The Wild Reed: St. Sebastian: "The Most Frequently Renewed Archetype of Modern Gay Identity"

Friday, January 20, 2012

St. Sebastian: "The Most Frequently Renewed Archetype of Modern Gay Identity"

Well, modern gay male identity, perhaps.

The quote in the title of this post is from Richard Kaye's scholarly article about St. Sebastian and his iconography through the ages. This article is from glbtq.com, the world's largest encyclopedia of gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender and queer culture. Kaye is Assistant Professor of English at Hunter College, and is currently working on a book about St. Sebastian in nineteenth-century art and literature.

Below (with added links) is an excerpt from Kaye's article, followed by links to previous Wild Reed posts about St. Sebastian, whose feast is celebrated today in the Roman Catholic tradition.

. . . Sebastian's extraordinary success as a "gay saint" is related to his status as an updated replacement for other culturally resonant "homosexual legends" – Hadrian and Antinous, Jonathan and David, Ganymede – whose narratives were reducible to narratives of love.

But the essence of Sebastian's tale resists such sentimentalization, standing as a modern emblem of radical isolationism, both a homoerotically charged object of desire and a source of solace for the rejected homosexual.

Since the advent of AIDS, St. Sebastian's historical position as a saint with the power to ward off the plague has been given a new sustenance, inspiring artists, such as the late David Wojnarowicz, to incorporate the martyr into their works. In painting, literature, film, music, theater, performance art, and recently, a video for the rock group R.E.M., St. Sebastian remains the most frequently renewed archetype of modern gay identity.