Midsommar: Tweak it a Little to Find a Gay Movie

I'm interested in the possibiliy of ancient pagan religions surviving in contemporary Europe, in mummer's plays and Punch and Judy, so I wanted to see Midsommar (2019) in spite of the reviews pointing out that everyone is heterosexual and a lot of girls get naked.

In The Wicker Man (1973), an uptight British police officer investigates a free-love island  ("Children, what does the maypole represent?" "A penis!"), and ends up being their virgin sacrifice.  A naked lady bounces all over the place, and there's a lot of heterosexual shenanigans.  Midsommar couldn't be worse, right?

It could. It's very long and very boring, with the "surprise" ending broadcast loudly from Scene 1.  But with a little subtext-tweaking, it turns into a gay horror movie.

We did it all the time in the 80s.  It was the only way we could survive those horrible teen-nerd movies.

Anthropology student Christian (Jack Reynor, top photo) was planning to break up with his girlfriend Dani, but then her familiy was murdered, so he stuck around out of pity.  A year later, he's ready to pull the plug on the long-dead relationship and move on.  His new man-crush Pelle (Vilhelm Blomgren, below) invites him and another couple, Josh and Mark, back to his village in northern Sweden to witness an ancient pagan midsummer festival.

Dani invites herself along.

Um...it was really supposed to be all boys, buddy-bonding, late-night groping, and orgies with Swedish studs, but....

Imagine the discomfort of sharing an 8-hour plane flight with your soon-to-be ex, while the guy you are crushing on is sitting right across the aisle!

When they reach the village, they meet Pelle's brother Ingemar  (Hams Holberg, left), who is bisexual.  He has invited a boy-girl couple, Simon and Connie, who he picked up in London.

The eager-to-experiment Simon (Archie Madekwe) is rather a clone of Christian, eager to break up with his girlfriend for the Swedish hunk Ingemar.

Things go wrong immediately when Dani has a bad trip on some magic mushrooms.  And when some of the village elders commit suicide by jumping off a cliff.

I'd be on the next bus back to Stockholm at that point, but the gang sticks around.

Mark (Will Poulter) is lured away by a naked lady to his death.  So much for heterosexual desire!  It can only end badly, either with a fragile, clingy, basket-case girlfriend or with a murderer.

Josh (William Jackson Harper) goes out in search of his boyfriend, and is killed by a naked man wearing Mark's face as a mask.  A nightmare of heavily symbolic homoerotic desires

Simon and Connie are separated and killed off camera.

Then Christian faces a fate worse than death: he is paralyzed and forced to have sex with a naked lady.

Horrifying!

Of course the only way the villagers can get him to do the deed is against his will.  He's into guys!

Turns out that the villagers need nine human sacrifices: four outsiders, four villagers, and one who could be either, chosen by the Festival Queen.  That's why Pelle invited three people, and Ingemar two, so they'd have one leftover just in case.

For some reason Dani becomes Festival Queen, and has to decide: Christian or a random villager.  Who does she choose?  It's obvious, isn't it?

There are surprisingly few bouncing breasts, and enough Swedish-hunk chests and abs to keep you interested.  Plus Christian's penis.

If you want a bright, sunlit, openly-gay character, or any deliberate reference to same-sex desire, this movie ain't it.  Everyone pretends that they never heard of gay people.  But for a blast to the past, to the old days when gay people never appeared in movies except in occasional "fag" slurs,  it's a pleasant diversion.

And did I mention Christian's penis?

Who Killed Cock Robin: The Only Gay Nursery Rhyme

When I was a kid in the 1960s, I liked science fiction, like The Wonderful Flight to the Mushroom Planet and The Spaceship Under the Apple Tree, but I hated fairy tales, and I especially hated nursery rhymes.

Most of them made no sense: who would bake  blackbirds into a pie?  Who keeps a lamb as a pet?  And what the heck is a tuffet?


Those that made sense (sort of) were entirely heterosexist.  Jack and Jill go walking up that hill hand-in-hand.  Jack Sprat and his wife have the disgusting habit of licking dinner plates. Some kid named Georgie likes to kiss girls.

The only one I could stand was "Who Killed Cock Robin?", which like most nursery rhymes, was intended to teach Medieval children about death.  It's not actually a mystery -- a Sparrow confesses to the murder in the first line -- and the rest of the poem involves various birds offering to sew his shroud, dig the grave, build the coffin, and so on.




What I liked about it:

1. I didn't learn the British meaning of the word "cock" (a male bird) until much later, so it was amazing to hear about a bird named after a penis.

2. I could even get away with asking my Dad to "read me the nursery rhyme about the cock."

3. The illustration in my nursery rhyme book showed a muscular male killer, not a sparrow.

4. One of my first "British Invasion" tv programs was the episode "Who Killed Cock Robin?" on Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased), about a pair of swinging detective buddies (Mike Pratt, Kenneth Cope), one a ghost.

5. An episode of Matinee at the Bijou in the 1970s featured a murder mystery entitled Who Killed Cock Robin (1938).  It starred the handsome Charles Farrell, who would go on to play the dad in My Little Margie in the 1950s.  I didn't know it at the time, of course, but Farrell was: a former nude physique model; and rumored to be gay.

6. The nursery rhyme is reputedly about William II, the King of England, who was gay.  He was shot with an arrow by Walter Tyrell, probably his lover, while hunting in the New Forest on August 2, 1100.  In The Golden Bough,  Sir James Frazier argues that his death was no accident, but a sacrifice to the Old Gods in a remnant of an ancient fertility rite.

