Sebastian: Homoerotic Icon - Renaissance Italy

This book will not only cover the lives of the artists--painters and sculptors--who brought to sensual life a beautiful boy in the guise of a saint, it will also delve into the political aspects of the Renaissance, the reasons for the fertile grounds that gave birth to a period nearly equal to that of our most glorious ancestors, the Greeks. The Golden Age of homoeroticism came to a screeching halt after the Age of Pericles, with the Roman conquest. Night descended over hallowed Hellas where the Thebans had passed a law proclaiming ''that it is illegal for anyone to maintain that sex between men is not beautiful.'' Romans were no strangers to the unique bond formed between males, but somewhere a wrench was thrown into the works, so that even the greatest of them all, Caesar, had to refute his having been bedded by King Nicomedes. During the Middle Ages the English king Henry II, no tyro when it came to affection for boys, nonetheless just tolerated his son Richard Coeur de Lion's love for the young French dauphin Philippe II. In modern times prewar Berlin had thousands of rent-boys. Hitler gassed them all, and the fatherless sons of soldiers that grew up at war's end, in the ruins, were the continent's Hershey Bar whores, even more available than before the conflagration. Homophobic harassment followed in even the most civilized countries, in Central Park until Stonewall '69, and here where I live, in France, until just this year, and the legal right for a boy to marry the lad of his choice. But there were outbursts here too, against the law, and even in the wondrous freedom of the States a guy would need undaunted courage to announce, to his locker-room buddies, his preference for them over the chirping maidens in the showers just next door. So when a boy, in our times, looks on a painting of the nearly totally nude Sebastian, his tear-filled eyes turned up to the heavens, the arrows piercing white skin trickling with blood from open wounds, his natural desire is to stem Sebastian's suffering, suffering familiar to gays since the day they realized their difference. Mocked, gassed, burned at the stake, humiliated in the gym, beaten up in parks, how would it be possible not to identify with the beautiful, youthful, suffering Sebastian? In this book we'll discover the wonders that stirred the peoples of the Renaissance, the famous Cenci murder, as well as the boys who would make themselves kings through impersonation--a story so fantastic that Ferdinand and Isabella had news rushed to them with the arrival of each ship. We will cover, in depth, the sexuality of the times, a sexuality limited in comparison to that enjoyed by the Greeks, but free enough to allow men to fully appreciate the true treasure of Renaissance Italy: it's magnificent lads.