One movie about the life of Christ that didn't make it into Turner Classic Movies' Easter weekend schedule is Him, a 1974 pornographic film, said to have been directed by "Ed D. Louie." The film is said to intercut scenes depicting Jesus' homoerotic sex life with the apostles and modern-day scenes about a young gay man who comes to a better understanding of himself sexually and spiritually by using the picture's vision of Big Gay Jesus as a role model. The movie is also infamous for a scene in which the hero describes his desires in confession to a priest, who is on the other side of the booth listening and masturbating. Most discussions of Him have to rely on a certain amount of trust and guesswork, because scarcely anyone is known to have seen it, and it's not clear that any prints of it still exist. For a while, there was serious reason to doubt that it ever existed at all.

For many of us, the first time we ever came across a mention of Him was in the 1980 humorous non-book The Golden Turkey Awards by Michael and Harry Medved. That book, which served its purpose in the universe by getting the Ed Wood cult rolling, dates from a time when Michael Medved was best known as a genial exploiter of other people's bad filmmaking--it was a sequel to the 1978 The Fifty Worst Films of All Time, which Michael published (with Harry) under the pseudonym "Randy Dreyfuss", lest fallout from the book damage what he then imagined to be his burgeoning scriptwriting career. He had not yet turned into a professional right-wing "values" scold, though there are traces of that later personality detectable in Golden Turkey's "comic" description of the black patrons attending a late-night screening of Scream, Blacula, Scream. Him is cited in the book as one of the contenders in the awards category "Most Unerotic Concept in Pornography", and in fact it took the top prize in that category. The book also includes the revelation towards the end that one of the "turkeys" cited in its pages is a hoax created by the Medveds, and the reader was invited to send in their best guess as to which film was their invention. The scarcity of Him, and the fact that it becomes harder with each passing year to imagine Michael Medved trudging off to gay porn theaters to properly research his life's work, eventually led many to speculate that the Medveds had made the whole thing up.

However, at some point the Medveds revealed that the hoax title in their book was actually Dog of Norway, a "Lassie"/"Rin Tin Tin" knockoff they'd conjured up as an excuse to make cruel sport of their own pet's weight problem. And over the years, a few surprising traces of Him's actual, if not ongoing, existence have come to light. These include the newspaper ad art seen above, online recollections by one or two lucky patrons who saw the film in the mid-1970s, and Al Goldstein's review from the April 29, 1974 issue of Screw, in which Big Al declared that it had "more to recommend it than some of its mismatched shots, mishmash editing and cheap budget would have allowed." Goldstein went on to write that "The plot might have worked, had it been explained to the viewer, but the movie begins inexorably slowly and, for its first 40 minutes, it consists of some solid hard-core in the gay vein and the meaning of the title HIM eludes the spectator. Only deeply into the film does one get the necessary material to permit the audience to comprehend the meaning of the plot. By then it's too late and you really don't give a shit, which is a shame, since so much of this film transcends most of the porno pap that permeates our perimiters." Ah, our critical forbears.

If Him did once exist only to vanish from the face of the Earth--and it wouldn't be the only independently produced hardcore gay porn film to slip into neglect over the course of more than thirty years--most of us will probably be able to live with the knowledge that we may never get to see for ourselves just how mismatched those shots really were. But the movie has its place in history and its lingering effect on the culture. I can remember as a kid growing up in the Bible Belt hearing rumors--spread, not by the local freaks and weirdos (even at nine or ten, I was the local freak and weirdo--but by the church deacons and the most rabidly disgruntled members of their flock, about how commie perverts in Hollywood were, even as we spoke, laboring away at a dirty movie about Jesus. Such rumors were, and are, useful to church groups for fund-raising purposes, and Snopes, the website devoted to the study of urban legends and other assorted horseshit, has a page that covers the evolution of the fund-raising letters specifically claiming to be targeted at combating this piece of filth. Did Him get the ball rolling on this?

Probably not. Most of the letters, which have kept being generated years and decades after Him was made and seen and forgotten and lost, are about raising funds to stop the movie from being made, and most of them seem to assume that the movie itself is a mainstream, big-budget Hollywood production. Also, as Snopes points out, the film "is so impossibly obscure...that it's hard to imagine it could have triggered a massive outpouring of petitions to stop its production." Most likely, the idea of a dirty movie about Jesus's sex life was just the sort of great-minds-thinking-alike notion that a lot of people scooped out of the ether at some point in time. But many of the great Jesus-movie controversies of the last several years, especially the one surrounding Martin Scorsese's The Last Temptation of Christ, have been fueled in part by the fact that many of the kind of people whose idea of a day well spent is marching in front of a movie theater with a handmade sign in their mitts and red food dye on their shirt have been primed for a Biblical porno movie and react to reports of a "daring" new film on religious themes with the mistaken assumption that it is finally here. This element of the controversies may be lost on someone like Scorsese, who just doesn't spend enough time showing up with a plate of pecan logs at Southern Baptist church picnics to know what the hot rumors about sinful Hollywood are these days. In fact, it seems likely that, in the years since Last Temptation came out, at least a few people who thought that the movie was the legendary dirty-Jesus movie and who lost their faith and went through their own fallen angel phase must have rented it and set it aside for an especially depraved weekend's entertainment. Boy, must they have been disappointed.