Martyrs have held a unique place in the queer canon. The imaginary of the sacrificial and the realities of state-sanctioned murder are profound for a roughly assembled constellation of identities that have had to hide away and deny aspects of themselves and their wants. Dominic Janes calls martyrdom a “social formation,” in that it needs a witness and that it arrives via mediation.[1] The death becomes less vital than the story that is told. Martyrs are built in myth more than a choice made by the devoted and faithful individual. It is this quality that led to the renaming of those who died from AIDS as saints—both an upliftment of the fact of their lives and a political statement that their deaths were political and enacted by those with power. The martyr, for queerness, becomes a tool of making “the homosexual self,” as a transhistorical and future state.

Saint Sebastian, a 3rd century Christian who was tied to a post and shot with arrows—is the clearest and richest example. His martyrdom by arrows became one of the most popular references for European sacred art often depicting Sebastian with an angelic young face, near nude body, and an ecstatic but tortured death (Guido Reni’s [1615] being the most famous). As Richard A. Kaye has discussed, throughout the 20th century, Saint Sebastian has “simultaneously served as an object of lustful devotion and a projection of an idealized ‘homosexual self’.”[2] For Mishima Yukio, that idealization comes in suicidal nationalism; for David Wojnarowicz, the patron saint of disease marks the dis-ease of queerness and the disease of state sanctioned apathy at AIDS; for F. Holland Day, a melancholic campy narcissism; and for Derek Jarman, an erotic queer political imaginary. In each, Sebastian’s martyrdom opens possibilities of becoming, of transforming into what they need—a queer myth in sacrificial death.

Released in 2016, João Pedro Rodrigues’s The Ornithologist offers another angle on the queer martyrdom in dwelling far more pointedly in the act of becoming that martyrdom offers. The film follows Fernando, an ornithologist tracking the migration patterns of rare birds along a river in Portugal. After his kayak flips over in the river’s rapids, Fernando must find his way out of the forest. Each encounter he has along his way is in fact a reimagining of the miracles of Saint Anthony of Padua—a 13th century monk and a sort of patron saint of Portugal. St. Anthony guiding two lost nuns on a pilgrimage a century after his death becomes two Chinese lesbians lost on a pilgrimage to Spain who drug Fernando and bind him like a shibari St. Sebastian. The famous sacred art of Anthony holding the Christ child in his right arm instead sees Fernando having sex with a deaf and mute goatherder named Jesus before seeing that the goatherder has his lost sweater and accidentally killing him. And St. Anthony’s sermon to the fishes is restaged as Fernando discovering Koi fish in a mountain pond and deciding to abandon his old life, throwing away his passport and medications. But the most subtle of Rodrigues’s nods to the saint is in the name of his protagonist: Fernando, the original name of St. Anthony before he became a Francisican friar. 

Like many of his previous films, Rodrigues is concerned with abject becomings. His first film, O Fantasma (2000) sees a man follow his desires fully and unrepentantly slowly becoming-dog. While his second film, Two Drifters (2005), leaves animality for gender play when a gay man dies and possesses the body of a woman to continue his relationship with his boyfriend leading to a pregnancy. The Ornithologist pulls on this same thread of becoming. Throughout the film, we see Fernando from the perspectives of birds. Through a fish-eye lens, we see a man who looks similar to Fernando and yet slightly smaller, more frail. This rupture of Fernando’s image is fully completed when Jesus’s brother kills Fernando, and in doing so, fully transforms Fernando into Anthony as we see the actor replaced by the film’s director, Rodrigues. Fernando is dead; Anthony is born. This is not transcendent ecstasy as we see with Sebastian, but an abject one that does not propel the self towards a “better” or more “divine” state, but merely towards somewhere else. Rather than a reification, it is a feverish escape. A dog let off the lease to run unthinkingly elsewhere.

Georges Bataille describes the “fundamental connection between religious ecstasy and eroticism”: violence.[3] To reach the divine, the martyr dies, usually violently, but that death is more than just bodily. To become a martyr, to be canonized, to be a conduit of God, is to evacuate the self. Eroticism too finds its power in the ecstatic collapse of the self into the other. To see myself as flowing into and from another. In both, it is a violence in that it demands a sublimation of the self—the I sacrificed for Him. Rodrigues’s queer vision of martyrdom reposes this away from the purifying annihilation of the religious divine towards the abjectifying release of profanity. This is not to say freedom or liberation but merely a release. A dropping of the facade of wholeness through giving up what we have been given to make what we desire.

There is a cliche many of us homosexuals say when we come out: “I haven’t changed. I’m still me.” It’s true, certainly. We have not necessarily changed; we have just shared a new detail. But it is also not true, not for all of us. To find your queerness and to hold it can change you. The performance can be dropped while the voice no longer has to. The hidden can be shown, but also something new can be made. For some, queerness is an end to who we were so that we can become elsewhere. In his restaging of Saint Anthony’s life, Rodrigues makes martyrdom useful for queerness. A tool and practice of unmaking for becoming. Just as Fernando Martins de Bulhões was unmade so Anthony of Padua could be, St. Anthony was unmade for Fernando, the ornithologist, who is unmade for Anthony, the resurrected, who is unmade by Rodrigues, the director. In each, the self is offered up so that something else can occur, a new abstraction that keeps solidifying necessitating a new abstraction. Rodrigues queers this cliched ebb and flow by showing the self is not an essential aspect of continuing. Martyrdom not as transcendence towards God but as an abjection elsewhere.  

Work cited:

[1] Dominic Janes, Visions of Queer Martyrdom: from John Henry Newman to Derek Jarman (The University of Chicago Press, 2015): 9.

[2] Richard A. Kaye, “Losing His Religion: Saint Sebastian as Contemporary Gay Martyr,” in Outlooks: Lesbian and Gay Sexualities and Visual Cultures, eds. Peter Home and Raina Lewis (New York: Routledge, 1996): 101.

[3] Georges Bataille, The Tears of Eros, trans. Peter Connor (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1989): 206-207.