The Divine Object of Queer Desire

A response to Stephen Adubato

Were the immortal urge that right and rise
Men’s thoughts, now to bring mine to light
He who ruthless rules Love’s house might
On me yet again in pity turn his eyes.
But since in brief time the body dies
While the soul lives long by divine right,
Its praise or worth carnal sense does slight
In describing what it scarce descries.
And so, poor me! what hearing now will get
The chaste desire that in my bosom burns
From those who others as themselves will judge?
My happy time with him has suffered let
For my dearest lord to false rumour turns,
To tell the truth, they lie who credence grudge.

~Michelangelo Buonarroti, Sonnet G58
from Love Sonnets and Madrigals to Tommaso de’Cavalieri
Translated from the Italian and with an introduction by Michael Sullivan

On a visit to Rome in the spring of 1532, the 57-year-old artist Michelangelo encountered for the first time the 23-year-old Italian nobleman Tommaso de’ Cavalieri.¹² The renowned artist immediately became enamored of the young man, apparently, as the historian Saslow reports, “attracted by the young man’s intelligence, exceptional physical beauty, and deep love of art and acquisitive admiration for antique sculpture.”³ Michelangelo had had other emotionally-charged relationships with other young men before, his relationship with de’Cavalieri would be the deepest and longest lasting such relationship the artist would have. Not only did Michelangelo consent to draw a portrait of the young man–something he reserved for subjects that he considered of infinite beauty–but his love for the young man would inspire him not only to draw several of his surviving works–Ganymede, Tityos, the Fall of Phaethon, and a Children’s Bacchanal–but would also inspire him over the course of years to write a series of poems about and to Tommaso that stand today as striking examples of Italian Renaissance love poetry.⁴

While surviving works and documents, including letters, suggest strongly that Michelangelo was no doubt in love with Tommaso de’Cavalieri and enamored of the young man’s beauty, the relationship was never sexually consummated–even if, as some of the artist’s poetry suggests, any number of the twos’ contemporaries assumed it had been.⁵ Rather, as indicated by the rash of works that flowed therefrom, as well as the way in which Michelangelo figures his desire and its (ultimate) object in the poetry inspired by his male beloved, Tommaso, not only did the artist’s obviously homoerotic desire lead him to think and to act beyond the attainment and enjoyment of mere physical union and pleasure, but Michelangelo himself consciously understood it as so directed: In a richly Platonic vein, the artist understood his beloved’s beauty as a particular showing-forth and participation in the infinite beauty and goodness of God, and that, whatever it may involve, the love inspired and fired by de’Cavalieri’s own beauty and goodness, properly understood and related to, led Michelangelo to think ultimately on God and to seek final union with him.⁶ Consider artist’s Sonnet 83 to Tomasso:

Here in your lovely face I see, my lord,
what in this life no words could ever tell;
with that, although still clothed in fleas, my soul
has often already risen up to God.
And if the foolish, fell, malevolent crowd
point others out as sharing their own ill,
I do not cherish less this yearning will,
the love, the faith, the chaste desire of good.
To wise men there is nothing that we know
more like that fount of mercy whence we come
than every thing of beauty here below;
nor is there other sample, other fruit
of heaven on earth; he who loves you with faith
transcends to God above and holds death sweet.⁷

Whatever anyone else says, where the desire elicited in Michelangelo by his beloved lead is clear: God. For the artist Michelangelo, as for many of his contemporaries in both Europe and elsewhere, love inspired by and for another male perceived as good and beautiful was not necessarily a distraction or temptation but a way by which some hearts and minds could be, and in fact were, raised to the contemplation and love of the ultimate Lover or Beloved, God.⁸

