In ‘Heaven’s Gate: The Cult of Cults,’ internalized homophobia becomes deadly
By: Eric Langberg
Tags: Documentary, Television, Film, True Crime, Streaming

Another week, another new true-crime offering from HBO. Along with Netflix, the premium cable-cum-streaming upstart has become the destination for true-crime fans to feed the binging beast; they are currently in the middle of a five-week run of original documentaries that include Crazy, Not Insane and The Mystery of D.B. Cooper. They also recently finished airing The Vow, a nine-episode show about the NXIVM cult that drew criticism from viewers for being too long and meandering instead of gripping.

Today’s new offering, however, is a tight four-part series, and it’s premiering on HBOMax all at once. Whereas viewers were frustrated with having to wait a week for each episode of The Vow only for ample time to be spent on digressions, new series Heaven’s Gate: The Cult of Cults is available to watch straight through, and the four-episode runtime means there isn’t that much space for unnecessary smoothie-making.

Heaven’s Gate: The Cult of Cults tells the story of the infamous cult which saw 39 members commit suicide together in 1997, hoping to hitch a ride on a spaceship they believed to be trailing the Hale-Bopp Comet. That’s all most people know about this cult: the mass-suicide, the “going to heaven on a comet” thing, and maybe the fact that they all wore identical Nikes when they did it.

A patch worn by Heaven’s Gate members. / courtesy HBOMax

There is a lot more to the story, though. Through interviews with surviving cult members, animated vignettes that sketch out the mystical wonder of the future promised by the cult, and archival footage of the cult in mass media, Heaven’s Gate: The Cult of Cults is a solid, thorough retelling of a tragic tale. The episodes take place in chronological order, with the first installment relating the mysterious appearance of two charismatic people who called themselves “The Two” in the 1970s. They were a UFO cult, preaching that they knew the way to heaven aboard a UFO, and they wanted people to join them on their ascent to the Kingdom of God. The leaders were a man and woman who also went by the name “Bo” and “Peep” — a reference to the fact that they were gathering a flock of sheep — and then ultimately settled on calling themselves Ti and Do. They were aliens, they claimed, here on Earth to guide people to the next level of existence.

Heaven’s Gate: The Cult of Cults peels back the facade of Do and Ti, revealing them to be Marshall Applewhite and Bonnie Nettles, respectively. Nettles was a nurse and Applewhite a visitor to her hospital, and they linked up when Nettles told Applewhite that she had a prophecy she needed his help spreading to the world. They were a duo in the eyes of the media, “The Two,” but they were not in a romantic relationship, because Do was, in fact, a gay man.

Marshall Applewhite grew up as the son of a Presbyterian minister, and he deeply hated the fact that he was attracted to men because he desperately feared disappointing his father. As Ti and Do fleshed out the details of their religion, determining over time the set of rules and regulations by which they would exert control over their followers, complete and total sexual celibacy became an absolute necessity… as much, it seems, so Do would have reason to deny himself the permission to act on his homosexual urges as it was an effort to redirect the energy of their flock toward utter devotion to their leaders. Whereas many cults — NXIVM, the Rajneeshis at the center of Netflix’s Wild Wild Country, Charles Manson’s Family, the Branch Davidians who followed David Koresh in Waco, etc — exist in part to supply brainwashed sexual partners for the cult leader’s pleasure, Heaven’s Gate sits at the opposite extreme of the spectrum. No sexual release was allowed for the leader or any of his followers, under any circumstances.

These sequences are very difficult to watch. Applewhite is directly responsible for the deaths of dozens of people and the destruction of the lives of untold more family members, but as Heaven’s Gate: The Cult of Cults progresses, he emerges as somewhat of a tragic figure. His internalized homophobia — his deep-seated hatred of everything he feared he was because his religion told him it was wrong — mutated and soured throughout his life, causing him to lash out and harm the world around him. He had been taught to hate himself, and so he rotted from the inside.

An illustration of The Two preaching to their followers. / courtesy HBO Max

One of the more harrowing sequences in the film comes in the third episode, as former cult member Sawyer relates the mass castrations that Do convinced a number of the men in the group to undergo as a way to tamp down on their sexual urges. It’s a tragic, frightening example of what can happen when someone hates themselves so much that they infect others with that same hatred.

The other strength of the docuseries, aside from highlighting how Applewhite’s queerness played into his specific form of control, is the way the series tracks the cult over time. This is a cult that spanned 20+ years of public prominence, and Heaven’s Gate: The Cult of Cults does an excellent job putting the group’s ebbs and flows in cultural context. We never lose track of the mood of the group at any given time, and how that mood was informed by the societal changes going on around it. The series paints a vivid picture of the UFO-obsessed 70s and the subsequent willingness of people to follow a cult along these lines, and then it’s contrasted later with the more cynical, technology-obsessed 90s where the group struggled to find a recruiting foothold online. (Somewhat strangely, the cult’s oh-so-very-90s website is still active!)

On a day where the eyes of the entire entertainment industry are on HBOMax, Heaven’s Gate: The Cult of Cults is a solid offering that shows the streamer’s potential. It’s not any longer than it needs to be while still being fleshed out, thanks to riveting interviews that give astonishing immediacy to details that may be unfamiliar to most people who only know them as a wacky group that tried to catch a ride on a comet. As one of the commentators says toward the end of the series, this is a tragic story about mental illness that was reinforced and given too much power, and the results are devastating.