Under the Banner of Heaven: Murder and crisis of faith in a fundamentalist Mormon familiy with five brothers (and five dicks)

 Under the Banner of Heaven, a Hulu series about corruption in the LDS Church, was written and produced by Dustin Lance Black, who is gay, so there's bound to be some gay characters or subtexts.  Besides, who isn't interested in cute Mormon missionaries?  

Scene 1: Establishing shot of Salt Lake City.  Jeb (Andrew Garfield), a super clean-cut nuclear family Dad, is listening to "Let's Hear it for the Boy."  A gay anthem!  So the protagonist is gay?   His preteen daughters, who wear long pioneer dresses, ask him to do loving-father activities, like lasso them.  Wife, who wears a modern t-shirt and cut-off jeans, calls him to the phone.  He has to go to work, so everyone has to do the evening prayers early.

We hear all the prayers: for the Mormon missionaries (how about a visual?), for Church President Kimball, for Grandpa in heaven, and for an Easy-Bake Oven.  "Let's Hear it for the Boy" came out in 1982, and Spencer Kimball died in 1985, 

Scene 2: Continuing to pray, Jeb the Cop puts the siren on his car and heads to a house surrounded by yellow tape and police cars.  Inside: the tv on, bloody footprints, scattered toys, a dead lady, and something in a basinet that makes him say "Evil."  The dead lady's murder was not evil?    He goes out to the yard and arrests the bloody young man who happens to be walking around.

Scene 3:  At the police station, Jeb the Cop and his Gentile (Non-Mormon) Partner do the good cop-bad cop routine on the blood-splattered suspect, Allen Lafferty (Billy Howle), who happens to belong to one of the most important familiies of the Church.  He claims that for the last year, "peculiar men" dressed like Mormon prophets have been stalking his family, so no doubt they did it.  They are probably after his brothers and their wives and kids, too.

Left: Billie Howie, Dick #1

Scene 4: While they book and strip Allen (Billie Howey), Jeb watches, flashing back to someone he saw at church (was this a flash of same-sex attraction?).  They send a squad car out to check on the only brother whose address Allen knows: the others all moved to hide from the humiliation of having a brother who left the Church.

Scene 5: Jeb is too disgusted to continue the interrogation, so his Gentile Partner continues alone.  Stunt casting: he's played by Gil Birmingham, a bodybuilder who appeared in Diana Ross's music video "Muscles" in 1982.

Allen: if you want to know who did, check out the Mormon saints.  

Flashback to his future wife Brenda winning runner-up in the Miss Twin Falls, Idaho contest in 1980, then going to Brigham Young University, to stay away from the "Democrats and crazies," and studying broadcast journalism.  She meets Allen at church.  

Back at the interrogation, Allen blames the Church on his wife's death: "My only regret is that I didn't drive her out of Zion (Salt Lake City) to protect her from our people."  

Scene 6:  Jeb the Cop continues to ruminate about how evil Allen is, to do that to a baby (and an adult?).  They're still having trouble tracking down the addresses of his brothers and their wives/kids, so Jeb calls his wife -- they went to church with the Lafferty family, so maybe she has some of the brothers' addresses.  

He returns to the interrogation: Jeb: "So, you despicable monster, was there anyone besides you who hated Brenda enough to do it?"  Allen:  Everyone hated her because she was so perfect."  Yeah, I heard that a lot in high school.

Scene 7: Flashback to Allen introducing Brenda to the family at a picnic. "Just don't say much," he warns. Patriarch Ammon (Christopher Heyerdahl, Dick #2) wants to know why she abandoned Twin Falls, Idaho for the evil Big City (Provo, Utah?).  There are an endless number of boisterous brothers, Stepford wives, and staring kids to meet. 

More Lafferty boys after the break

"The Eyes of Tammy Faye": A gay-positive light in the homophobic 1980s

 

The Eyes of Tammy Faye (2021) takes us back to the golden age of televangelism, when the big names were world-famous celebrities with huge political and social influence.  They had dinner at the White House.  They were parodied on Saturday Night Live.  

1. Jerry Falwell (Vincent D'Onofrio) turned his Moral Majority into a seething- ground for anti-gay hatred.  He blamed them for everything.  An airplane crash in Peru -- must have been some gays on board.  Rise in teen pregnancy -- gay rights make our kids think they can do anything they want.  Your basement is flooded -- God is punishing you for not hating gays enough.  "A homosexual will kill you as soon as look at you."

2. Pat Robertson (Gabriel Olds) proclaimed that God was punishing all of the gays by giving them AIDS, but they wanted to infect as many straight people as possible, with the goal of destroying society before becoming extinct.   They had special rings that, when you shook their hand, would prick you with a little of their blood, so you would catch AIDS and die.  They would spit on your food or cough on you on purpose

3. Jimmy Swaggart (Jay Huguley) said that he would kill any gay man who looked at him romantically.  He saw his huge tv ministry decimated after two prostitution scandals, in spite of his famous "I have sinned" speech. 

4. Oral Roberts managed to build a whole homophobic university with sleazy fundraising techniques, like claiming that if viewers didn't send in $8,000,000, God would kill him.

5. Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker (Andrew Garfield,top photo and left, Jessica Chastain) ran the PTL (Praise the Lord) Club, the most direct influence of Eli and Aimee-Leigh's Praise Be to He hour.  

Jim always promoted homophobia and denied allegations of "homosexual activity," even after he was convicted of defrauding his viewers out of $150 million and sentenced to prison.  

Tammy Faye, however, believed in compassion.  In 1987, she interviewed Steve Pieters, a gay minister (who had AIDS), without ever saying "God's punishment." She asked stupid-sounding questions like "If you've never been with a woman, how do you know you don't like it?". but later explained that those were the questions her viewers had.  

She regularly attended pride events and was interviewed in gay magazines through her post-PTL years.  Her heavy make-up made her look like a drag queen, and she went with it, attending -- and judging "Tammy Faye Drag" contests.

Tammy Faye was not entirely gay-positive: she didn't support same-sex marriage, and continued to believe that same-sex acts were sinful.  But so was premarital and extramarital sex between straight people; why should gay people be subjected to discrimination and prejudice?  

Many evangelicals today still hate LGBT persons, but imagine what it was like in the 1980s and 1990s, when almost all of them did!  My sister didn't speak to me for five years after I came out (my brother was always fine with it).  In that morass of homophobia, Tammy Faye was a beacon of hope.  

Bonus: Louis Cacelmi as Richard Fletcher, who furnished prostitutes for Jim Bakker and claimed to have had sex with him.