timetofeelthebreeze:

PAGLIA (sternly): I have never identified with Christianity. The only elements in it that I identified with are those in Roman Catholicism that I have identified in my writing as pagan, the pagan elements in it. Whether it’s the sexual personae of the martyred saints … Saint Sebastian, with the arrows sticking out of his body—he’s a kind of parallel to the beautiful boys of Greek art and so on and so forth. There was just something in the humbleness of Christianity, Saint Joseph and Mary and the baby and so on, that I absolutely rejected. I just felt like such an alien, not only a sexual alien but a social alien, in my own time. So dreaming about ancient Egypt and studying it was my escape, you see, from what I regarded as (disdainfully) the humiliating simplicities and humbleness of Christianity that we were being taught. Turn the other cheek and all that. Well, I don’t believe that for a minute. I don’t think any Italian really does. We believe in war!