Link to NSFW review
Junior is gay: In the locker room, Glendon offers Eli "some bonus pay on the South Side," while Junior looks on, smoking a cigarette, still either jealous or angry. As they leave, they pass a n*de guy. Junior is so busy looking that he trips, and then looks back again. The boy is definitely into men.
Jim Crow Must Go: As they drive through a black neighborhood on the South Side of Memphis, near where Martin Luther King, Jr. will be assassinated on April 4th. Junior looks out at the townsfolk in disgust.
Suddenly they are surrounded civil rights protestors: "Jim Crow must go!" "We protest injustice." Junior calls them "bums," which was usually applied to hippies, not African-Americans, leading me to believe that something changed between writing the script and hiring the background actors. Glendon punches him: "they just want what everybody wants, a piece of the fucking pie."
Ok, Junior is racist, and Glendon is abusive, but why this scene? Hiring background players, costume, and staging must have been very time-consuming, with no payoff: civil rights are never mentioned again.
The Loan Enforcer: Glendon is a loan shark as well as a wrestling manager: the job involves beating up a deadbeat. Eli and Junior both go, squabbling over who's the boss.
"Kill 'em!" we hear. Psych! It's the tv. We meet a slovenly, drunken, foul-mouthed, abusive jackass of a husband. While Junor subdues his wife and baby, Eli punches him a few times and asks for the money, and when he doesn't have it, breaks his thumbs. Junior laughs "derangedly" (according to the subtitles).
Afterwards Glendon drops Eli off, hands him some money, and tells him, "Buy yourself something nice." This is a feminizing statement.
As Eli drives off on his motorcycle, we hear Buck Owens' "Tall Dark Stranger":
They say a tall dark stranger is a demon, and that a devil rides closely by his side.
So if Junior is the demon, Eli must be the devil riding beside him. How long will they ride together?
Abusive Daddies all the way down: Eli drives to the Gemstone residence (it's not a stage name, apparently), where his abusive dad chastises him for being late for dinner. So they're eating after Eli's wrestling match? Like at 11 or 12 pm? There's also a mousy, skittish mom and a little sister, May-May (important in Season 3).
Ordered to say grace, Eli jokes: "Good food, good meat, good God, let's eat," which makes May-May laugh. Dad slaps him. End of flashback.
We're fine with the f*ggots: In 2022, elderly Eli Gemstone is a megachurch pastor and televangelist. He and the satellite church ministers are discussing the case of Pastor Butterfield (Victor Williams), caught with his wife and another woman in a dance club restroom, while they were all high on Molly ("we thought they were Sweetarts"). The story made the front page of The New York Times, thanks to reporter Thaniel Block (Jason Schwartzman), who has made a career of publicizing ministerial scandals. Eli wants to be lenient, but the others object.
A Spanish speaking pastor explains: "My church is ok with the maricones, but we're not ready for swinging and tropus." Pastor Diane translates: "His church is really cool with the gays and the queers, but not so much about the swingers and the thruples." They fire Pastor Butterfield; he tries to commit suicide.
In other news, Gideon's younger brother Abraham has been leaving "secretions" all over the house, like in the freezer next to the Dreamsicles.
We cut to a church service with Eli Gemstone and his children, Jesse, Judy, and Kelvin, announcing the start of their streaming service, GODD. We see Jesse's wife Amber, their kids, and Judy's husband BJ in the audience. No partner for Kelvin. He must be single
F*ck, yeah: After the service, the family drives in a caravan to Jason's Steak House. They get out of their cars in slow motion and walk past the al fresco area, heterosexual couples reveling in their nuclear family conformity, the "job, house, wife, kids" litany of my youth made visible. The background song brags about their heteronormative success:
All I want out of every day, is to wake up every morning
Sun is shining, smiling, and we've covered every room
Wait -- where's Kelvin?
Suddenly the record scratches off. Two vans pull up with a flexing muscle Christ and the logo "Strength above All Else." Twelve muscle men emerge, wearing identical canvas gis: the God Squad! Biceps and pecs, abs, bulging flexing intruding on the smug primness of the nuclear families. Wait -- where are the bulges. They wear cargo pants that don't show anything.F*ck, yeah! F*ck, yeah! F*ck, yeah!
We see their leader from the back of his tiger-splashed leather jacket. Who is this Messiah of Muscle, this Pope of the Phallus, demolishing the iron cage of heteronormativity, leading us to homoerotic Eden of masculine power?
Kelvin! The prissy little femme boy from church earlier? I thought it would be Junior.
He has changed his jacket: more shiny buttons, a gold bracelet. And his pants: a porn-star bulge and a bright gold zipper to help guide us to his.... Obviously gay, but hardly closeted. His life, career, and religion all center on masculine beauty.
A man we haven't met before stands beside him, identified as Keefe. His relationship to Kelvin is unclear. Assistant or boyfriend? Acolyte or lover?
Kelvin gives his God Squad some micromanaging instructions about "eating light," and starts to walk toward the steakhouse. Keefe stops him. "Excuse me, sir. Will you be dining with the men and I?" Sir? Assistant.
Kelvin says no, he'll be dining "above you" with the family.
Keefe: "Shall I join you?" Boyfriend.
Kelvin: No. "Upstairs church lunch is only for family...and Daddy's closest work associates."
This upsets Keefe. He looks like he's about to cry. Apparently they have enjoyed intimacy before, so he thinks he should be treated as a boyfriend. Never hook up with your boss, Dude: it only leads to trouble.
Kelvin: "Do not take this personal. No matter how many disciples we gather, you're still my Number One." So Kelvin is Jesus, and Keefe is the Beloved Disciple. Assistant
Keefe still looks upset, so Kelvin says "Let me tickle them meats" and reaches out to squeeze his nipple through his shirt. Hey, that's inappropriate with an employee. Boyfriend..
