Contrary to what you might expect if you’ve come across tradwife TikTok, Christianity was once very queer. In fact, non-heterosexual men fundamentally influenced public religious life in the medieval to modern era, including its theology, liturgy, and aesthetics. It was only in the 19th century that Christianity began to straighten out.
The rise of imperial Christianity and the centuries that followed — from roughly the end of the 4th century through the beginning of the 18th century — were largely characterized by restrictive norms around sexuality. All sex outside of marriage was illegal under both civil and canon law, and authorities in both realms, as well as ordinary people, spent a significant amount of time and energy enforcing them. Punishment for violating such laws could result in the death penalty.
While women were disproportionately prosecuted for having sex outside of marriage, queer men were also common targets. There was, however, one place of sanctuary for these men: the Church. While celibacy did not become a requirement for the priesthood in Western Europe until the 11th century (and never became required in the Greek and Slavonic-speaking churches), bishops had largely ceased to marry by the 5th century, and control of the Christian Church was more or less in the hands of unmarried men. Ecclesiastical life, therefore, was essentially the only place where one could avoid compulsory heterosexuality.
This made the Christian church an incredibly queer space, replete with homoerotic imagery in its liturgy, theology, and art. Michelangelo’s oeuvre, particularly his “Ignudi,” 20 seated young naked men torqued into erotic poses on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel (1508–12), has been the subject of speculation for centuries. The erotic dimension of his 1521 marble sculpture “Risen Christ,” in which a barely clothed Christ with rippling muscles embraces the shaft of a crucifix, housed to this day in the Santa Maria sopra Minerva in Rome, is undeniable. Equally undeniable is the homoeroticism of portrayals of St. Sebastian across a host of paintings by the likes of Sandro Botticelli, Andrea Mantegna, and El Greco. This was queer sexuality hiding in plain sight, unseen by the vast majority of society, who had little frame of reference to acknowledge non-heterosexual desire.
Beginning in the early 19th century, this collective naivety slowly came to an end as the Industrial Revolution unleashed a vast range of societal changes. Most significantly, industrialization decoupled production from the biological family. Up until that point, households had worked together in trades, be that farming, fishing, or artisanship. Marriages were arranged, in no small part to ensure that marital partners possessed the necessary skills to support the family business. Now, individuals were free to make their own money, and as a result, their own lives. People began to leave small villages, where everyone knew you and possibly your entire family for generations, for the relative anonymity of the big city. The result was a sexual revolution.
Victorians get a bad rap today as uptight prudes scandalized by the sight of table legs. Nothing could be further from the truth. From the 1830s through the rest of the century, Victorian society saw what is arguably the most significant relaxation of sexual mores in human history. Men such as Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, a German pioneer of the gay rights movement, came to understand sexual desire for other men as intrinsic to who they were. Lively underground queer subcultures popped up in cities like London, Berlin, New York, and Paris.
The Church’s conservative turn was, somewhat ironically, the result of that growing sexual permissiveness and increased queer visibility in the 1800s. For the first time, queer men who had once seen ecclesiastical life as their only option to express their romantic preferences were presented with alternatives outside the Church. This newfound freedom, notably limited though it was, also increased the visibility of queerness in the public imagination. What had once passed unnoticed was now noticeable, and as such came under more outright condemnation. The tacit centuries-old agreement that had allowed queerness to flourish within Christian life began to unravel. This led to a systematic and vocal opposition to queerness within the Church. The idealized heteronormative family became central to both theological and social understandings of Christian life and took on the anti-queer tone we might expect of it.
The great scientific discoveries of the age also placed religious faith on the defensive to find a new place in society. No longer the explainer of the physical world and of metaphysical realities, religious authorities began to craft a new role for themselves as guardians of morality. The changing sexual landscape provided an excellent stage on which to play out this transformation. Throughout Europe and Latin America, evangelical movements emphasizing personal piety began to emerge, pointing to the heterosexual family — which was, after all, losing its economic importance — as the realm in which spirituality was best found and practiced. The now-familiar glorification of the “traditional family” took shape in this period, a strange departure for a tradition that, at its origin centuries before, had glorified monasticism as a particular kind of holiness.
The result was a backlash against an earlier art now deemed too erotic, and the creation of a new, aggressively heterosexual style of art. Leading religious figures of the day, including the Catholic Cardinal John Henry Newman and Anglican British politician William Ewart Gladstone, wrote with horror about the dangers of eroticism in Christian art. A campaign emerged to cover Michelangelo’s Ignudi, part of a wider effort to remove the sight of male nudes (or near nudes) in religious and secular settings. They disappeared entirely from newly commissioned art, and depictions of religious figures from Christ to John the Baptist were stripped of both erotic and effeminate characteristics.
William Holman Hunt’s “The Light of the World” (1851–54) and Ary Scheffer’s “Christ the Consolator” (1837) are two examples of this new way of depicting the male form in Christian art. The former, one of the most influential images of Christ during its time, drapes him in a long, shapeless tunic and cape. The latter illustrates a gospel story of a paralyzed man brought to Christ. In the painting, the man is semi-clothed and reaching for Jesus in a manner that evokes desire. But that man does not look at us, and Christ does not look at him. Any erotic tension, like that seen in the Sistine Chapel, is gone. In both paintings, Jesus is a robust patriarch who firmly refuses the sexual gaze.
These 19th-century clerics and critics’ efforts to purge the homoerotic elements of Christian art were so successful that we have almost no cultural memory of them here in the 21st century — even when we are staring at it on the world’s most famous ceiling. Understanding this hidden story in the history of Christian art has value beyond the mere cultivation of a robust understanding of art history (always a good thing, of course). This narrative is an important part of the larger religious and political movements of the past two centuries, a journey that has placed issues of gender and sexuality at the center of our ideological and theological discourse, making them chief determinants of our personal identities and political alliances today.
This historical amnesia has consequences for contemporary discussions around sexuality, religion, and art. This summer, for instance, a scene in the Olympics Opening Ceremony featuring drag queens was (wrongly) thought to depict Leonardo Da Vinci’s “The Last Supper” (c. 1495–98), the most famous depiction of the last meal Jesus ate with his disciples before his arrest and crucifixion, causing an international uproar. Yet Da Vinci’s depiction features the quite queer imagery of John the Apostle intimately laid on Christ’s chest, a fact that clearly escaped the legions of angry commentators decrying this performance as part of the “LGBT agenda.” This event is a microcosm of a much larger problem: the attempt to erase the queer history of Christianity to set up a dichotomy between faith and queerness — often to terribly harmful ends.
