Why is St Sebastian such a strong gay icon? I post him here for Pride week (and having snapped this yesterday - don't you just love the colour). Surely it can't be the (almost) camp posture, I mean camp wasn't invented in the fourteenth century, was it? And to be honest, the history of the character the martyrdom and picture are based on has little to do with homosexuality - and just for the record, these arrows didn't kill him. Susan Sontag once pointed out that his face never registers the agonies of his body, that his beauty and his pain are eternally divorced from each other. Despite my search though, I can't really find a definitive answer, it just happens to be one of those things, he was adopted as an icon and that adoption evolved over the centuries until even Oscar Wilde decided to become Sebastian Melmoth, when in exile in Paris, for the love that dare not speak its name. You can car dance to this gay singer:
