I can imagine the throbbing sensation of blood pooling in his skull like when you’re on a plane that’s taking off, the lightheadedness and disorientation you experience as the plane gains altitude and pressure fluctuates within the cabin. Laforgia and Ropes stand on either side, bathed in a soft, red glow, their biceps and forearms flexing as they pull on either rope to keep Motta’s arms outstretched. Yet, the subtle imbalance in their grip causes his body to gently drift back and forth like a pendulum. We’re able to see that he’s suspended from a wooden beam on the chapel’s ceiling. His breathing is ragged and difficult. Motta grunts one final time and the scene dims to black. We don’t see them lower Motta back to the floor.

We are only allowed to watch the moment of pain, the experience of it. We watch with fascination. We can imagine ourselves in Motta’s place, the immense pressure of the ties pulling at our feet in order to suspend our body, his toes curled, likely beyond his control. How long is he upside down? I realize that I’m noticeably tense while watching “Inverted World” and must consciously relax my shoulders and remember to breathe. Motta’s work intrigues me because of its subversive quality. He places himself in the role of Jesus, accepting all the suffering of humankind. He sexualizes the crucifixion, the crux upon which the whole theistic regime of Christianity hinges. 

Motta’s “Inverted World” makes me think of another sexualized portrayal of Jesus in Michaela Coel’s “Chewing Gum,” a British sitcom written by and starring Coel as Tracey Gordon, a restricted, religious virgin, who wants to have sex. In the first episode, Tracey tries to seduce Ronald, her boyfriend of six years, by stripping down to her underwear in his bedroom and begging him to let her sit on his face. He throws a bible at her and drags her out into the street where he threatens to call the police and have her arrested for sexual assault, shouting “Oh for my foolishness, God strike me down!” He gets hit by a car. Tracey leaves him there in the street. Later, Tracey visits Ronald in his home to officially break up with him so that she can pursue her neighbor Connor. However, she notices him staring at his nursing aid’s ass and the two men exchange a flirtatious smirk. Tracey suddenly notices a homoerotic poster of a shirtless Jesus leaning on a sawhorse, another of him flexing his biceps—still shirtless—and holding up two fish, a third of him reclining suggestively on top of the Sea of Galilee, and—finally—a poster of British diver Tom Daley on Ronald’s bedroom wall. Tracey has an epiphany: Ronald is gay.

I am a huge fan of “Chewing Gum” because of how cleverly Coel is able to make fun of Christianity. Coel converted to Christianity at 18 after joining a dance group that she learned later was part of a Pentecostal church. Her humor is the product of someone who once had a deep spiritual connection within the church. Her jokes rarely cast judgement and refuse to portray Christianity as fundamentally wrong. She doesn’t seem interested in advocating against the church. Instead, she offers a much more complex type of humor, drawing our attention to the absurdities of prudish Christian morality.

In one particularly memorable scene, Tracey thinks that she may be pregnant after giving Connor a handjob and performs an absurd treatment using suppositories and diet coke to flush out the imagined baby. She prays to a poster of Jesus in her room, asking for the courage he had to tell them he was the son of God, and kisses her hand, pressing it to his benevolent face. And then she turns to a poster of Beyonce, saying, “I need the strength you had to make the switch from R&B to hip-hop when they doubted you.” She gets her period a few minutes later, exclaiming, “You gotta have faith, yo. He lives!” She looks up to heaven.

Tracey never seems to explicitly want to renounce her faith. She wants to have sex. During the penultimate episode of the first season, Tracey’s ultra-religious sister Cynthia gets drunk on alcoholic chocolates that Connor brought to dinner and when Tracey asks her if she's okay, Cynthia taunts Tracey, “Are you okay, oh, are you okay? Oh, I’m Tracey. Oh, look at me, my crisis of faith amidst the dark and confusing world. I’ve got a penis in my mouth. I put it in my mouth. I take it back out.” Cynthia is flippant and drunk, but her rant reveals something important about Tracey’s story. Amidst this dark and confusing world, Tracey is determined to have sex, and she pursues her pleasure relentlessly until she gets what she wants. In an interview for Vulture, Coel describes “Chewing Gum” as a show about a Christian girl who wants to lose her virginity, but also as a show, perhaps more importantly, about “a girl who is marginalized from the world and wants to be a part of the world, and so she pursues that right as loudly and as absurdly as she can because it’s part of her humanity.”