All of the above has been as a preamble to addressing the thesis of Stephen G. Adubato’s article featured in First Things “The Impossible Object of Queer Desire,” as well as the larger, pluriform movement within contemporary conservative Christian circles to refuse to engage honestly and intelligently with the reality of homoerotic desire–represented in the not-so-distant past, for instance, by Michael Hannon’s 2015 First Things essay “Against Heterosexuality,” as well as by the Catechism of the Catholic Church’s all-too-quick and (in)famous dismissal of homoerotic desire as always and everywhere intrinsically disordered, full stop.⁹ Drawing on the work of the gay 20th-century writer Quentin Crisp, whom Adubato takes to have had “deep insights into the metaphysical nature of homoerotic desire,” as well as Camille Paglia and others, and thinking on the implications of the plot of the recent film Queer and the decision by the film’s openly gay director to cast straight men in the roles of the film’s lead gay characters, Adubato argues that homoerotic desire–unlike erotic desires of the member of one sex for someone of the other, it is implied–has as its object something essentially unattainable: “[I]n its essence, homoeroticism is a desire for the impossible, for the mysterious and elusive”–for a truly masculine and manly straight man (or boy, for Adubato, like so much of the contemporary conservative world, cannot make up his mind whether gays are really just pederasts (pedophiles, in common parlance) or whether they really want a manly man) who will reciprocate the desiring homosexual’s desire not as a fellow homosexual would (which, Adubato suggests, would always and everywhere be received on some level by the homosexual as imperfect, defective, not enough) but as only a heterosexual man–a real man–could.¹⁰ Because what the homosexual desires as homosexual is impossible, he must sublimate that desire into an aesthetic or spiritual vocation or face tragedy and his own demise; for, because all homosexuals everywhere desire something impossible, and because only the psycho-biological complementarity of the sexes allows, apparently, for fruitful love and self-gift, homosexual relations tend to be marked by use and the exercise of power of one over the other: each is seeking from the other what the other cannot give, and so each uses, and uses up, the other–and in vain.

But of course, we can and should ask: Is what Adubato argues—or, rather, claims—true? Is it correct to claim, as he does, that homoerotic desire, unlike straight desire, is after something “impossible, mysterious and elusive?” Is it right to suggest that any attempt at a queer relationship is doomed to failure and tragedy on account of the impossibility of the desires of those involved? That there is much promiscuity, heartache, and pain among gays and lesbians, this is no less true of their straight counterparts: people sleep around, and a lot of us are unfortunately after pleasure after fleeting pleasure like a hit of a drug we have developed more and more of a tolerance for—queers and straights, we are all human and all equally human. It is also true that, even if children are a unique and precious good proper to committed romantic relationships between men and women, we have no good reason to think that a straight married couple that cannot ever have children suffer the fate of forever sharing a defective love, one marked by use and the exercise of power thereby; just so, and as intelligence provides us the ability to put different parts of ourselves to different and creative uses, we do not, prima facie, have good reason to think that queer couples, gay or lesbian, are doomed to suffer a different fate than childless marriages.¹¹

Moreover, as thinkers from Thomas Aquinas to Augustine of Hippo have recognized, all desire, and certainly all erotic desires among and toward finite persons, is always and everywhere in this life after an impossible object insofar as that object is God Himself, for God is for us unattainable naturally.¹² Even men and women are always and everywhere after infinitely more than any one finite person, or even all the finite persons put together, could ever provide, and with a desire that no finite person or number of finite persons could ever satisfy. At least in developed countries where arranged marriages are not de rigueur, men and women often spend much time and effort trying to find the right spouse, and many never do; the widespread reality and occurrence of cheating and adultery attest that even if one thinks she or he has found “the one,” someone who will satisfy their longing for love and companionship, as hard times arise and time goes on, the terrible limitations we all have as finite and needful creatures show themselves, and thoughts of and desires for what could have been and what still could be still begin to arise–and, in all too many cases, these thoughts and desires win. For erotic desire is in some way infinite and is ordered to the infinite: one could enjoy a different life, different experiences and experiences of truly good things, with this person or that person–and so on ad infinitum. Even penile-vaginal intercourse, which is the primary site of marital union for many conservatives, is not, and never can be, a real union in being nor a union that can ever even come close to sating the desire for union with goodness, beauty, and being that drives and fires us all in all our longings, loves, and actions. Although a bringing together of parts that fit well together that serves to create in each sexual partner an intense experience of physical pleasure, even ecstasy, one that can lead to the generation of new life, the one whose penis it is and the one whose vagina it is remain completely separate and distinct even through the act of coitus; the interlocking of genitals and the pleasure the resulting friction causes does not real union make. And climax, when or if it comes, ends, and people walk away unsatisfied or wanting more–more, often enough, than one’s partner can give, as those who move from partner to sexual partner out of boredom have always attested. This all makes perfect sense if we attend to erotic desire and, with Plato and those who follow him, notice that whatever we desire, including erotically, is desired under the aspect of goodness, and no finite thing or collection of finite things can ever exhaust the possibilities for goodness.¹³ And our pursuit and enjoyment of good things, including erotically, indicates as much practically: we can always enjoy more, always appreciate more; within us is as if an abyss that no finite thing, no matter how hard we try and how long we search, can fill.

