If you’ve ever been a church, museum, or any Catholic-adjacent building, you’ve probably come upon a familiar sight: an impossibly ripped twink, his hands tied behind his back, his sculpted torso pierced by a series of arrows, a single tear rolling down his melancholy cheek. This, of course, is Saint Sebastian, early Catholic martyr and gay icon.
A minor figure in Christian myth, Sebastian—who was hunted and killed with arrows for concealing his faith only to come magically back to life—has taken on the status of baroque legend in the queer community, and at first glance, it’s not hard to see why.
There are plenty of languid, twinkified figures in scripture and Roman art, but something about the glorification of Sebastian’s suffering, matched with his bondage-style restraints and boyish good looks, made for a perfect visual metaphor for the queer experience at a time when anti-gay persecution ran rampant in English society.
How about we take this to the next level?
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We can trace a straight line from Sebastian’s queer icon status back to—who else?—Oscar Wilde, Irish playwright and Patient Zero for queering the hell out of Catholic imagery.
Wilde famously said that while he could never live as a Catholic, he might die as one, but long before his deathbed conversion, he loved the imagery of the high church and the stories it told about saints, outcasts, and suffering men who died for the love of another man (Jesus, naturally.) He loved Sebastian so much that when he was exiled to France to live out the final years of his life after his prison term, he took the martyr’s name.
Wilde was known in these years as Sebastian Melmoth, a combination of two characters he deeply related to: the gothic anti-hero Melmoth of Charles Maturin’s 1820 novel, and St. Sebastian.
When Wilde was a young man, a trip to Genoa during Holy Week found the Oxford student face to face with Guido Reni’s iconic portrait of Sebastian. According to Wilde’s biographer Richard Ellmann, it was a chance for the young writer to match his pagan obsessions with his growing attraction to Catholicism.
“Ah God! Ah God!” Wilde wrote in his Sonnet Written at Holy Week in Genoa, “those dear Hellenic hours, had drowned all memory of thy bitter pain, The Cross, The Crown, The Soldiers and The Spear.”
Wilde was hardly the only queer person to find Sebastian’s beatific suffering relatable. Bisexual dancer Ida Rubenstein took on the character in drag for one of her most shocking stage roles in 1911.
The gay Japanese writer Yukio Mishima also famously posed as Sebastian in 1970, after writing about the legend in his own, very homoerotic Confessions of a Mask.
Lorca, Pasolini, Derek Jarman, Robert Glück—the list of queer artists inspired by St. Sebastian’s lore goes on and on. During the height of the AIDS crisis, queer creators latched on to Sebastian’s role as patron saint against plagues as yet another layer of queer identification.
But even without all that, it’s hard not to look at Saint Sebastian and see in him a queerer figure than Catholic art usually presents to us. Beyond the (amazing, hilarious) memes of Jesus showing the boys his top surgery scars, there’s something especially potent about the story of a man whom every artist chose to make beautiful in his suffering—specifically his seemingly enjoyable suffering by penetration.
Because one thing about gay saints of the past? They were extremely dramatic divas who loved to flaunt their suffering whenever possible, and they looked damn good doing it. Saint Sebastian’s story may have encountered stylistic changes over time (not to mention his recent Scorsese-led transformation from twink to twunk) but one thing about him will never change: he will always be suffering, he will always be beautiful, and he will always be 100% run through.
And we love him for that.
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