Gay saint sebastian
Until a few years ago, I kept a pair of lightweight robin’s-egg-blue gloves in a box inside my closet. They were one of the strangest items I owned, not because of their appearance, but because of their function. They were for Easter mass — and I didn’t go to church.
I was raised Catholic. Growing up, I was always picking fights with my family. Why couldn’t priests procure married? Why couldn’t women preach? I didn’t agree with the premise or politics, so I stopped going just after confirmation at the age of 14. My general unwillingness to travel to mass became a sticking aim in the family, but dodging mass at Christmas and Easter verged on a level of Satanic even I was uncomfortable with. So, the gloves stayed.
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Though I didn’t feel a spiritual connection to the church, I secretly loved going — even after I quit. I loved the chanting, the miracle births, the incense and the post-mass doughnuts. As I got older, while my family was singing songs about the Lord, I used the hour to think about sex.
As a child, I knew I was queer, even if I didn’t own the words for it. I’m multi-attracted , but back then I just knew that I alwa
Why Is St Sebastian a Same-sex attracted Icon?
One may think that Christian saints have little in usual with gay culture, but there is an exception to every rule. If you see a handsome guy in his prior 20s perforated by arrows, you know it’s St Sebastian, probably the earliest known gay legend. However, what does a captain in the Praetorian Guard, killed for converting Romans to Christianity, who is the patron saint of soldiers and athletes, acquire to do with that?
First of all, Sebastian was not killed by arrows. He was rescued from the stake by St Irene of Rome to later harangue Diocletian for his paganism. Unmoved by his tenacity, the emperor had Sebastian clubbed to death and his body dumped in Rome’s sewers.
History, however, is far from the visual arts and iconography established by the painters of the Renaissance. St Sebastian is always shown at the stake, punctured by arrows, awaiting martyrdom with eyes raised to the heavens. His tense, naked body, covered only by a restricted loincloth, fueled the imagination of painters to such an extent that he might be the most frequently portrayed male saint in art history.
The paintings of St Sebastian, with their languid eroticism,
(saintly male bodies seen through worldly eyes and treated in sometimes very plain talk, so not to everyone’s taste)
From Susan Benson Hamel yesterday:
Thought of you yesterday when I was in the Auckland art gallery and came across this delightfully coy St Sebastian by Guido Reni:
(#1) There are an astonishing number of St. Sebastians out there; this Reni really is wonderful (I said to SBH), in its dreamy gaze welcoming death, and all done with a single mortal arrow (plus, Reni dwells lovingly on the saint’s body, giving what many have seen as a homoerotic cast to the painting; and his private parts are just barely concealed, as in a cock tease)
In this Reni Sebastian — he did six of them — the saint’s tree of martyrdom is there, but downplayed, and his arms are bound behind him at the waist, rather than above his head (a pose that produces what I’ve called a pitsntits presentation of the upper male body), as in this more famous Reni, from 1615:
(#2) An even more beautiful youth, with not so muscular a body and pierced by two arrows, but still the upward gaze and the teasing drapery
A parallel. From my 8/23/24 posting
Recreating Saint Sebastian
In the last century or so, the gender non-conforming community has adopted Saint Sebastian as something of a queer icon. This is, in part, due to the links between Saint Sebastian’s persecution, and the abjected position that queer people have historically inhabited within society. Oscar Wilde reportedly took on the specify Sebastian when he left prison [having been sentenced to two years' complicated labour for 'gross indecency' in 1895]. In Evelyn Waugh's novel 'Brideshead Revisited' (1945), the unhappy Sebastian Flyte is described as "full of barbed arrows".
Another reason for Saint Sebastian’s appreciation within queer circles is, of course, his beauty. In recent reimaginings of Saint Sebastian, queer artists have explicitly invited the onlooker to view him as an object of desire. Artist-duo Pierre et Gilles’ various homoerotic recreations of Saint Sebastian resemble Ken dolls more than a religious martyr – the arrows more reminiscent of arrows of desire fired from Cupid’s bow, than arrows of persecution. Likewise, Derek Jarman’s film 'Sebastiane' (1976) offers a highly eroticised account of Saint Sebastian's martyrdom.