The basic question, then, and one that neither Adubato nor his fellow contemporary conservative Christians wish to engage (if they even realize it is a question to engage at all), is one of erotic desire–of eros: Is erotic desire–or eros, as it is called by Plato and those working in the tradition of Plato–essentially good, essentially bad, or essentially neutral (if that were possible)? Is it in fact labile such that, through whatever personal or social and/or biological means, it can be determined to the beauty and goodness and being as expressed in members of the opposite sex or in members of the same sex? And, what is erotic desire in the first place? Is it just a desire for sex and sexual pleasure, or is a desire for something more? Finally, if we want to think through these questions with someone, should we look to Adubato and his ilk, or someone else?

The Greek philosopher Plato, a deeply influential thinker well regarded by vast amounts of the entire Christian tradition that informs the work and thought of conservative Christians even today, as well as the entirety of the Platonic tradition after him, is clear on this point: erotic desire is first and foremost not sexual but a desire for Beauty Itself, which is the Good Itself–and which the Christian tradition understands as God, the creator of all–which is awakened in one by an encounter with an expression of goodness and beauty in the embodied form of another to which one is especially fitted; Plato’s dialogues Symposium and Phaedrus express this well, and they have been hugely influential on Western understandings of desire. Whether that other is male or female does not matter for the basic nature and thrust and aim of this desire. For the Platonic tradition, then, erotic desire, whether for a member of the same sex or the opposite sex, is basically good because it is a desire for Goodness Itself; such desire needs proper forming, directing, and understanding—as Socrates helps the boylover Glaucon see through the discussion recounted in Plato’s Republic—but it is good nonetheless. As for the basic lability of eros, the basic openness of erotic desire to being determined to different embodied expressions of beauty and goodness, the Platonic tradition is clear; in this, it has simply recognized what we find the world over and at all times: Yes, it is so determinable, and different determinations do arise, whatever their particular maturity or immaturity here or there. It is a long tradition, the Platonic tradition of thought, one deeply influential on the course of things that have led us to where we are in the present–a tradition, moreover, that has been embraced and utilized by Christian thinkers since shortly after the preaching of the Gospel. It is a tradition at variance with the thought of Stephen Adubato and his ilk, as well as contemporary conservative Christian understandings of desire. If we do not know as yet and do not see the relevant deep down things, who would be wiser to follow: Adubato et al., or the one whom many of the Patristics took as the one sent by God to preach the Gospel to the pagans in preparation for the in-breaking of Beauty Itself, Goodness Itself, into our world in the person of Jesus Christ?

While Adubato and his ilk certainly stand athwart the Platonic tradition regarding desire—and thus and thus any amount of the Christian tradition inspired positively by the former—in some respects they are even more Platonic than either Plato or the tradition his work inspired. For they take erotic desire as having as its object types and not singular, concrete persons—explicitly in the case of homoerotic desire, more implicitly in the case of straight erotic desire.

According to Adubato’s reading of Crisp and Paglia, whom he smashes together in the same article in attempt to render a unitary reading of queer desire, a gay man is somehow after both the great and dark man who is everything the gay man is not and he is after the archetype of the beautiful boy as destroyer. Whatever the (in)coherence of Adubato’s attempted account, what it does affirm intelligibly is that queer desire has as its object a type and not concrete persons. He implies, furthermore, in the pastiche of quotations he has arranged from other authors, that straight desire is the same generally but somehow different because of the type whose object it is: quoting the work of the theologian Fabrice Hadjadj, Adubato affirms that straight desire has as its object the sexually and otherwise Other, the different but complementary (whatever that fully means). Put straightforwardly, straight desire has as its object maleness-as-femininity’s-other or femininity-as-maleness’s-other depending on the sex of the desiring straight subject—which is to posit that, again, as for the desiring gay or lesbian subject, erotic desire always has as its object a type.

