He’s not the first person to say it, but Sir Ian McKellen has backed the idea that William Shakespeare was gay or bisexual, telling the New York Post that, “Shakespeare obviously enjoyed sex with men as well as women.”
Although it’s difficult to prove 400 years after the fact (especially when the historical Shakespeare is rather enigmatic), McKellen is convinced, saying “No doubt Shakespeare was gay. His predilection was evident from his works. An unmistakenly feminine portrait of his patron Henry Wriothesley adds evidence that early sonnets to ‘fair youth’ were probably meant for males.” For many years critics have noted that many of his poems to seem to have been written to or about a man (while others insist this doesn’t mean he’s gay, just that he referred to things using male pronouns, or was talking about abstract ideas of love rather than an actual man).
McKellen adds, “Married, with children, he left his wife in Stratford to live in London. I’d say he slept with men. The Merchant of Venice, centering on how the world treats gays as well as Jews, has a love triangle between an older man, younger man and a woman. And complexity in his comedies with cross-dressing and disguises is immense. Shakespeare obviously enjoyed sex with men as well as women.”
Personally I’m not sure we can really say much about Shakespeare’s sexuality now, especially as ‘being gay’ in the way we’d understand it (culturally as well as sexually) didn’t exist back then. However there is a fair amount of evidence that the writer appreciated the masculine as much as the feminine.