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In the fourth decade of the second century of the Roman Empire, a new standard for male beauty is achieved. It is the haunting seductiveness of a dead Greek boy, almost a man, immortalized the moment his bronze imago is liberated from its paraffin prison. So perfect that he steals the paradoxically feminine and androgynous from Aphrodite and Hermaphroditus both, he will become the epitome of male beauty for the next two-thousand years.

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Indeed, he is an epitome in the literal sense of the Greek, “to cut short,” for the boy was not yet twenty years of age at the time of his tragic drowning in the Nile. This boy, Antinous of Bithynia, was an imperial Favorite that much of the empire had seen with their own eyes during his travels with Hadrian. His undressed genius, in bronze and marble and alabaster, already dressed the baths and gardens of the emperor’s villa. 

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But fate necessitates that this statue be true to living memory and capture the second-century’s imagination of the divine. And so, an artist-sculptor from the Aphrodisian School in Rome is summoned by a grief-stricken emperor to Athens and begins their meticulous work on a bronze prototype. For the first time in hundreds of years, a new immortal likeness is created, not merely the rebranding of the existing pantheon, but an Olympic transformation of a boy who had been flesh and blood. 

 

Perhaps Hadrian rejects several plaster masters and demands precision before the sculptor finally renders the impossible. Perhaps the artist, trained in the creative height of classical Greek form, waited their whole life to give Rome what it now hungers for: impeccable detail on a larger-than-life scale; unnatural smoothness next to incomprehensibly real texture; a polish that could both tease light and frame terrible shadows.

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Picking up their chisel, a marble Gemini emerges from sedate stone. The head is lowered and turned slightly to the left, as if to show off the deeply drilled messy locks that form a crown of curls spilling down the neck and forehead. Prominent, almost horizontal eyebrows make the exotic eyes even darker. The nose is not aquiline, but wide and severely straight, and ends just above supple, pomegranate lips. Broad shoulders and a full chest juxtapose the delicateness of the nipple. Soft, ample thighs enclose pubescent male genitals.

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Mummified in wax, plaster and terracotta castings, thousands more bronze gods are born for distribution throughout the empire. They inspire other artists to sculp medallions, which once approved by the obsessive emperor, are cut into die and minted as coins and talismans. At the feet of this immortalized beauty, a cult forms. Shrines and temples ascend the Greek-speaking world. If the emperor is possessed, the empire is insatiable. Replicas and imitations abound. Over thirty cities begin to mint their own coins of him. 

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Athens, Mantineia, Bithynia and Antinoopolis each host games to Antinous, the Antinoeia.  Another sculptor imagines a colossal bronze statue of Antinous for the games on a Titanic scale, standing as the nude Dionysus, with the gods signature long-platted hair that is the envy of a goddess. A replica of this Antinous, in marble and wood, rises, implacable and terrible, as a temple colossus in Frascati, Italy. It is this Antinous the 18th century art historian, Johann Winckelmann, called “the glory and crown of art in this age.” Indeed, Napolean will fall for him and pay a record sum to the Borghese to move his head from Villa Mondragone to his own residence. 

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To the athletes and artists competing for his glory in the Antinoeia, he is the penultimate hero, the mortal who won immortality. But in the competition for the soul of the second century, there are two new entries into the race that no one is betting on yet, who resemble each other more than they resemble any of the classical pantheon. One might mistake them at this distance for the twin horse riders, the Dioscuri. In fact, Celsus, writing at the end of the second century felt little need to distinguish the flourishing new cults: the beautiful, self-sacrificed and immortal youth from Bithynia, and the immaculate, self-sacrificed and resurrected redeemer of Calvary.

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It is no coincidence that almost all the Christian apologists will go on to attack the cult of Antinous. Tertullian of Carthage compares Antinous with public harlots and with a corrupted Ganymede. Clement of Alexandria blames the Hadrian for sexual and aesthetic violations of his lover, while his pupil, Origen, who had his own genitals castrated to prove his purity, condemned the cult as demonic. Whether a state religion enforced by an egomaniacal emperor, the worship of sodomy in the guise of beauty, or, as Origen admits, real magic albeit conjured by Egyptian necromancers, the Church Fathers agree on one point: it is on the cross of sexual immorality that the cult of Antinous should be crucified and buried.

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But archeology and Freud remind us that what is buried deeply is rarely buried forever.  Everywhere in late antiquity, images of Antinous are destroyed or mutilated by barbarians and Christians alike. The statue of Antinous at Leptis Magna, like Origin, famously had its genitals removed. The statue at Eleusis was smashed to pieces in the taurobolic ditches. The statue of Antinous at Delphi, lovingly polished for centuries, was toppled in a barbarian incursion, losing both arms. At Hadrian’s Villa, multiple statues of Antinous were found desecrated in a huge pit hastily dug in the sacred grove of Dodona. And the colossus at Frascati, though in good enough condition to grace Napoleon’s palace, was beheaded before it was carefully interred into the earth for posterity.

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Even before the relics of antiquity started being exhumed and dusted off as decorations for papal palaces and models for Christianizing Renaissance artists, however, it was the very scandal of Antinous that rendered him immortal. Like that one uncle your parents never talk about, Christendom could never completely vanquish the same-sex lover of a pagan Emperor that the early church was forced to spill ink condemning, no matter how badly she wanted her children to forget him. Not surprisingly, her children grew up to be fascinated by him.

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In Stations of the Cross Dresser, Andrew Saint Flos imagines an alternative New Orleans where the cult of Antinous triumphed over its Christian counterpart. Stations consists of digitally conceived works depicting nine historic churches and cathedrals in New Orleans, traditional sites of pilgrimage on Good Friday’s “Nine Churches Walk,” each  superimposed with images of Antinous as relic and object of worship. These sites are reconceptualized as “stations of gender and sexual development.” Each is accompanied by a poem reimagining Freud’s “Oedipal Theory,” thus offering new psychosexual stages of development for emergent queer, trans and non-binary individuals.

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Art and theory are tied together by two additional components: an audio of a fictional retelling of the “Sacred Nights” brings the sacred and subversive aspects of the cult to life as viewers move through the space, and a wig modelled on the Louvre’s Antinous Mondragone functions as a queer altarpiece. Each of these elements invite pilgrims to the space to reflect on the role of myth, oral history, cult and community in shaping queer identities. Disciples are invited to leave a votive heart above at their favorite station until He returns.