But his claims are not true, and he does not accurately describe how erotic desire works—at least, this is not how erotic desire that finally blossoms into love works. While many, so many, both queer and straight, spend their lives pursuing a type and not seeking to love a concrete and limited person (which is perhaps one reason why divorces among married couples, especially straight married couples, is so alarmingly high),¹⁴ love, and even the erotic desire that plants the seed of love, is always for a concrete and singular embodied person–as we saw, for instance, in Michelangelo’s case vis-a-vis Tomasso de’ Cavalieri. Love is always actuated by and drawn to this flesh, this body, this person. If there is a straight man John, say, who desires and loves his wife Jane, he does not desire and love in Jane femininity, otherness, or complementarity but rather first and foremost Jane. In Michelangelo’s case, it was not boyishness, youth, manliness, or any other abstraction that would go into making a type but rather this man Tomasso and his singular beauty and goodness–even if the young man’s goodness and beauty led the artist to contemplate the beauty and goodness of God, which is singular, anyway, for being actually infinite. The danger of the type as ultimate–and thus impossible–object of erotic desire exists for all embodied desiring personal subjects; love, flowing from erotic desire actuated by a singular, concrete, embodied person, is a choice against one’s preferred type and for what is concretely real. As a gay man or lesbian woman is just as much a human being as a straight man or a straight woman–whatever Adubato and his fellow conservatives might wish to think–it stands to reason that the former are as capable of love for one who actuates their erotic desire as are the latter.

One can certainly be understood for wanting more than arguments, for wanting even more examples of queer desire gone right, queer erotic desire that blossomed into love, than just the person and life of Michelangelo in relation to his beloved Tomasso de’ Cavalieri. To that end, and in closing, one can consider the life and example of the 20th century American—and very gay—poet Dunstan Thompson.¹⁵ Thompson, a World War 2 poet who shot to fame in the literary world for a brief moment in the 1940s as a new, young, and inventive and highly talented poet, fell into obscurity in the 1950s; his work has begun to be newly discovered and appreciated only over the last twenty years or so before this essay’s writing. Raised a Catholic, Thompson abandoned the practice of his childhood religion around the age of 18; besides running (very briefly) his own literary magazine, writing poetry, and finally serving behind the lines as an officer in WWII, he was rather sexually active in the shadows, and the marks of the longing for love and union that fired his clandestine homosexual trysts, as well as the eventual failure thereof, are found throughout his early works published between 1943 and 1947. At the end of the war, Thompson met the one who would become his lifelong partner, Philip Trower, to whom Thompson would remain faithful until the latter’s death of liver cancer in 1975 at the age of 57. After the war, and until Thompson’s death, Thompson and his partner lived a largely quiet life together in a house in the English countryside. Some years into their relationship, in the 1950s Thompson decided he wanted to return to the practice of his childhood Faith, which he informed his partner would involve them no longer being sexually intimate with each other; as Trower had at that point been thinking seriously about converting to Catholicism, they both agreed to live chastely but, with the suggestion of a local priest they both knew and respected, continued to live together and support one another; both, from the indications available to us, lived happily together until death parted them.¹⁶ There was no question for either Thompson or Trower that they were both gay, and there was no question for either of them that the love they shared was homoerotically determined; and yet, they managed to live and shape a life together, one that was happy, peaceful, loving and joyful–one that, to the extent it matters, a conservative Christian could not find fault with except that they lived under the same roof. While theirs is but one data point, that Thompson and Trowers’ queer love went right, coupled with both the work and example of Michelangelo and the long Platonic tradition that has positively informed so much of Western and Christian thought and life, perhaps we can stand athwart Adubato and the larger conservative world that would seek to condemn or elide homoerotic desire, say “Stop,” and, pointing at the reality as it is, say, in the words of a form poem found in Dunstan Thompson’s notes after his death, that perhaps indeed we may find that:

The author wishes to thank Benedict Ferrer and David Higgins for reading drafts of this essay and providing valuable insight and editorial advice along the way.

1. Header image: Claude Thomas Stanfield Moore, The Thames at Greenwich (1900-1910).

2. James M. Saslow, Ganymede in the Renaissance: Homosexuality in Art and Culture (Yale University Press, 1986), 17.

3. Ibid.

4. For a fuller discussion of Michelangelo’s relationship with de’Cavalieri and its fruits in the artist’s life, see Saslow, Ganymede in the Renaissance, 17-62. See also the introduction in Michelangelo, Love Sonnets and Madrigals to Tommaso de’Cavalieri, translated with an introduction by Michael Sullivan (Peter Owen, 1997). Additionally, see the introduction to Michelangelo, Poems and Letters: Selections, with the 1550 Vasari Life, translated with an introduction and notes by Anthony Mortimer (Penguin Books, 2007)

5. In a certain sense a perfectly reasonable assumption, given the pervasiveness of homosexual relations among the male populace of Michelangelo’s Florence. See Michael Rocke, Forbidden Friendships: Homosexuality and Male Culture in Renaissance Florence (Oxford University Press, 1996).

