USSC finally decides the "Shakespeare Authorship Question"

[Syt]

How can one infer sexuality from someone's writings, short of a remark along the lines of "I am gay"?

Writing anything that can vaguely be associated with man-man love.

[grumbler]

How can one infer sexuality from someone's writings, short of a remark along the lines of "I am gay"?

1. Start with a conclusion
2. Quote-mine the author's writings, ignoring everything that doesn't fit one's predetermined conclusion.
3. Draw dubious inferences from the vague evidence gained in step 2.
4. Restate conclusion as "proven."  Where possible, state that this is also "generally accepted."

[Sheilbh]

How can one infer sexuality from someone's writings, short of a remark along the lines of "I am gay"?

Well of the roughly 150 sonnets around 130 of them are addressed to the 'master-mistress' of my passion, a young man that we know as as the 'fair youth'.  It's the sonnets that have always been controversial after 1640 until the 19th century the pronouns of those 130 sonnets were changed to 'her' and 'she'. 

The sonnets are interesting because they have a reputation for being more biographical than most of Shakespeare's writings.  He puns a lot on his name and on his wife's name.  As I say they had a reputation for Hellenism going back long enough for Coleridge to try and defend Shakespeare agains them.

The other ones that are really remembered  are the characters of Antonio and Bassanio in the Merchant of Venice and Mercutio's relationship with Romeo (no suggestion Romeo's gay).

As Harold Bloom put it there are no stronger and more beautiful love poems to a man than in Shakespeare's writings.  Of course that doesn't mean he's gay.  That's a 20th century invention.  It is widely accepted that he was attracted to men, physically as well as intellectually, at least as much as he was to women - from what we have in his writings.

And the thing is that the gay thing doesn't come in to many people's writings.  There's no evidence that Middleton, Kyd or Jonson have anything like that (especially not Jonson), or, for that matter, Milton and Sheridan. Swift or Shelley.  I'd say there are about 4 writers who people have suspicions about based on what they wrote (and the fact that it can't be shrugged off as 'common for the times'):
Marlowe.
Shakespeare.
Byron.
Tennyson.

[alfred russel]

Is anyone disputing Shakespaere's homosexuality or bisexuality these days? I thought it's pretty much an accepted fact.

You can do better than this: the thread is about the dispute of whether Shakespeare the author even existed.