'This poem is quite appalling," said Alan King-Hamilton, the judge at the Gay News trial, after the jury had agreed, by a majority of 10 to two, that the journal and its editor were guilty of blasphemous libel. He wasn't thinking of its literary qualities but of the "scurrilous profanity" in what it describes - a Roman centurion having sex with the dead body of Christ, who when alive, so it's disclosed, was himself a promiscuous homosexual. Twenty-five years on, James Kirkup's gayification of Christ still looks pretty daring in parts: there's nothing to rival its necrophiliac buggery even on Channel 5. But as a poem, it's feeble in the extreme.

When the centurion takes Christ from the cross in the opening lines, he notes his "tough lean body" and that he is "well hung". The first image is a cliché of soft porn, on a par with "my tongue found his" and "the fire in his thighs", which follow. The second is a tee-hee pun, and there are several more in the same vein - "kingdom come", for instance (heaven as an orgasm), and "before we rose again" (erection as resurrection). In between, there's a blow-job:

For the last time

I laid my lips around the tip

of that great cock, the instrument

of our salvation, our eternal joy.

The shaft still throbbed, anointed

with death's final ejaculation.

If the lines are a mouthful, that's because the language of hymn books ("our salvation, our eternal joy") doesn't happily mix with the vernacular ("great cock"). Mary Whitehouse and her supporters, who held prayer meetings during the trial, must have found that stanza hard to take. But according to Geoffrey Robertson, who defended Gay News at the trial along with John Mortimer, the stanza generally regarded as most "odious" was the next, which shows Christ as a great one for orgies:

I knew he'd had it off with other men -

with Herod's guards, with Pontius Pilate,

with John the Baptist, with Paul of Tarsus,

with foxy Judas, a great kisser, with

the rest of the Twelve, together and apart.

He loved all men, body, soul and spirit - even me.

"A great kisser", used of Judas, is witty: in a less repressive era, perhaps Kirkup would have risked some comedy. Instead, the poem goes pious on us, and starts to sermonise. (The explicit needn't harm a poem; the explanatory always does.) Same-sex lovers, it's said, experience a "blissful crucifixion" when they make love, and sado-masochistic sex, with its "loving injuries", is full of "joy and grace". The centurion discovers this when he forces his "spear, wet with blood", into the "open wounds" of Christ's body, "his side, his back, his mouth" ("back", we take it, is a euphemism for anus).

This ferocious love-making revivifies Christ, who, Lazarus-like, returns to life and proves he can give as well as receive:

And then the miracle possessed us.

I felt him enter me, and fiercely spend

his spirit's final seed within my hole, my soul,

pulse upon pulse, unto the ends of the earth.

"Hole" is brave. (Craig Raine would later write a poem called "Arsehole".) But the poem takes no formal risks, beyond some perfuctory attempts at half-rhyme (tomb/warm/him/time, as well as the inevitable come/came), and its ending is trite and sentimental. Christ and the centurion lie "entwined" like a shepherd and shepherdess in a rural idyll, and the attendants who come to take Christ's body to the tomb "were glad for us,/and blessed us, as would he, who loved all men". Three days later, he rose from sleep, at dawn, and showed himself to me before all others. And took me to him with the love that now forever dares to speak its name.

It's been good, not least for literature, that gay love now dares to speak its name. The novels of Edmund White and Alan Hollinghurst, and the poetry of Thom Gunn, can be richly rewarding, and instructive, not least to heterosexuals. Kirkup has written decent poems, too, but this isn't one of them. Not that it's indecent. I can imagine many Christians as well as gays feeling cheered by its happy-chappy message. But a message is what it delivers, not a sense of homoerotic passion. It's a propagandist intervention, not a work of art.