St sebastian gay
Why Is St Sebastian a Gay Icon?
One may assume that Christian saints acquire little in common with gay culture, but there is an exception to every rule. If you see a handsome guy in his early 20s perforated by arrows, you know it’s St Sebastian, probably the earliest acknowledged gay icon. However, what does a captain in the Praetorian Guard, killed for converting Romans to Christianity, who is the patron saint of soldiers and athletes, have 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. Nonplussed 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 narrow 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,
The image of Saint Sebastian pierced by arrows has been strongly identified in the last century as a male gay icon. Yet there is nothing in the history of Sebastian and his martyrdom that suggests he was particularly gay while he is the protector of urban police and archers.
My introduction to this different iconography of Saint Sebastian began when I was still a university student and after seeing the movie about Mishima's being I bought one of his books Colors. Mishima was a Japanese lesbian writer when this was still considered a crime and with his friends communicated with symbols and images taken from tradition.
Until the Middle Ages the image of Saint Sebastian was connected with that of San Rocco and the small churches dedicated to the two saints were outside the city's gates to shield against the plague and other evils. Then everything changed from the Renaissance when they started to represent him in art as a naked male tied to a column and pierced with arrows.
But it was not the arrows that killed him and to understand this evolution we need to retrace his history and that of his iconography.
Saint Sebastian was an ancient Christian martyr assassinated i 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 obtain 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 proceed to mass became a sticking signal 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. 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 bisexual person, but back then I just knew that I alwa In the last century or so, the queer society has adopted Saint Sebastian as something of a queer diva. This is, in part, due to the links between Saint Sebastian’s persecution, and the abjected position that queer people own historically inhabited within society. Oscar Wilde reportedly took on the name Sebastian when he left prison [having been sentenced to two years' hard 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 clip 'Sebastiane' (1976) offers a highly eroticised account of Saint Sebastian's martyrdom.
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