“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. “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. 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. 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.
