Jenna's House of Idiosyncrasies Version 10.0 [Focus.]

Today, the ugly side of the Internet showed itself to me again. I received this e-mail:

“Alright crew, here's the deal,

IMPORTANT: Once 500 have signed, kindly mail to allan@imagetek.co.za and start again.”

Instantly I was outraged! Censorship is really the answer for something like this.

(If you can't detect the sarcasm, I assure you it's there.)

Part of the great dumbing down of America—anything we don't like, we have to squash. Forget starting a dialog or gathering information. Blah.

I sat down to write this little texty-text, and realized: maybe this whole thing is fake. 10 minutes of searching came up with some very interesting things:

First I went to the Internet Movie Database, and searched for "Corpus Christi" from the years 1890 to 2005.

You guessed it. The matches:

1. Corpus Christi Bandits (1945)
2. Corpus Christi Procession, Orvieto (1898)

Of course, neither is about a gay Jesus.

So, I ran a Google Search, “Corpus Christi” movie Jesus, and the first 3 results explained a hoax:

1. Gay Jesus Movie from The AFU & Urban Legends Archive: “The rumors have circulated at least since 1985. Urban folklorist Jan Harold Brunvand investigated the rumors in his book The Mexican Pet (1986).[...]This recent version of the ‘gay Jesus’ rumor may have been inspired by a real work. The email mentions it is based on a play. ‘Corpus Christi’ by Terrence McNally, first produced in 1998, portrays Jesus and his disciples as gay and is set in Corpus Christi, Texas. Predictably, the play has sparked controversy in the US and Europe when staged. Still, there are no public plans - again, no production company, no director or actors - to make the play into a movie. And by some accounts, despite its controversial premise, the play is not terribly blasphemous.”

2. A movie is coming out showing Jesus and his disciples as homosexuals-Fiction!: “This appears to be a new, Internet version of a rumor we investigated more than 15 years ago when an article in a magazine in the state of Illinois in the United States claimed such a film was being proposed. The movie project was authentic, but never got off the ground. A rumor about the movie was circulated far and wide, however, and multitudes of letters were received by an Illinois state agency which, for some reason, became the focus of the protest. The movie never had anything to do with Illinois but had merely been mentioned in a publication from Illinois. The rumor as it is currently appearing on the Net is very weak. It doesn't give any specific information as to who is producing the movie or where anyone could write to effectively protest it. Additionally, the encouragement to add a name to the list and forward the email is useless. Who is going to send the final version and to whom?”

3. Gay Jesus Film Hoax: “This play called Corpus Christi was, according to the British actor Stephen Billington, a reaction to the beating death of Matthew Shepard in Laramie, Wyoming. It is written as “the story of Christ and his apostles, changing the setting to the Corpus Christi, Texas, of the recent past and the apostles to a group of young gay men. It is not written as a literal retelling. Most of the familiar figures of the gospel are represented by modern counterparts...” Jacob Weisberg, a political corespondent for MSN, wrote in a review of the controversial play.”

(The third link contains nearly an exact copy of the letter I recieved.)

This play, to me, sounds really interesting, and different, and full of things like social commentary. It might make you think. I say, bring this movie on. If it causes this much controversy when it's fake, it would cause a really awesome commotion if it was for real. The conservative media would eat it right up.