Then he swishes off with a jaunty over-the-shoulder smile, pushing up the gay stereotypic behavior Boyfriend.
Now we see Kelvin's central conflict: he is closeted after all. He imagines that being gay is incompatible with the cozy families sitting upstairs in Jason's Steakhouse, so if he wants a career and a family, he must deny Keefe like Peter denied Christ: "Him? Oh, he's my...um...assistant." During this season, Keefe will be pushing for a place at the table, recognition as a romantic partner. Will Kelvin find a way to admit him?
More after the break
Keefe tries to move in for a kiss, but Kelvin blocks him with an awkward hug. He tries again, and Kelvin blocks him again. Finally he makes a blatant "enough!" gesture and backs off. Judy finds this little dance hilarious. It reflects the couple's conflict this season: Keefe wants to join the family as Kelvin's partner, the equivalent of BJ, sitting at the dinner table being criticized, while Kelvin isn't sure that same-sex romance is even possible. His muscle cult is about desire: no love allowed.
We cut to Eli in his office, watching a tv news show: Thaniel Block being interviewed about the "salacious scandal" story that took down Pastor Butterfield. How famous was this guy? I thought he was just the anonymous pastor of a satellite church. They preach "s*x only between married heterosexual partners, or you're going to hell," but privately they do everything under the sun. Who will he target next? Maybe Kelvin-- "Secretly gay youth minister and his stable of muscle boys." Ulp.
Damn, we got old: Later, Eli is standing at the docks, worrying, when Junior approaches him and grabs him from behind, another homoerotic intrusion into his heteronormative life. Junior complains that Eli forgot that he existed.
Then: "We got old. I look like a piece of shit, but damn! You look sturdy! Still got that mass going on!" He grabs Eli to check. Sort of presumptuous, dude, thinking that your ex will still be into you after fifty years.
Eli thinks that Junior plans to blackmail him over revealing their days as loan enforcers (and lovers?), but he claims that he's just there for nostalgia, looking up an old friend. "Why you all nervous, Eli? Why are you bein' all weird?" In this series, "weird" usually refers to s*xual frustration.
Junior tries to hug him again, but Eli pushes him away. On a scale of 1 to 100, how certain are you that these guys spent the psychedelic 1970s enjoying free love?
As Eli walks away, Junior guilts him into a dinner invitation.
Sticky Stephens: Nuclear families are eating at Sticky Stephens, a parody of the Sticky Fingers Restaurant in Charleston that closed down in 2020. Both sound dirty. The 1972 Rolling Stones album of that name depicted a pair of jeans with an enormous bulge, leaving no question about why the fingers are sticky.
Junior points out a kissing couple: "Damn, look at that piece of tail he's with!" Ok, so he's bi. Everybody watches as the man, Randall (Rene Rivera), lifts his girl onto the counter so they can have sex right in the restaurant! Why doesn't someone on staff intervene? Eli yells at him to "tone down romance," and Randall yells "Suck my d*ck, Grandpa." But the couple leaves.
Over dinner, Junior reveals that he's now a wrestling promoter: "I got a stable full of fellas I keep working." Tell me more, tell me more. What do they do besides wrestling? Stripping?
"I wonder what my Daddy would think about you and me being reunited," Junior says. Eli answers: "He put us together, so he would think he did a pretty good job." Except they were separated for a lifetime. That's not a great job of matchmaking.
Junior says that his Daddy just disappeared one day, setting up a major mystery of the Season: Did Eli murder Glendon Marsh?
A Proper *rection: The siblings meet at the Aimee-Leigh memorial to discuss who will be in charge of the church after Eli steps down. Certainly not Kelvin, Jesse jibes: "All you care about is muscles," and it's not about God, "it's about being self-centered and popping...." Jesse just stated that Kelvin gets a ...when he looks at muscular guys, and he doesn't deny it. He doesn't get the least defensive. How out can you get?
Kelvin counters that it's about being healthy. But, he concedes, "If you're healthy, you do maintain a proper *rection."
Judy agrees with him. Their stories run parallel, so obviously they have both been having s*x with their partners. Fans who claim that Kelvin is not active tend to ignore this scene, and actually the entire season.
Next, Jesse goes to work on his son's autoeroticism. He actually doesn't think that there's anything wrong with it, but in order to convince Abraham to stop leaving secretions, he says that when you do it, all of your dead relatives, even your distant ancestors, swoop down to watch and judge you: "When people see you do something bad, it's hard for them to look at you in any other way." In sociology it's called a stigma, a "spoiled identity." I wonder if other people around have spoiled identities due to the bad behavior in their past. Maybe Eli?
Back to Eli and Junior: Outside the restaurant, the guys run into Randall the Thug saying goodbye to his girlfriend. "Bet you two queefs haven't seen action like that in years!" he jokes. Eli doesn't want to engage, but Junior gets riled: "How dare you talk to us like that! We're from Memphis, asshole. We stuff twinks like you full of rocks and sink you in the Misssi-fucking-sippi." Only gay men use the expression "twink." Junior knows his way around gay culture.
Things escalate. Randall punches Junior, then Eli The old wrestling training kicks in, and Eli punches, kicks, and head-butts him, and as he screams for mercy, breaks his thumbs! The end. Dang! These boys are obviously being presented as ex-lovers, and Junior is openly bi in the present!
The n*de photos are on RG Beefcake and Boyfriends
See also: Eric Roberts: A lifetime of sleazebag killers, hunks, and noble gay guys
Shane Michael Philips, the stunt c*ck in Young Eli's dressing room
Tommy Nelson and Friends: Lots of gay subtext roles, some n*de photos, but no p*rn
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