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Popular Culture Review
sadomasochistic scene that involves nails and an almost naked man.4 In the
eighteenth century, Sade made no mistakes about it and joyfully recycled the
whole affair in more than one memorable and voluptuous orgy. In a more
subdued, contained manner, the film Priest, which tells the story of a
homosexual catholic priest in England, also points to the same sensual evidence:
the protagonist, a sincerely fervent believer, tries desperately to pray to a lifesize crucifix but cannot avoid being aroused by the exposed, luscious thighs of
the savior. The protagonist faces a serious dilemma of which he is barely
conscious: the most symbolic visual microstructure of his religion has the power
to stimulate his sexual hunger. Naturally, prayer, then, gives all its value to the
term “sacrifice/'
The power and violence of the implicit sexual tension contained within
Christian iconography transcends geographical and cultural barriers, as is shown
by the Japanese writer Yukio Mishima, who (in his Confessions o f a Mask)
mentions a reproduction of “The Martyrdom of San Sebastian’’ as a key moment
in his sexual evolution. The young and blonde ephebus tied to a tree and
transpierced by several arrows is, indeed, irresistible and has become a cultural
staple within the contemporary gay community, as he was during the Italian
renaissance. Furthermore, and in socio-cultural terms, the endless strain of
pedophilia scandals which lately have stained the catholic church could be partly
explained in semiotic terms by the imagery of the church itself. As a woman, the
virgin Mary is denied feminine form, cloaked in shapeless garb, and exists only
as the ideal anti-sexual being: she is the immaculate conception; that is to say,
the only way to resolve the sticky problem of sexual activity. She is reduced to a
mere function, that of asexually producing the savior. On the other hand, little
angels—theologically speaking, sexless by definition—that ornament churches
tend to be entirely nude; furthermore, one can easily catch glimpses of their
perfectly round and adorable cheeks in between the lyres and the clouds. In
other words, the only visual presence of flesh in the catholic universe is that of
naked little angels. After a few centuries of this iconographic diet—bondage,
torture, symbolic penetrations by pointy objects, and naked little angels on the
ceiling—the catholic unconscious logically turns to pedophilia.5 Needless to say,
cherubs do figure on the menu of more than one very graphic Sadian episode, a
figure of speech which leads us to consider the mystery of transubstantiation,
hence adding anthropophagi and vampirism to the list above. F