Virgin Envy by Jonathan A. Allan

Author:Jonathan A. Allan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Regina Press
Published: 2016-11-15T18:11:25+00:00

PART 3:

MEN BE VIRGINS TOO: QUEERING VIRGINITY

Chapter 5

The Queer Saint: Male Virginity in Derek Jarman’s Sebastiane

Kevin McGuiness

British film director Derek Jarman (1942–94) ranks among the most celebrated filmmakers of queer cinema. Prior to his untimely demise because of complications from AIDS, he produced a number of provocative and avant-garde works. One of his most challenging and poetic works is his 1976 film Sebastiane,1 a fictional recounting of the final days in the life of the Christian saint executed for his religious convictions. Sebastiane functions as a mixture of narrative drama and experimental cinema, and it draws tremendously from the plethora of historical artworks that addresses the saint’s martyrdom.

The film depicts Saint Sebastian as a chaste religious zealot within the hedonistic world of the ancient Roman Empire who sublimates his sexual desires and redirects them toward God. His refusal to submit to the sexual solicitations of his male comrades, particularly those of his superior, Severus, indirectly results in his death. Jarman’s depiction of the virginal saint’s life is fraught with eroticism, and the elaborate execution scene at the conclusion of the film functions as a symbolic gang rape, violently reconciling the sexual tension that persists throughout the film. The homoerotic connotations of Sebastian’s death are explored in vivid terms through Jarman’s use of cinematography. In this chapter, I reveal the means by which Jarman communicates both Sebastian’s virginity and repressed homosexuality through his use of imagery associated with historical images of the saint in both literature and painting.

Numerous art historians and scholarly writers, including Germaine Greer and Richard Kaye, have commented on the erotic undertones present in historical images of the saint. Within renderings of Sebastian, the notion of sexual penetration is manifested through the symbolic arrows that puncture his flesh. Death and sexual intercourse are bound together in this scene, serving to illustrate the analogous notion of orgasm as the petite mort. Sebastian moans in agony and pleasure as his flesh is violated in a process akin to sexual penetration. His “beautiful demise” functions as a metaphor for the first bite of forbidden fruit and the shedding of virginal blood, a concept that takes centre stage in Jarman’s film.

Employing a methodology of semiotics, I examine in this chapter the visual language used in the film and the implicit relationship that Jarman builds among the themes of male virginity, sexual penetration, and death. I explore these ideas predominantly on a symbolic level, conveyed to the reader through the employment of signs and motifs appropriated from the history of artistic representations of Sebastian. Through the act of sexual transgression, represented by the arrows that penetrate him at the conclusion of the film, his symbolic virginity is lost, and his death occurs. Jarman therefore implicitly communicates the idea that sex and death, embodied in the figure of Sebastian and his chastity, are inextricably tied together.

Jarman and Sebastiane

Sebastiane marks the directorial debut of Jarman, a canonical figure in first-wave European queer cinema. He completed the film, made in 16mm, on a budget of ₤30,0002 provided by an anonymous Italian businessman.

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