Gemstones Episode 2.9 Continued: A Perfect Christian, the Lion King, naked twinks, and lovers in old photographs.

Previous:  Episode 2.9: Who killed Thaniel?  Will Keefe ever get a place at the table?  Can we see some Gemstone alums naked?

Keefe stands alone: Keefe sits next to Kelvin on the way to the Zion's Landing ground-breaking party.  He stands next to BJ while the siblings perform.  But afterwards, he goes off to make new friends: he tries to impress them by doing the Worm, and is upset when he fails.  

Why doesn't he interact with Kelvin, or anyone in the family?  It's as if they told him "You can come, but don't be seen with us.  We don't want people thinking that you and Kelvin are together." 

Baby Billy Returns: As Tiffany sits in a cabana, Baby Billy appears!  He tells her "I'm back for good,"  Judy isn't having it "You've got a lot of nerve coming here after what you did!" 

He ignores Judy and asks Tiffany to take him back.  She refuses to answer, saying that she has to go to the bathroom.

Keefe and the Perfect Christian: Meanwhile, Keefe and Joe Jonas, the world's most perfect Christian, head to the same porta-potty.  They are so busy gazing at the guy who just exited that they both reach for the handle at the same time, and clasp hands.  It is accidental, but still a strangely erotic moment.  

Tiffany pushes them aside and rushes into the porta-potty.  Joe Jonas and Keefe continue to flirt as she goes into labor.   Don't they, like, have to go?

Personal note: Although they were only on stage for a few minutes, I used their budding friendship for a fan fiction, "Keefe's Date with Joe Jonas."  Actually he has the date with a guy on Joe's PR team.

The Lion King: Later, a crowd has gathered around the porta-potty.  Didn't anyone fetch a doctor? 

Baby Billy rushes up and asks Keefe, Pontius, and Abraham if they've seen Tiffany.  They point. She said she was going to the bathroom, you dolt! Why did it take you so long to figure it out?

Tiffany emerges, stating that she had her baby: it fell into the toilet.Gross callback to the "toilet baby" discussion.  Baby Billy reaches down and pulls the baby out.  Then, in a scene reflecting Simba's birth in The Lion King, he holds it over his head for the crowd to see.  Everyone applauds. 

Lyle's Revenge: Eli gets a phone call: Junior has used his underworld connections to trace the origin of the weapons the Cycle Ninjas used. They were sold to some boys in a gang in Texas -- where Lyle Lissons is from!  Don't jump to conclusions, Eli -- Texas is a big state.

On the beach, Jesse, still unaware of Lyle's involvement, is handing over the investment money.  Suddenly a woman appears, yelling at Lyle about the disappearance of her husband: "He was working with you, to get information on the Butterfields!  He told me all about it!"  

Finally Jesse starts to figure it out.  He confronts Lyle, who admits to sending the Cycle Ninjas to kill Eli --  he thought he was "doing you a solid," freeing up some money so Jesse could invest.  Besides, hasn't he often wished that his father would hurry up and die?  No, of course not.  But, now, worried that he might tell, Lyle attacks. They fight, and Jesse hits and kills him with a rock from the David and Goliath slingshot he used to threaten Junior. 

He rushes to his family -- um, hang on for a moment. Check out Kelvin's ultra-femme outfit and mannerisms.  He's really come out loud and proud.  He was the macho Messiah of the Musclemen an episode ago, and now he's my Aunt Sadie. 

And why isn't Keefe there?  He's at the porta-potties, of course, but there isn't even a chair that he vacated.

Jesse announces that he's murdered someone.  The family follows him to the beach, but Lyle is alive, and Lindsey is armed!  She shoots BJ in the femoral artery, and forces the others to swim out into the ocean.  BJ will bleed out in 2-4 minutes unless he gets first aid.  He's doomed!

Lots of Reconciliations: One month later, we see Chad and his wife reconciling at Amber's marital group. I didn't even know that was a plot arc.   

Then Judy and BJ, who has miraculously recovered, say goodbye to Baby Billy, Tiffany, and baby Lionel as they head home. 

Nobody ain't inviting no kids to the steam showers:   Kelvin and Keefe  have started a Youth Squad for 12-15 year olds. "The whole time we've been searching for our calling," Kelvin says, "It's been right under our noses: these beautiful, innocent children."

