Italian Renaissance artist Guido Reni’s 1619 oil painting, Saint Sebastian, hangs in Room 006 of Madrid’s Prado Museum. In January of this year, I saw it. The saint is only wearing a cloth around his waist that looks like it is about to slide off, with his arms tied behind him. His chest leans forward, tempting the viewer into staring at his toned muscles. Sebastian was a member of the Praetorian Guard, who was sentenced to death by the Emperor Diocletian and tied to a tree to be shot by arrows for converting other Romans to Christianity. Reni painted the saint many times, in two distinct styles. A more famous ‘first’ style, and less famous ‘second’ style, which I saw in Madrid. In this iteration, a single arrow is painted onto the right side of his stomach, while in the first style there are three arrows, spread across his chest. I find he looks noticeably more youthful and naive in the first, with his arms tied above his head rather than behind him. In both, his face looks towards Heaven with slightly blushing cheeks, tortured and in the throes of agony. Despite this pain, in the face and body of Sebastian, torture looks more like passionate ecstasy and divine beatitude, unabashedly homoerotic.
In his alluring face, death appears to be lascivious, almost sadomasochistic agony, as if he had willingly taken on the arrows to turn his pain into a performance. The voyeurist gaze of the viewer becomes another arrow piercing his chest. Each arrow, as art historian Camille Paglia writes, is “the aggressive Western eye… solar shafts of Apollo the archer”. In both of Reni’s works, Sebastian becomes the Christian expression of pagan Greek kouroi, the archaic statues of ephebic youths. Sebastian is Hyacinthus, but the arrows that kill him are not the misfired arrows of the god Apollo, but of a punishing society, whether it be the arrows of paganism martyring a saint or the arrows of deadening, homophobic culture.
200 years later, writers in Victorian England were having similar feelings to those I felt towards this painting. For the writers of the Uranian movement, who advocated for homosexual liberation in Victorian England, this line from kouroi to Sebastian meant the saint underpinned their ideas, justifying and intellectually defending male homosexuality through reference to its practice in ancient Greece and its continued (albeit hidden) existence in art. Playwright Oscar Wilde, French poet Marc-Andre Raffalovich and his lover John Gray, poet-priest Gerard Manley Hopkins, photographer Frederick Rolfe, and writer-historian John Addington Symonds all wrote of the Uranian’s devotion to Sebastian. He is dying, passively penetrated with phallic arrows, made effeminate compared to his fellow soldiers who shot him. Through this, he embodies the homosexual man persecuted, in extremis. But in his suffering he obtains this perfection, in his body and his gaze to heaven, and this perfection has formed him into a lodestar for these men, both artistically and spiritually.
While Oscar Wilde was imprisoned, in a state of persecution akin to Sebastian’s, he asked in The Ballad of Reading Gaol, “How else but through a broken heart / May Lord Christ enter in?”. The moment that Reni depicts in his painting is the moment that Christ has been able to enter Sebastian through his wounds. Raffalovich writes that Sebastian was a “young God, naked and bleeding… wounding and wounded”. Manley Hopkins associated “perverse desire” with “the contemplation of bodies for a religious cause”. In a note accompanying his poem The Grave of Keats, Wilde describes Sebastian as having “crisp, cluttering brown hair and red lips”, and calls him a “Priest of Beauty slain before his time”. Sebastian becomes this personification of beauty through his persecution, as in his wounds is a vision of suffering made beautiful.
The experience of both beauty and suffering speaks to repressed and pained homoerotic desire—the love that Oscar Wilde’s former lover, Alfred Douglas, called “the love that dare not speak its name”, and that Addington Symonds called “l’amour de l'impossible”—impossible love. I find this intellectualising about having to live without loving very sad, fulfilling what French writer Michel del Castillo called the ‘Sebastian dilemma’, questioning “how to live without living, how to live without loving?”. After the Wilde trials and the great increase in homophobia that followed, many of these men converted to Catholicism and rejected their previous lives of decadent homosexuality. Yet this did not distance them from Sebastian. Rather, his light as their lodestar continued to burn. Raffalovich adopted the name Sebastian after he was baptised, becoming Andre Sebastian Raffalovich. While he was imprisoned, Wilde adopted the moniker Sebastian Melmoth. Gray continued to write poetry referencing the saint, and instead of his poetry becoming less homoerotic, it became more. Male homosexuality always entails a degree of suffering, as society is structured against same sex love, so Sebastian’s beautiful suffering and artistic dying has always been so alluring for homosexual men. In Sebastian is a vision of pain made beautiful. In their art, they attempted to do the same, turning the pain of living without loving into something beautiful.
