MomTok Might Not Survive “Bottoming for Jesus”

Michael Speciàle’s one-man queer ex-Mormon confessional Bottoming for Jesus may have come into its royal position for a time such as this, when Mormon women dethroned the Kardashians on Hulu as reality TV’s most-watched show. MomTok might not survive Bottoming for Jesus, but Speciàle succeeded in his primary goal of making space for people of faith and the LGBTQ+ community on Thursday, May 8.

Never before and perhaps never again will Process smell so strongly of Estée Lauder, but so it was for a mostly friends-and-family staging of Bottoming for Jesus. In a respectable hour, Speciàle looks back on his teen logic in joining the Mormon church before accepting himself as a gay man. Along the way, he finds grace for himself—and explains the hookup app Sniffies to the uninitiated, among other far less printable concepts more common to sexually hyperactive queer men.

Bottoming for Jesus is a young production still exploring its identity. The Sniffies material, for instance, mixes the sacred and profane like Oscar Wilde did with Salome more than a century ago, but reads more for shock value than some of Speciàle’s better points in his program. There is some humor around the unspoken cultural importance of stacking chairs in religious communities, but more insights into church culture would be welcome. As it inevitably refines itself on the road to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival—Speciàle’s dream for the program—Bottoming for Jesus joins recent works like Regina Hall’s challenging film Honk for Jesus. Save Your Soul. to offer a more informed production around religion than the lazy Christian caricatures with goofy regional accents most audiences are used to seeing.

The emotional crux of Speciàle’s sermon that turns it from confessional to testimony—he now understands himself better, but reluctantly admits he misses how much more sense the world made inside the church—lands hard, as does his reenactment of Judy Garland’s preshow ritual of beating a wall screaming “Fuck ‘em!” to the haters in her life. Speciàle stands on a ground spring of material that will in time prove itself an audacious but essential work of art.