See also: The Joy of Saying "Cock"

The Beefcake Empire of Ancient Crete

When I was a kid in the Midwest, I thought of Greece as a "good place," where same-sex desire was open and free, based on the My Village books of Sonia and Tim Gidal, books on Greek mythology, some movies set in modern Greece.

And a small paperback book, The Bull of Minos, by Leonard Cottrell.

 It told me about the Minoan Empire of Crete and the Aegean Sea, that predated the Greeks and was completely forgotten until Arthur Evans excavated the Palace at Knossos in 1900.

Their language is unknown.  They had two alphabets, one partially translated, the other still a mystery.

What kid wouldn't find that fascinating?

But the illustrations (and the illustrations I found in other books) were even more fascinating, displaying an exuberant interest in the male form.

There were some naked ladies, including a topless snake goddess, but many more naked or loincloth-clad men serving beverages, leaping over bulls, farming, fishing, hugging each other as if they are lovers, and just standing, waiting to be objects of desire after 3300 years.

That's right, leaping over bulls.  Apparently bullfighting originated in an ancient Minoan ceremony where semi-nude young athletes grabbed bulls by the horns and leaped over them, a spectacle of man and muscle without the blood.

Remember Theseus in Greek mythology, who had to enter the labyrinth and fight the monstrous minotaur?  This is most likely a memory of a homoerotic ritual, in which a naked warrior fights a man in a bull costume to signify the triumph of civilization over barbarism.

Others have noticed the masculine energy of the ancient Minoans.

The Minoan Brotherhood, founded by Edmund Buczynski in 1977, draws from the Minoan mysteries to enact neopagan rituals for gay and bisexual men.

In 2008 British composer Harrison Birtwhistle transformed the story into an opera, The Minotaur.  The Minotaur (John Tomlinson) gains the power of speech and despairs of his violent existence, while Theseus (beefy Johan Reuer, right) looks to him for meaning.

Flights from Athens to Heraklion, the capital of Crete, take about an hour, but it's more fun to go by boat.  You can stop off at the gay resort of Mykonos on the way.  (Also stop at the Penis Festival in Tyrnavos.)

Spring 1980: Malcolm Boyd, the Fighting Priest Who Can Talk to Kids

Malcolm Boyd and Mark Thompson

When Fred the Ministerial Student and I visited Des Moines in the spring of 1980, we went to Drake University to hear an Episcopalian priest named Malcolm Boyd speak on social justice.  Thomas, the priest with three boyfriends, knew him, so the next day we all had lunch (no, Malcolm wasn't one of the boyfriends).

 All I knew about Malcolm was his book, Are You Running with Me, Jesus? (1965), a series of brief prayers about contemporary concerns, such as political injustice, racial inequality, sexual freedom, and gay people:

This is a gay bar, Jesus....Quite a few of the men here belong to the church as well as this bar. If they knew how, a number of them would ask you to be with them in both places.  Some of them wouldn't, but won't you be with them, too, Jesus?

Still, I was shocked to discover that Malcolm Boyd was gay himself -- and out, the first openly gay cleric in any mainstream religious body in the world.  He came out in a newspaper interview in 1977, and in 1978 he wrote Take Off the Masks, suggesting that Christianity should not only be tolerant, but gay-positive.




Born in 1923, Malcolm began his career as a movie producer, but felt the call to the clergy and graduated from seminary in 1954.  During the 1960s, he was famous his work in the Civil Rights movement, and for his hip religious poetry at the Hungry I nightclub in San Francisco.  He was the inspiration for the Doonesbury character Rev. Scott Sloane, "the fighting priest who can talk to kids."

In 1982 he moved to Los Angeles to become the priest at St.-Augustine-by-the-Sea Episcopal Church in Santa Monica.   He has written over 30 books, including Gay Priest: An Inner Journey (1987).

Mark Thompson, his partner of over 30 years, has written many books on gay spirituality, including The Fire in the Moonlight: Stories from the Radical Faeries, about the group that Sparky T. Rabbit helped to found.  They believe that gay people have a unique spiritual role as gatekeepers to the other world.

Jim Morrison: Bisexual Poet of the Dark Side

I didn't know Jim Morrison of the Doors until 1980, when a biography by Jerry Hopkins and Daniel Sugerman appeared on the racks at Readmore Book World, with a shirtless photo and a provocative title, No One Here Gets Out Alive.

It made Jim Morrison into a tortured poet with ties to the world of magic and the occult, a hippie rebel against convention of all sort.  That read Gay to me, although the book made him sound exceptionally homophobic.  But in the 1980s, every biography of a gay or bi man made him sound like a homophobic heterosexual.

Other biographers have mentioned that Morrison was bisexual, usually in a negative light.  Break on Through: The Life and Death of Jim Morrison (1992), says that his search for "the dark side" led him to "unpleasant places," like gay bars. Jim Morrison: Life, Death, Legend (2005) talks of his "midnight ramblings in the gay underworld."

But there's a lot of gay symbolism in the Doors' lyrics:


"Break On Through" (1967) seems to be a search for a "good place":
You know the day destroys the night, night divides the day
Tried to run, tried to hide, break on through to the other side

"Strange Days" (1967) sounds like nights at the levee, looking for love in the darkness:

Strange days have found us..we linger alone
Bodies confused, memories misused
As we run from the day,  to a strange night of stone

And "The Soft Parade" (1969) seems to include a reference to same-sex love:
There's only four ways to get unraveled:
One is to love your neighbor 'till his wife gets home









And Jim Morrison's writings:

Boys get crazy in the head and suffer
I sacrifice my c*** on the altar of silence. (The American Night).

Every gay and bi man in the 1960s sacrificed himself on the altar of silence.