The Gospel of Eureka dir. by Michael Palmieri and Donal Mosher (review)

A jovial emcee cloaked in the gray suit and patterned tie of a bygone decade emerges onstage to welcome a half-empty audience and set the tone for the upcoming live show. Backstage, performers cram into close quarters alongside storage containers and racks of costumes, the men scurrying to dress themselves in leather skirts, timeworn wigs, and gold accessories before beating their faces with makeup. The emcee begins to sing an acapella number, signaling to the performers that the time has come to take their places and line up on the stairs just behind the stage door.

This scene is not set at a drag show, as a queer viewer might expect. Rather, it describes some of the cast members of The Great Passion Play in Eureka Springs, Arkansas, as they assemble their Roman soldier costumes. A once-dazzling epic performance that attracted the attention of Christians nationwide, it has recently settled into a mere local oddity, one of the necessary tourist obligations when visiting the small Ozark town's healing hot springs. The play chronicles the last days of the life of Jesus Christ, opening on his sunny arrival to preach to crowds who dress in bland biblical fabrics and fan him with plastic palm leaves, and closing on his inevitable return to heaven, which is orchestrated by an impressive mechanical ascension into the night sky.

The thesis of Michael Palmieri and Donal Mosher's 2019 documentary film is found in those easily recognizable overlaps between the play and its local foil, the drag show at Eureka Live Underground, a gay bar billed as the Hillbilly Studio 54. The film continually cuts back and forth between reverent Christian passion play actors and irreverent Christian drag queens, always beginning with the hegemonic former and cutting away to the subversive latter in an effort to establish the power dynamic between the two groups.

However, this rhetorical parallel does not uncritically reinforce conventional depictions of this classic struggle for power. Too often, we are offered a monolithic assembly of Christians wholly close-minded to queerness, pitted against an essentialist GLBT community who collectively take up a reactionary stance to such expressions of faith. In The Gospel of Eureka, such expected portrayals are overturned by the inclusion of rarely seen characters: an elderly transgender woman who, despite her experience with a Baptist preacher attempting to cast out her demons at the age of 16, remains devoted to her belief in God; a now-affirming man who, after his father came out as gay, revisited his readings of scripture and challenged his long-held beliefs; the African-American drag queen who lip syncs the sincerest of Yolanda Adams worship ballads while holding her Bible, a performance mostly devoid of the parody one would find in a gospel drag brunch; and the married gay couple who own Eureka Live Underground but also self-identify as Christian, even reading from the Book of Proverbs while chain-smoking on their patio. As one of the subjects wisely retorted, being a Christian "doesn't really have anything to do with who you're fucking. It has to do with who you're loving."

What structures the plot is the political effort to pass a local ordinance preventing employment and housing discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity. Animosity surfaces as anti-gay protesters line the streets of Eureka Springs to evangelize passersby about the dangers of "sexual sin." They even go as far to sponsor televised ads that feature images of vulnerable children under threat in public bathrooms. It is fortunate that, amid the fear and hatred, the filmmakers manage to deconstruct the rural/urban binary that so often afflicts queers on screen, disrupting the tired narrative that queer people leave their small-minded towns for the utopian big city. Even the mayor of Eureka Springs allies with the organizations pushing to pass the nondiscrimination ordinance, snidely exclaiming that everybody is welcome there, "even the Christians."

The competing storylines never become muddled, tied...