“Touch my body, bro”: Sex, Death, and the Male Body

This is the third article in a series entitled “My Mediterranean Adventures”

I spent my first morning in Milan walking around the Cimitero Monumentale. Known for its elaborate headstones and mausolea, the Monumentale is the resting place of several well-known Milanesi and is frequented by locals and tourists. The juxtaposition of the morbid-yet-artistic ethos of the cemetery against the quickly modernizing city opened my eyes to some new postmodern *cracks*.

Among the most ornate of the headstones are dramatic sculptures of people in mourning. I was struck in particular by the statues that depicted scantily dressed figures. I’d guess that even the most liberated of Americans would get uncomfortable seeing a topless woman sitting upon the grave of a loved one. While Americans claim to be very open about sex and the human body, we seem to have a hard time recognizing their undeniable connection to death.

Our understanding of sexuality is informed by the consumerist mentality that our capitalistic culture has engendered, and the immanentistic worldview that underpins it all. It shouldn’t be surprising to Americans that our formerly Puritanical culture gave way to a consumer-capitalist one. Once the transcendent was divorced from the physical realm, it wasn’t long until belief in transcendence disappeared altogether. Now, sex is about feeling good and expressing yourself. Don’t think about the deeper and long term implications of entering into a sexual relationship, just have fun! And use protection.

Having been immersed in a sacramental worldview for several centuries, the interconnectedness of sexuality, death, and transcendent meaning is more apparent to Italians. Perhaps this is why it’s not so scandalous for them to see a nude body sitting on nonna’s grave.

I couldn’t help but reflect more specifically about the implications of these differing worldviews for the ways male beauty and sexuality are portrayed. In one of the most prominent sections of the cemetery were two nude men, posing pensively upon adjacent tombs.

“That’s so gay,” would have been the reaction of most of my students upon seeing those two nude statues beside each other.

“That’s so unimaginative,” I would likely have responded. The idea that homoeroticism constitutes an expression of sexual love analogous to that of heterosexuality is unique to a post-puritanical, post-Enlightenment, immanentistic worldview.

Across the way was a billboard for DSQUARED2 men’s underwear, with an underwear-clad model spreading his legs open for the viewers/consumers to gaze upon. In this moment, I was reminded how quickly that same immanentistic worldview of my own upbringing has been making its way across the Atlantic.

In a sacramental view, love between men was indeed valued and exalted, but as something totally distinct from opposite sex conjugal relations. Jesus, the God-man and origin of the sacraments, reveals himself as the divine Bridegroom…to both his female and male followers, who together make up his Bride, the Church. Christ’s nearly nude body, which is commemorated today on crucifixes around the world, presents itself to its Bride as her greatest object of affection.

Christian men (especially monks) throughout history have employed various channels to express their devotion to the body of their divine Spouse. Some examples that might shake the sensibilities of us postmoderns include John the Apostle, Bernard of Clairvaux, and John of the Cross, who demonstrated their affection to Christ through allusions to bodily gestures and embraces.

In those men’s respective cultures, bodily gestures of love for another man were not considered to be sexual. Sex happened in the context of marriage, where a man and a woman committed their lives to each other—to the point of death. The ethos of Christian marriage is centered upon the image of the Cross-in which two distinct and complementary elements unite themselves to each other in love, in a bodily way, pouring out their very beings for the sake of the other, and being open to the new life that is born of their union.

In a sacramental culture, same sex love and even sodomy itself were not considered “sexual” because of the type of “matter” involved in the exchange. The body—matter, played a role in giving meaning to the form—to the expression of love. The sacramental understanding of the relationship between form and matter is radically different from how Americans perceive the relationship between love, sex, and bodies. This is why what Americans call love is less explicitly connected to bodily self-gift and bearing fruit, and tends more toward an emotivist-capitalist ideal of gratification and acquiring of “goods” (ie “getting me some d*ck/p*ssy”).

As I passed through the cemetery, I thought back to a book I read several summers ago about the way people with same sex attractions navigated the culture of Victorian England. The author (and my friend) Fred Roden asserts that Victorian queers flocked to the Catholic and Anglo-Catholic Churches because their sacramental worldview consisted of cultural and vocational spaces that were much more hospitable to queers/sexual deviants than were those offered in the lower church denominations. The valorization of flesh, art, and celibacy (itself a “queer” expression of sexuality to low-church Protestants) made the higher Churches a haven for those who experience SSA.

As I looked at that nearly nude model, I thought about everything he represents: a supreme reduction of what his body once signified. Intimacy has been reduced to consumption. The body has been reduced to a mechanism for gratification as well as an incentive to spend one’s money. And public spaces are reduced to room for advertising. Out go transcendence, sacrifice, nuance, and gratuitous spaces of beauty. The nude male is now the subject of consumption, whether by the mega corporation or by the homosexual groom.

As Italians attempts to shake off their sacramental heritage, I wonder if they’ll recognize the rich and comprehensive expressions of intimacy that their “archaic” tradition afforded them. If not, at least they’ll have good-looking underwear models to distract them from the flattening out of their culture.