ANTINOUS THE GAY GOD

SAINT JEAN GENET

SAINT ARIAN AND THEOTYKHOS

ON April 15th the Religion of Antinous remembers two saints who lived in different ages and who lived in different cultures but who shared a belief that a man must be true to himself and must stick to his convictions, regardless what others demand of him.

St. Jean Genet

St. Arian, his Body-Guards and St. Theotykhos

Saint Jean Genet was one of the first and most modern gay poets, whose elegance and sordid love for the street life was unprecedented, and has never been matched.

Among his most fervent desires, expressed from the very beginning was that he should one day be elevated to Sainthood. We of the Religion of Antinous, fully and faithfully, take faith in the spirit of Saint Jean Genet, through whom the eternal voice of Antinous spoke with the most voluptuousness and vain-glory. Saint Jean Genet died on this day in Paris in1986.

Saint Arian was the governor of Antinoe, and oversaw the persecution of Christians under orders from Diocletian. He was the governor who ordered the deaths of Saints Apollonius and Philemon, whose martyrdom we observed last week. An executioner' s arrow aimed at Philemon ricocheted off his body, and shrapnel from the arrowhead blinded Arian. As he was dragged off to be drowned with his "dear friend" Apollonius, Philemon swore that Arian's eye would be restored to wholeness if he converted to Christianity at Philemon's grave and rubbed the martyr's ashes into the wound.

Arian was in fact healed and he did in fact convert to the Christian faith and was baptized together with all his household and bodyguards.

Diocletian heard of this and had Arian and his bodyguards arrested. For their faith and devotion, they voluntarily went to torture and were sentenced to death. They were cast into the river and drowned — an ironic ending for an official and his coterie who had lived in the Sacred City founded on the spot where Antinous drowned. Among the body-guards the eldest was the Martyr Theotykhos, remembered together with the other saints.

We of the Religion of Antinous recognize the mistaken zeal of the Governor Arian, who took the lives of so many Christians in our Holy City Antinoopolis.

St. Jean Genet and St. Arian were men who were prisoners of an unrelenting and intolerant age.