Gay icon a prototypical portrait of a tortured closet case." Due to Saint Sebastian's status as a gay icon, Tennessee Williams chose to use the saint's name for the martyred character Sebastian in his play, "Suddenly, Last Summer". The name was also used by Oscar Wilde—as Sebastian Melmoth—when in exile after his release from prison. Wilde, an Irish writer and poet, was about as "out of the closet" as was possible for the late 19th century, and is himself considered to be a gay icon. Marie Antoinette was an early lesbian icon. Rumors about her relationships with women circulated in pornographic detail
Charlotte Melmoth 18th century, as "Mrs Courtney Melmoth" part of an acting duo with her supposed husband, Samuel Jackson Pratt who used the stage name "Courtney Melmoth". It is not known whether she adopted her husband's stage-surname "Melmoth" or, as has been speculated, "Melmoth" was her real surname and Pratt adopted it as his own stage name. Most biographers give her year of birth as 1749, the same as Pratt's. However this would put her in her twenties in the early 1770s, when she first met Pratt, in contradiction of another biographer's claim that she was still at school when this meeting