“Chewing Gum” resonates so strongly with me because I often felt marginalized from the world as a trans person growing up, simultaneously finding safety and community within the Christian church while also struggling against the church’s archaic moral codes, which were rarely substantiated by the Bible’s scripture.

When I was three years old, my parents enrolled me in preschool at St. Peter’s Lutheran Church and School, which my family also attended on Sunday mornings. The building is garish, a mostly windowless building built at odd angles, conflicting angles with a dark brown, metal roof and a large, copper-colored cross affixed to the front facade. I hated it. Although, my hatred for St. Peters was mostly because I was cast as a sheep during the annual nativity scene while my cousin Joslyn played one of the angels, complete with a pair of finely feathered wings and a glittery halo that my aunt bought from Party City. I wanted to be an angel. They were beautiful and inspired fear, always having to warn whoever they visited, “Do not be afraid.”

We only went to St. Peter’s for a few years. My parents decided to join Heritage Church, a new, non-denominational church that was renting space from Lutheran North High School, which was visible from St. Peter’s, both occupying the same stretch of 24 Mile Road across from the public library. The non-denominational designation simply meant that they were an Evangelical church that played rock music and put on increasingly costly light shows mostly so that they could say they weren’t dreary and uninspiring like the Catholics.

As an acne-ridden, pubescent teenager, I was smitten with Jesus. I thought about him constantly as if I was overcome by an uncontrollable crush. How could I not think about him? He was everywhere. On Sunday mornings, my friends and I congregated in the far-right side of the auditorium where all the other teens gathered so that we could silently file out after worship was over. We took communion. Ushers passed around platters of unleavened bread—which were packaged tortillas cut into bite-size squares—and wine poured into tiny, individual glasses, except the wine was Welch’s grape juice, substituted in order to be mindful of the recovering alcoholics in the congregation, of which there were many. The disposable cups always ended up being set underneath the folding chairs and forgotten, trampled underfoot as people rushed out to the lobby after the service.

The pastor instructed us to eat the bread, reminding us that it represented Jesus’s body, whipped and bloodied after Pontius Pilate sentenced him to be crucified. The tortilla was gummy and stuck to the roof of my mouth. I was relieved when the pastor told us to drink the wine, which represented Jesus’s blood spilled to atone for my sins and the sins of all humanity. We sat in silence. We were supposed to be quietly reflecting, communing with God, but I caught myself running my tongue along the surface of my teeth, savoring the lingering sweetness of the grape juice. I was thinking about Jesus’s body, how he would taste on my tongue.

One of my earliest erotic memories associated with the church was a reenactment of the crucifixion. The youth pastor, Pastor James, was cast as Jesus. He didn’t resemble popularized images of Jesus in the slightest, but he was tall, white, and in his early 30s which was close enough. He once came to visit me in the hospital after I fractured my hip during a car crash where another driver fell asleep at the wheel and plowed head on into my dad’s jeep. I was in second grade at the time. Pastor James was doleful and sweet, holding my little hand in his big, doughy grip and squeezing tightly. He said that he would be praying for me. I was painfully aware of the fact that I was naked underneath my hospital gown and didn’t want him to see my prepubescent body, feeling ashamed like Adam and Eve as they hid from God amongst the trees in the Garden of Eden after they ate the forbidden fruit and realized they were naked.

I can’t remember why our church was doing a reenactment of the crucifixion. It must have been around Easter; Although, the reenactments weren’t always wedded to holidays. Our church was prone to theatrics year-round. Pastor James wore a simple, white cotton tunic with a sash around the waist and a faux crown of thorns on his head as he carried a recreation of the cross on his back, pretending to stumble underneath the weight. Except the cross was incredibly lightweight. It was made from soft, pliable pinewood, put together by one of the many handymen in our congregation. They were always putting their trade skills to use, building ahistorical replicas of Jerusalem’s markets for the children to dress up and pretend to be Biblical characters or setting up the hot tub used for baptisms on the church’s stage.