Date: March 20
Time: 7pm
Admission: $8

PLEASE NOTE: This lecture will be recorded for those signed up as well as our $5/month and above Patreon members. Become a Member HERE.

Ticketholders: A Zoom invite is sent out at 5:30 pm EDT on the day of the event to the email used at checkout. Please check your spam folder and if not received, email [email protected]. A temporary streaming link will be emailed after the event concludes.

The Catholic tradition of revering holy figures as saints is nearly 2,000 years old. Many of these divine figures’ popular stories and iconographies are rejections of traditional gender expectations with exhortations to renounce marriage, depictions that illustrate a smorgasbord of sexual desires, and allegories that confound binary gender constructs. Saint John the Evangelist ‘the beloved disciple’ was Christ’s favorite and left his wife at the altar to join Jesus as a virgin. The teenaged aristocrat and martyr Saint Wilgefortis is easily recognised as a crucified woman sporting a long beard. Saints Sebastian and John the Baptist are two figures whose legends lend themselves so readily to erotic depictions commissioned for the male gaze by wealthy elite. Saint Hildegard of Bingen was a forceful abbess and polymath, whose visionary works were inspired by her romantic affections for a young nun. 

These stories – and many others like them – have been revised through the centuries to confirm to contemporary Catholic morality. This illustrated video talk by Eric Huang, creator and host of Saint Podcast, brings these gender-queer stories to light to celebrate the lost diversity of Christian experiences from the Roman era through the Middle Ages to today.

Eric Huang is a failed palaeontologist who’s now the producer and host of Saint Podcast, a history and pop culture podcast about the lives of the saints. Eric was raised Catholic in LA and describes himself as ‘fallen’, although he has retained his boyhood obsession with saints. In addition to Catholica, Eric is fascinated by queer histories, old masters art, and the natural world. He currently lives in London with his grumpy cat, McNulty. Follow him on Instagram and Twitter @dinoboy89.