Gay playwright Tennessee Williams used the saint's name for the martyred character Sebastian in his 1957 play, Suddenly Last Summer. In the 1890s, Irish poet Oscar Wilde, himself also called a gay icon, was incarcerated and exiled for his sexuality, and adopted the pseudonym 'Sebastian Melmoth' after the saint.
Kaye states that 'Contemporary gay men have seen in Sebastian at once a stunning advertisement for homosexual desire (indeed, a homoerotic ideal), and a prototypical portrait of a tortured closet case.' The 3rd century Christian martyr Saint Sebastian is one of the earliest known gay icons, due to his depiction in artwork as a beautiful, agonied young man.
Saint Sebastian, history's first recorded male gay icon Saint Sebastian
