He boasts more aliases than Sean Combs and Martin Bormann combined.

He’s been reified by Jack Nicholson, Vincent Price, Burgess Meredith (twice), Robert De Niro, George Burns, Susan Lucci, Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor.

He had his way with Rosemary and got all up in Miss Jones.

He’s the ubiquitous Satan, Prince of Lies and Lord of the Flies, and of all the are-they-or-aren’t-they? names roving around on the gaydar, he’s the one most overdue for a big coming out. We’re talking millennia overdue.

As one of the most recognizable figures in world culture, he’s also one of the most enigmatic. In various contexts, he’s merely the symbolic projection of the natural instinct within man, a living entity bent on leading us all astray, Hell’s overseeing whip master and God’s right hand man version of Karl Rove.

The lone unifying factor: he’s hot as hell and bad as he wants to be.

The man has balls, that’s for sure. Though Christianity can’t seem to make up its mind whether Satan and the fallen archangel Lucifer are one in the same, their calling cards — revolt, insurrection and the casting off of the law of the father — jive close enough to conflate the pair into a single conglomerate badass.

Leader of the War in Heaven waged against God and his loyalist seraphim, Lucifer was the one-time favorite booted out of Heaven and cast down into the abyss. Depending on the source, he either A) refused to bow down to God’s new (and flawed) creation Adam, B) fought as Man’s benefactor to ensure that the race’s burgeoning free will wouldn’t damn them all C) wanted to overthrow a deity he considered uncaring and despotic, or D) resisted falling in line with God’s predestination of all fates, especially his own…

Whatev. The point is, any gay son who’s ever gone up his domineering dad and been kicked curbside for his efforts will empathize at least a little with Luce. How many of us have hit the bricks for parts unknown, daring the dangers of the world rather than serving and suffering at the will of the tyrannous Father? Non serviam has become the mantra of all gay recusants battling for liberty against the soul-numbing autocracy of daddy worship.

Satan’s affect is central to his characterization; his is a physical kind of charm. While Christ as God’s new fair-haired boy is technically hot in a sort of liberal arts English professor way, Satan – even at his most monstrous – is the firebrand of the two. His various incarnations in film, literature and art more often than not showcase his influence in the shape of knee-knocking beauty or shameless carnality.

In the silent film Haxan, he’s a naked night haunt with a Gene Simmons tongue presiding over all manner of Pre-Code nastiness. Gustave Doré depicted him as a sorrowful Neoclassical beauty, while in Mark Twain’s The Mysterious Stranger, he’s a mesmerizing youth with a glacial disdain for cruel and frail humanity.

Billed as “Chernabog”, Ol’ Scratch is so ripped to the gills in the phantasmagoric “Night on Bald Mountain” segment of Disney’s Fantasia (right) that he could easily deflect holy thunderbolts with a mere flex of his abs, one would guess a tip of the hat to Nicolai Kalmakoff’s marvelous rendering of Satan wherein the court of hell revels like teeming spermatozoa between his mighty open thighs.

Vertigo Comic’s Lucifer presents the Morningstar as the burr-cut blond amalgam of Sting and David Bowie.

The screen’s most gorgeous and seductive Devil may very well be sinister flower child Viggo Mortensen in The Prophecy. With a face literally by God and a soul as deep as the very Well of Hell, he is everything we’ve been conditioned by the world’s pulpit-pounders to fear in one sense and hanker for in another. His choice line is a shuddery come-on/menace that speaks to the simultaneous thrill and terror of a Sunday School kid’s juvenile gay bedtime stirrings: “How I loved listening to your sweet prayers every night. Then you would jump in your bed, so afraid I was under there…and I was.”

And since America’s God Squad thinks gays are on a first name basis with His Infernal Majesty, we’ll admit we’d be more than a little let down if upon our entry into the Inferno, we weren’t greeted by a horned warden who didn’t come close to resembling Tim Curry’s Bowflex-built fiend from Legend (left) or Hellboy’s Ron Perlman in all his pumped-up, muscle minotaur splendor.

If you ever had any doubt that Christianity is fundamentally built upon a paralyzing fear that sex + magic= damnation, take a gander at the preponderance of medieval proto-porn bas-reliefs devoted to the danger of the Devil Dick: couples (often two men) embrace with massive erections, serpents attack engorged genitals, witches kiss demons’ rock-hard asses and Beelzebub himself often appears to condemn sodomites while also gleefully rear-ending them with his huge tool.

We get that Satan is supposed to represent evil. We’re just not sure why said villainy so often coincides with having shelf-like pecs you could rest your whole Time-Life Enchanted World series on, an ass that won’t quit and a slugger cock that could dick slap that smirk off the Sphinx.

Be he the supreme iniquity or the Promethean champion of rogue queers, the world by and large has given him short shrift on either count. His is a biography that can’t be ghost written, an all-star movie epic that’s impossible to adapt for the screen. Why would an upstart would-be usurper bother inking out buy now, pay later contracts with ironic price tags, much less saunter around in red tights? Would a militant gay mutineer who found the whole notion of Adam and Eve to be insipid condescend to knocking up Mia Farrow all for the sake of becoming a controlling father himself?

A Devil with a host of fallen male beauties at his side needs no special lady. And no defiant heretic would found his own caricature religion to be populated with goth-inclined losers and sole celebrity convert Jayne Mansfield. Conquering God and taking his place is so 6,000 B.C. Being born again is the ultimate futility and independence is the new revolution.

Only Anatole France’s sweeping The Revolt of The Angels – in which Satan bids his hordes to cast down their spears and abandon a second march against Heaven — comes nearest to capturing his essence: “God conquered, will become Satan; Satan, conquering, will become God. May the fates spare me this terrible lot; I love the Hell which formed my genius.”

Defiance is the Devil’s backbone.