, we can at least be glad to live in a society where people who want to make a 1970s gay-Jesus porno were free to do it. I will even go so far as to say that what they did was almost certainly more worthy of survival than the likes of Ingagi. That brings me to one last unwarranted philosophical moment courtesy of Gandalf: “Many that die deserve death; can you give it to them?” This is why we need media preservation, because even if what is preserved is pure coprolite, it will make the good stand out all the more. So go watch something good, or maybe create something you would rather destroy than show to anyone but you. If you want to be you, be you!