He continues, evoking a Judean retreat: "We could groom these kids into the next generation of muscle men."  Keefe suddenly realizes that people could get the wrong idea, and suggests getting chaperones and permission slips.But Kelvin isn't ready to start planning yet; he's just brainstorming, thinking of the possibilities.  

I read fan responses to this scene before actually watching it: anger, disgust, and dismay: "Please don't let them be creeps.  Please don't let them be creeps.  Please don't let them be creeps."  The "They're straight buddies" camp was ecstatic, because who would give gay characters lines like that?  When I watched, I was upset by the structure: everyone else gets a heartfelt scene, and the guys get pedophile jokes. But one fan who grew up a queer kid in an Evangelical church set me straight, so to speak.  I paraphrase a bit:

This IS a touching scene!  Friggin' homophobe, thinking that because the guys are gay, they must like little boys!  

The kids are not dressed in revealing outfits, and at least one of them is a girl!  Kelvin and Keefe  do not say one single thing that suggest an erotic interest in the "little angels."  Keefe notes that a particularly muscular boy is popular with other boys, and Kelvin fiddles with his "wedding ring," to let you know that he and Keefe are partners. 

The Youth Squad is a perfectly legitimate way for them to combine their interests in youth ministry and physical fitness.  Note that the kids are not training for bodybuilding, which is not permitted for anyone under age 15.  They are doing strength training exercises, which are recommended for children aged seven and up.   

Plus it makes structural sense.  The heterosexist trajectory includes job, house, wife, and kids.  Baby Billy does not become a man until he holds his infant son.  BJ and Judy have no children of their own, so they adopt Tiffany. Nurturing children is the final step in Kelvin's movement into manhood.

Lovers after the break

"American Gigolo," 1980 and 2022: Frontal nudity and homophobia, or underwear shots and gay erasure. Which do you prefer?

 

In 1980, American Gigolo became famous for Richard Gere's biceps, chest, abs, and penis -- the first  full frontal shot in any mainstream movie!   

Every gay magazine had an article on The Nude Scene, with a screen shot.  This was before you could buy a DVD or stream the movie, so every gay guy in the country, probably in the world, marched down to the Cineplexto see it.  Gere plays Julian, a hustler who specializes in women, and in fact rejects any assignment involving "fag tricks."  The plot involves Julian falling in love with one of his clients (of course), and being framed for murder.  (He was with a client that night, but she refuses to come forward.)

Gay men of the era didn't mind that the hustlers have 100% female clients, while in real life 97% of their clients are closeted gay/bi men.  They were used to being erased.

They didn't consider homophobic slurs a problem. You weren't allowed to mention gay people, even in slurs, before the 1960s, so in the 1970s and 1980s, most movie characters threw in a few "fags" and "fruits" to demonstrate that they were cool.

Nor did they get upset when the villain turned out to be gay: Julian's pimp (Bill Duke), whom he pushes out a window to his death. Straight people hated us; it was a given, a simple fact of life.  You couldn't escape it,  unless you managed to live and work in a gay neighborhood and avoid mainstream media altogether.  The rest of us would hear homophobic jibes, slurs, scandals and jokes from family and friends, from coworkers, from random strangers on the bus, so what difference did a movie make?  You got to see a dick on screen!

Writer/director Paul Schrader has been involved with a number of other homophobic projects, such as Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters, about the gay writer who developed a fixation with bodybuilders.  Again, being gay is all about darkness, destruction, death. Being gay is evil.

But not Richard Gere.  A year before American Gigolo,he  starred in the gay-themed (and not homophobic) Bent on Broadway, about gay men who are sent to a concentration camp in Nazi Germany.  In 1993 he appeared in And the Band Played On, about the first years of the AIDS crisis.

How did he manage all three?  Does he hate gay people, or not?  

In an interview in Entertainment Weekly.  Gere reveals that he took the part because Julian was so different from himself, into fashion and languages (which Gere was not), and with "a gay thing flirting through it," and he knew nothing about "that community."  Good enough explanation, I guess.

In 2022, an American Gigolo tv series appeared.  15 years after the events in the movie, the middle-aged Julian (Jon Bernthal) tries to find out who framed him (I thought Leon confessed?) and to reconnect with The Girl of His Dreams.  

