American gods gay
BEVERLY HILLS — “I recollect when they sent me the script describing somebody being filled by an ejaculation of flames,’” Neil Gaiman recalled late Wednesday night during a panel for the Starz series American Gods. “I’m going, ‘This is beautifully written in the script. Obviously they won't actually undertake this ... Only a madman would write this.’”
The British author was referring to a scene from the upcoming episode “Head Full of Snow.” In what might be one of the most explicit gay sex scenes ever shown on television, Salim (Omid Abtahi), a Muslim man from Oman, and the Jinn (Mousa Kraish), a fiery-eyed genie disguised as a taxi driver, make love in a New York hotel room. It begins with full-frontal male nudity, and then the men are shown thrusting in and out of each other, first on a bed and then in a faraway desert — and yes, there is an “ejaculation of flames.”
Showrunners Michael Lush and Bryan Fuller took extreme care with this strange yet tender moment, as they adapted Gaiman’s seemingly unadaptable 2001 novel American Gods, which is about feuding deities who live among men.
“We wanted to make sure that it was undeniably stunning for even those who were uncomfortable
A Gay Perspective on the Jinn and Salim Love Scene
I agree that it’s huge to see a tender, hot, and complex gay love scene in the current climate. And Kudos to Bryan Fuller for wanting to depict a genuine gay sex scene!
On another note, on your debate of tender love scene vs power act , why can’t it be both? My friends and I talk about sex a lot, and both topics reach up frequently. With gay men, especially “masculine” gay men, sex can incorporate a lot of notions of power- the act of penetration is offensive, figuring out who is penetrated, flipping someone over on their stomach, forcing someone down to their knees or as the jinn does, having them a stop blowing you, etc.
The scene between Salim and the jinn also struck me as a very tender very loving scene, shown in the small moments- Salim touching his shoulder in the cab, grabbing his hand in the elevator, the stare into his eyes before they kiss, the tender way the jinn moved Salim back on the bed. It also definitely involved power- I would match it in a cert
Bryan Fuller Demanded a Reshoot of American Gods’ Gay Sex Scene Because It Wasn’t Gay Enough
Omid Abtahi as Salim. Photo: Jan Thijs/Starz Entertainment, LLC
When American Gods showrunner Bryan Fuller first saw a cut of the epic gay-sex scene in Sunday’s episode, he didn’t mince words. “I was like, ‘Okay, unless he has a 12-inch, candy-cane cock and can fuck around corners, his dick’s not getting in him,” Fuller recalled. “So you guys need to proceed back and figure out where holes are.”
Chalk it up to straight-guy naïveté. Every decision maker in the room for the initial shoot was hetero: actors Omid Abtahi and Mousa Kraish, and director David Slade. They meant well, really. All of them were veterans of the screen trade and had been tasked with bringing to experience one of the most tender and erotic sections of the Neil Gaiman novel upon which the Starz series is based. In it, an Omani salesman and a djinn — one of a group of supernatural entities whose roots lie in pre-Islamic Middle Eastern spiritual traditions and who appear frequently in the Koran — make affection in a New York Town hotel room.
It’s one of the more memorable bits of the novel,
American Gods: The Jinn Scene Explained
Warning: SPOILERS ahead for episode three of American Gods
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When Bryan Fuller and Michael Green began to adapt American Gods for the small-screen, they had a rule in place in regards to the novel's often graphic depictions of sexuality: If there was going to be nudity, then everyone would be getting naked! Green expanded upon this rule, which Fuller jokingly referred to as "Starz loves cock":
"Equal opportunity’ was the actual term. They knew that there was going to be sexual content in this illustrate, we were remove that our sexual content was always going to be uncuttable in the sense that it would be connected to character and story and be presented as artfully as anything else. If there is a sex scene in a present or film that if you eliminated it, someone can still appreciate the emotional journeys of the characters, then it probably wasn’t done right – or at least that’s how we went about it."
This will be of no surprise to anyone who has been watching the show, in which Shadow (Ricky Whittle) unfortunately found the photographic evidence of his late wife’s affair with his best friend, and the audience saw a poor heart being devo