'The cult of Saint Sebastian': How a brutally tortured 3rd-Century saint became a gay icon

A Roman soldier who was killed for his Christian beliefs, Sebastian has been a hero for gay men over the centuries – from Oscar Wilde to Keith Haring. Here's why.

Loaded and emotive, the term "gay icon" is often applied to resilient female celebrities like Judy Garland (embattled), Cher (high camp) and Madonna (tireless). When Dusty Springfield died in 1999, Pet Shop Boys singer Neil Tennant was asked why his friend and collaborator had become "such a gay icon". Tennant's response, as he recalled in a 2024 interview with Mojo, was pretty dismissive: "To call her a gay icon is simply to marginalise her. It's to say, 'She's only of interest to gay people.'"

Tennant made a good point regarding Springfield, but attaining "gay icon" status can also be celebratory and subversive. This is certainly the case with Saint Sebastian, a Roman soldier who was killed for his religious beliefs in AD288, during a sustained persecution of Christians by the emperor Diocletian.

Sebastian is venerated as a saint in both the Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches, which have long disseminated the legend that he was clubbed to death after berating Diocletian for his "sinful" pagan views.

However, it is an earlier attack on Sebastian by the emperor's henchmen, in which he was tied to a tree and pelted with arrows, that has made this unknowable martyr an enduring muse to artists of repute – there are no fewer than 14 depictions of Sebastian in the National Gallery, London's collection – and a perennial conduit for gay desire.

How the cult of Saint Sebastian grew

Sebastian's emergence as a gay icon can be traced back to the culturally transformative Renaissance period of the 14th to 17th Centuries, when prominent artists including Guido Reni, El Greco and Sandro Botticelli depicted his arrow-pierced body with a smouldering homoerotic subtext. 

Daniel Fountain, a senior lecturer in art history and visual culture at University of Exeter in the UK, tells the BBC that these arrows are generally perceived by art historians as a phallic "symbol of penetrative sex and queerness". People's History Museum director Clare Barlow, who curated Tate Britain's 2017 exhibition Queer British Art 1861–1967, believes the arrows "take on a huge psychosexual significance" in a lot of these paintings whether this was the artist's intention or not. "And the fact that Sebastian is often painted as a very beautiful youth only makes him more entrancing," she adds.

During the Renaissance period, when attitudes towards homosexuality were much less tolerant, artistic depictions of Sebastian's lithe, desirable body became fashionable and fascinatingly ambiguous. Much like Michelangelo's 16th-Century masterpiece David, which crystallised an ideal of male beauty in marble form, paintings of this beautiful, persecuted saint served as an acceptable conduit for gay male desire.

Still, Barlow points out that it is "often very hard to track whether this was a particular artist's overt intention, or whether it was simply read into their work by a community of viewers who were hungry for representation". In some cases, it may well be a little of both.

Over time, though, it's fair to say that Sebastian blossomed into what we might now describe as a highbrow queer reference. According to writer performer and educator Holly James Johnston, who paid tribute to Sebastian in 2025 with a living sculpture performance at The Wallace Collection........

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