Paul Schrader was not involved, so no homophobic slurs and no gay villain. But gay men are still erased; 100% of the hustlers' clients are women.  There's a lesbian cop, which is not nearly adequate representation.

And no frontal nudity, just a butt shot.

Is that progress?

Richard Gere's dick after the break

Empire: Which son should run the hiphop empire, the finance major, the big dick, or the gay one? With some butts and bulges

 

Since I used nude photos of Jussie Smollett and Terrence Howard as illustrations in the Gemstones Episode 3.8 review, I feel obligated to review the series they're in: Empire (2015-2020), about a hiphop mogul trying to decide which of his children should get his multimillion dollar recording business after he dies. 

Scene 1: A woman in a recording booth, singing a R&B song, while Terrence Howard's Lucious, head of the recording empire, listens: "I got time on my side...why you leaving so soon?" Uh-oh, Lucey is doomed!   

He tells her to "sing like it's your last day on Earth."  Ok, enough foreshadowing.  Let's get on with the terminal diagnosis.  He flashes back to it, then tells her to sing like she just had to identify her brother's body after he was murdered.  Ok, now she's singing in an agonizing shriek.  Lucey is satisfied, kisses the hand of a masculine-presenting woman, and wakes up the fat guy on the couch. 

Scene 2:  Party on the deck of his platinum-album-strewn office.  Ugh, close-up of a bikini babe.  I counted ten bikini babes, four fully-clothed men. So far, so heterosexist.

Gross, a woman is feeding a man!  That's a major trigger, causing immediate disgust.  Get your own damn food!  In-universe, it's meant to designate that he has such a big penis that women would do anything to get him in bed.   Another gives him a whiff of a cigarette.  Big Penis appears to be Lucey's youngest son, Hakeem, played by Bryshere Y. Gray.

Cut to another guy composing music on the piano.  Big Penis jumps in.  They sing about being ready to hit the top, go to the limit, get money and girls.  Why, are you going to get 30 women instead of your usual 15?

A slightly older man in a suit and his wife look down from above, disapproving of his brothers' rambunctiousness, wondering why Hakeem is singing when Dad's not around.  

Scene 3: Lucey and the masculine-presenting woman in the back of a limo, talking about his big announcement. They arrive, get mobbed by reporters and fans, and go into a gigantic office, where he kisses her.  Must be his wife Porsha, played by Ta'Rhonda Jones, who is an LGBT ally but doesn't usually have a masculine gender presentation. 

Lucy's secretary gives him a rundown of the day's requests.  He says no to The Tonight Show and grudgingly ok to President Obama -- "but this is the last timee."  

In a board room, twirling a basketball, Luscious waxes nostalgic about the music that kept him alive when he was growing up on the streets. But now people download music for free, so kids growing up in the projects can't escape by composing and singing songs. Well, to be fair, less than one in a million wannabes makes a living as a singer/songwriter, but it's a nice hobby.  Empire Music is going to change all that by being a commodity on the New York Stock Exchange.  

Scene 4: Dining room, with a painting of a hot guy on the wall, although yellow pants against a yellow background might not be the best choice.

The guys who did the "I'm ready to be rich and famous" song are sitting at the table. There's no food.  

The Suit Guy enters and asks Jamal, the one who was playing the piano, about "that friend of yours."  Euphemism for a gay partner?  Jamal is upset because Suit Guy didn't show up for dinner; they cooked and everything.  "I forgot."  

Lucey enters and lambasts them for not being prepared to take over his music empire. He's going to die soon, and "I need one of you to man up and lead it." He'll be deciding who during the next few episodes. 

Scene 5: Cookie, a woman with big hair and a very short skirt, is leaving prison. 

 Meanwhile, Looney and Suit Guy  observe a wrestling match and congratulate each other on how much money they're going to make on the kid. He must be Lucey's eldest son Andre, played by Trae Byers

Suit Guy suggests that since he has a degree in finance, he's best qualified to run the company, but Lucey disagrees: it should be a celebrity, like Big Dick.

Later, Lucey's assistant reveals that Cookie has been released from prison.  Lucey wants round-the-clock surveillance. 

Scene 6: Jamal, played by Jussie Smollett, complains to his boyfriend that Dad would never choose him to run the empire, because he's a card-carrying, slur-slinging homophobe.  He's out at Minute 11 of the first episode.   Hear that, Kelvin?  

More gay guys after the break