6. For anyone familiar with Renaissance poetry and thought, including that of Dante Alighieri, this is not at all surprising given the profound directing and shaping influence of both Christian faith and Platonic thought on that artistic, literary, and social world.

7. Michelangelo, Poems and Letters, 23.

8. While erotic desire of men for women and women for men has always been the statistical norm, we find poetics of love, lovers, and the beloved in both Europe in the Renaissance and in the Ottoman empire (as well as in Sufi poetry generally) recognizing a possible, and often enough actual, homoerotic determination of desire and its object as at least neutral, if not positive. Like as found in the poetry of Michelangelo, the Ottoman and generally Sufi traditions of Islamic poetry take seriously homoerotic desire and its object as paths to the transcendence of mere materiality and fleshly desire toward union with God. See the excellent treatment of Ottoman (and Sufi) poetics of love and the beloved, as well as a comparison thereof with that of Renaissance Europe in Walter G. Andrews and Mehmet Kalpaklı, The Age of Beloveds: Love and the Beloved in Early-Modern Ottoman and European Culture and Society (Duke University Press, 2005).

9. CCC 2357-8

10. For those who know the history of and scholarship on the heterosexual/homosexual binary and the notions involved, the thrust of Adubato’s essay cannot but elicit a chuckle: In understanding and critiquing homoerotic desire as he does, Adubato foregrounds and (implicitly) affirms homosexuality as heterosexuality’s Other, which has been used consistently by conservatives and straight (largely white) men to affirm for themselves and others the normalcy of their own desires and actions. See, for instance, Jane Ward, Not Gay: Sex between Straight White Men (New York University Press, 2015). Regarding Adubato’s claim that pederasty is essential to homosexuality, to the condition of those whose desire is homoerotically-determined as such, it is worth pointing out that, while it is recognized that it goes woefully underreported, the data we do have on instances of child sexual abuse indicates that females experience far more sexual victimization than males. (See https://www.cdc.gov/child-abuse-neglect/about/about-child-sexual-abuse.html, accessed 3.29.2025.) Does this indicate that pedophilia is essential to heterosexuality? By Adubato’s standard of evidence, yes, it does. See also this Buzzfeed article, which includes wildly inappropriate babywear that, if used for children by gays, would get them excoriated as pedophiles but that is seen as merely quirky when used by straight couples: https://www.buzzfeed.com/briangalindo/23-wildly-inappropriate-baby-t-shirts-and-onesies, accessed 3.29.25.

11. At this juncture, more conservative readers versed in such things would be inclined to deploy Natural Law-esque lines of reasoning or to cite received authorities who have done so. It is beyond the scope of this essay to respond to such objections; the interested reader is directed to the following two books by Gareth Moore, O.P., which have already done so in some depth: The Body in Context: Sex and Catholicism (Continuum, 1992), and A Question of Truth: Christianity and Homosexuality (Continuum, 2003).

12. See, for instance: Augustine of Hippo, Confessions, 1,1.5.; Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I-I, Q. 6.

13. Something Aquinas himself recognizes in the response in article 4 of Question 6 of the first part of his Summa Theologiae: “Everything is therefore called good from the divine goodness, as from the first exemplary, effective, and final principle of all goodness. Nevertheless, everything is called good by reason of the similitude of the divine goodness belonging to it, which is formally its own goodness, whereby it is denominated good. And so of all things there is one goodness, and yet many goodnesses.” https://www.newadvent.org/summa/1006.htm, accessed 03.30.25.

14. See, for instance: https://www.wf-lawyers.com/divorce-statistics-and-facts/#:~:text=Almost%2050%20percent%20of%20all,8, accessed 03.30.25.

15. The following is largely drawn from discussions included in the following two collections of Thompson’s poetry: Dunstan Thompson, Here at Last is Love: Selected Poems, edited by Gregory Wolfe and with an afterward by Dana Gioia (Slant Books, 2015); D. A. Powell and Kevin Prufer eds., Dunstan Thompson: On the Life & Work of a Lost American Master (The Unsung Masters Series at Pleiades Press, 2010)

16. One can note that while many Christian straight couples make vows to each other at their weddings and subsequently break them, whatever the Sacramental character of their relationship, Thompson and Trower actually lived these vows–till death did them part.