Brow Beat

Why Starz Was the Perfect Home for American Gods’ Groundbreaking Gay Sex Scene

Omad Abtahi and Mousa Kraish in American Gods  “Head Full of Snow.”

Starz

American Gods, Starz’s divine adaptation of the 2001 novel by Neil Gaiman, has been pushing boundaries since its first episode, which featured bodies being torn to shreds and a fertility goddess who consumes lovers with her vagina. But even by the show’s already-elevated standards, Sunday’s third episode, “Head Full of Snow,” was one that viewers will not soon forget. In an interlude taken directly from the book, a lonely Omani salesman, Salim (Omid Abtahi), meets a New York cab driver who also happens to be a Jinn (Mousa Kraish), a fiery-eyed mythological figure from Middle Eastern and Islamic folklore. The two displaced souls bond over their shared displacement and memories of home, tentatively touching hands in the taxi, and then they head back to Salim’s hotel room to have some of the hottest sex ever seen on television. (Quite literally, since one of them ejaculates like a flamethrower.)

It would have been a simple matter to cut the scene from the show, since the book’s many interludes, while fascinating, are not essential to its plot. Instead, American Gods went all in, with a four-minute full-frontal encounter that is one of the most graphic gay sex scenes ever seen on mainstream television, one that was even more remarkable for taking place between two Muslim men. “Just seeing two Middle Eastern men represented in that way, with humor and love and joy,” said Kraish at a panel co-hosted by GLAAD, “it’s taken me 11 years to get to that.” Showrunner Bryan Fuller explained that in addition to taking great technical pains to make the scene as physically accurate as possible—including reshoots to help the straight actors get the sexual positions right—the creators also worked toward emotional accuracy. “We felt like for Salim, as a man coming from a country that throws you off the top of buildings if you’re gay, a blow job in an alley is probably his only sexual experience,” he told Vulture. “We felt like the Jinn, in this romantic gesture, wanted to give him a more intimate sexual experience.”

A scene like this might seem more obviously suited to a streaming service like Netflix, where queer storylines—and, in particular, sex—have flourished, but it’s no coincidence that this game-changer made its debut on Starz. Where HBO and other premium cable networks have been accused of shunting LGBTQ representation into niche shows—when they aren’t cancelling them altogether—Starz’s original programming has made key strides in sexual diversity over the past several years. Survivor’s Remorse and Power, for instance, have both featured queer characters of color, but that sexual diversity also extends to genres where we don’t always expect queer stories to be told. Black Sails, Starz’s prequel to Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island, boasted almost as many bisexual characters in its main lineup as not, and same-sex relationships acted as major drivers of the plot—the show’s most prominent character is an outlaw who wages an entire war on civilized society to avenge his male lover, in a rare, nuanced depiction of male bisexuality that is even rarer for being part of an action-driven period piece. (That’s right: Until recently, one of the queerest shows on television was an 18th-century pirate epic produced by Michael Bay.) While Black Sails concluded in April, its four-season run demonstrates Starz’s history of looking beyond a straight male audience, even in genres whose audiences might be assumed to skew that way. Let’s not forget that Starz was once home to gladiator saga Spartacus, which openly embraced the queer male gaze and that featured one of television’s first gay action heroes.

Even with Black Sails and Spartacus off the air, Starz is still taking risks with its sex scenes. Outlander’s first season distinguished itself by approaching historical fantasy from a female perspective, often objectifying its male lead in the show’s own steamy sex scenes in the process, and even more recently, The White Princess turned a would-be rape scene into a moment of female agency and empowerment. Nudity on premium cable is something of a given, but according to Fuller, Starz’ only stipulation regarding actors stripping down on American Gods was that that the nudity be equal opportunity, rather than just limited to women—a policy that has distinguished the network from its more squeamish counterparts since the days of Spartacus. It wasn’t uncommon to spot a penis or two on Black Sails, where characters, regardless of gender, were regularly naked, and Outlander’s Tobias Menzies was matter-of-fact about snaking out for the show. That’s a policy that applies to contemporary fare too, like Power, where 50 Cent’s penis recently made its own small-screen debut in a masturbation scene—but Starz’s willingness to disrobe its male characters specifically are what set its historical fantasies apart from, say, Game of Thrones, which has been criticized for a noticeable gender imbalance when it comes to nudity. (The penises in American Gods’ sex scene are computer-generated but no less prominent for their digital origins.)

We take sex and nudity on premium cable for granted, but when done right, sex scenes also deliver critical information about the characters’ emotional states or even propel the plot forward. The scenes from Jamie and Claire’s wedding night on Outlander were a way of building trust and navigating their new relationship; Black Sails’ complicated sexual relationships are the impetus for much of the show’s action; Power’s offer key insights into characters’ relationships. American Gods now joins those ranks: As with prior sex scenes featuring the goddess Bilquis, whose lovers experience intense ecstasy as her body ingests them, the show’s groundbreaking gay sex scene shows us a new way that that gods and humans can interact—in this case, by forging a genuine emotional connection, something that sets the Jinn and Salim’s relationship apart from Bilquis and her sacrifices. Their encounter also ends with an act of selflessness by the Jinn toward Salim that calls into question his insistence that he does not grant wishes. Even though these characters appear in just one scene in Gaiman’s novel, Fuller has promised that this is not the last we’ve seen of them on American Gods. If those scenes happen to be incredibly hot? Well, Starz is still the place to make it happen.