49 years after Wilde died, Japanese writer Yukio Mishima published Confessions of a Mask. The book is written as fiction, but really, it is a thinly-veiled memoir about Mishima uncovering his own homosexuality. Sebastian and Reni’s paintings of him are as present here as they are in Uranian poetry, and here again the saint was the lodestar for his sexuality and aesthetic disposition, guiding him in his artistic endeavours and his relationship to his body. Mishima recounts his main character, Kochan’s, first experience ejaculating when he found a reproduction of Reni’s Sebastian in one of his father’s books. He compares the expulsion of the heterosexual boy he had fallen in love with in high school to Sebastian’s martyrdom, imagining him “stripped naked” and “bound to a tree”. He blames the discovery of Reni’s painting to the beginning of his “bad habit” and he recounts habitually putting his hands above his head when he was undressed, adopting the pose of Sebastian in Reni’s first style. Later, in 1963, photographer Eikoh Hosoe photographed Mishima as Reni’s Sebastian, with his hands tied behind him and arrows in his chest. For Mishima, the attraction of Sebastian lay in the idea of a boisterous, hypermasculine soldier reduced to a state of complete vulnerability through penetration.
Each chapter of Mishima's life brought him closer to the life and death of Sebastian in his own homo-fascist way—Mishima was both a homosexual and an ultra-nationalist. This habitual adopting of Sebastian’s pose and him being photographed as Sebastian is like Wilde and Raffalovich adopting Sebastian’s name. Sebastian’s influence upon them went further than guiding them artistically as a lodestar—he formed part of their very identity and how they wanted to be perceived by the world. His life reached a similarly dramatic conclusion as Sebastian’s. He committed seppuku in 1970, after failing to rally the Japanese Self-Defence Force to throw off the post-war Constitution and revive the patriotism of pre-war Japan. He did not die after cutting open his stomach. His friend, Masakatsu Morita, who was assigned the job of severing his head to avoid prolonging his suffering, failed to do so three times before someone else had to step in and do it. Mishima’s death was a performance in the vein of Sebastian’s. I have read about his death much more than his writing, because I find it has an almost camp ridiculousness about it—committing seppuku while wearing a headband with the quote “To be reborn seven times to serve the country”, after failing a coup to restore direct imperial rule, 25 years after Japan had been defeated. Here, this old queen was suffering, but suffering as an expression of his aesthetic vision for Japan and the world. Sebastian suffered in the same way, after failing to subdue Rome to his own Christian vision for the world. Mishima’s dagger is the arrow that killed his lodestar, Sebastian.
After Mishima’s death, in the mid-70s on a beach in Sardinia, gay and weird filmmaker par excellence Derek Jarman was shooting his own interpretation of the saint’s life, Sebastiane. On this beach, a group of all-male Roman soldiers, speaking only Latin for the whole film, are abandoned to their own boredom. Naturally, homosexuality follows. Sebastian, being (in the words of Jarman) a “doolally Christian…Catholic closet case”, refuses “a good fuck”. Like Mishima and the Uranians, Jarman identifies Sebastian as not necessarily heterosexual, but celibate in a way that is more erotic than the other soldiers who are unafraid to sleep with each other. Because he refuses to have sex with the character Severus, Severus orders his execution. Jarman said Sebastian “sports his wounds on a thousand altars like a debutante”. Again, like in Reni’s paintings, Sebastian’s suffering is a self-conscious performance put on for the viewer, just as Mishima’s suicide was a performance too.
For Jarman, Sebastian is not so much a lodestar, but a medium through which to explore male sexuality. Even though I am a gay man, I see myself much more in Sebastian, rather than in the other soldiers’ loud sexuality. Some of the most ‘gay’ things I have seen or heard about happened in high school gym change rooms. The Sardinian beach is the equivalent of an all-boys high school. What Jarman is able to understand is that although the actions of the other Roman soldiers appear to make them gay, the contradiction is that in reality their lack of shame in their sexual playing around is the greatest expression of their machismo heterosexuality. The memoirs of gay writers like Christopher Isherwood, Addington Symonds, and Mishima contain the same anecdotes about not taking part in, and sometimes being disgusted by, the messing around of other boys their age at all-male schools. Jarman brings Sebastian down from the sky so he is no longer a lodestar to be looked up to and admired. Rather, In Sebastiane, he is a representation of almost universal gay experiences.
18 years after Sebastiane was released, Jarman died of AIDS. In medieval Europe, Sebastian was prayed to for protection against the Black Death, and is one of the Fourteen Holy Helpers. He is also the patron of those who desire a saintly death. The narrator of gay writer James McCourt’s novel, Time Remaining, about AIDS in New York, describes Sebastian as a link between medieval plague victims and AIDS victims. In Sebastian’s slow and torturous death and in his injuries one can see similarities with the slow deaths and needle wounds of AIDS victims. In Sebastian's performative death is Jarman’s Blue, his final film, where, over a blue screen, he narrates his life with AIDS and his reflections upon his impending death. AIDS left Jarman visually impaired to the point where he could only see in shades of blue. Like Reni’s Sebastian, Jarman’s reflection upon his own suffering allowed him to create beautiful things, allowing him to live on through his art.
Sebastian’s wounds are the wounds suffered by Wilde, Beardsley, Douglas, Raffalovich, Grey, Addington Symonds, Isherwood, Hopkins, Mishima, Jarman, and McCourt. All of these artists’ visions of suffering made beautiful attest to that gay sensibility I see in myself and other homosexuals in my own life — turning everything, even one’s own death, into a performance.