As I stood there I found there were two figures in The Last Judgement I couldn’t stop staring at. The first one was not so much a figure as a thing — a kind of grey, hollowed-out husk of a man’s body held in the hands of a robust, near-naked saint. Clyde informed me, whispering into my ear, that the man holding the husk was Saint Bartholomew, who had been martyred by having his skin flayed from his body, and that the shell of the man he held was himself. His own flayed skin. The container that once held his life. Clyde proceeded to tell me that Michelangelo had painted the living Saint Bartholomew (completely ripped, like all the other muscle daddies in the afterlife) with the face of Pietro Aretino, the poet who publicly derided the painting as indecent during its creation. Michelangelo then gave the grey husk his own face, a self-portrait of his tortured soul. Self-portrait as sheath.

The second figure that captivated me was a bald man clutching his head on Charon’s boat as he was ferried into the underworld. I stared at him for several minutes until I realized he was the only figure in the entire fresco — at eye-level, at least — who was looking out at the viewer. He appeared to be gripped by sheer terror, but also something more, something verging on existential disbelief. Perhaps at the horrors of the world itself. How could the world be this cruel? How could existence be this excruciating? And it felt as if he was looking right at me, through the painting, through time, seeking an answer.

I realized that as I had moved through the Vatican that day, looking at the historical paintings of large group scenes, I had been unconsciously trying to find the men and women who were staring out from the canvas towards the viewer. Those figures struck me as feeling not of the world they found themselves in. They seemed to be looking outward into the future, perhaps to the future I was presently standing in. Perhaps they were the feminists, queers, and dreamers of time gone by. Imploring the future-viewer to get me the fuck out of here. And as I stood in the Sistine Chapel looking at that poor bald faggot clutching his head on Charon’s boat, I wanted to tell him to remain steadfast in the hope that the march of time — despite crushing setbacks along the way — had been an incremental one towards progress.

XII

XII