Was Cervantes gay?

"My film about Cervantes will be a thermometer for homophobia in Spain," Alejandro Amenábar told La Vanguardia a few days before the premiere of El cautivo today, Friday. And indeed, among philologists and academics, the mere hypothesis that the author of Don Quixote had a homosexual relationship with the Pasha of Algiers has provoked a stir.

"There is not the slightest indication that this can be proven, quite the contrary," argues Jordi Gracia, who sees the controversy as self-serving and attributes it to a "marketing campaign." Cervantes was in his thirties and had a tough time during his long captivity; he was not a young man who could be part of the "boys' market," argues the professor at the University of Barcelona (UB), author of a biography of the one-armed man of Lepanto.

“They are as crazy as a cowbell,” Guillermo Serés laments in the absence of a single document or reference that, apart from the gossip of a Dominican friar who had a grudge against him for some reason, speaks of a love affair that Cervantes “would not have lent himself to.”

"He came from Lepanto in a state of exhaustion, and he wasn't a courtier who could have entered the seraglio," argues the professor at the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB), who laments that the tiresome search for "heterodoxies" in a Cervantes who has become a convert, an Erasmus, and even a masochist distorts the image students may have of the great Castilian classic. "Nonsense!" he concludes.

But neither Gracia, who criticizes the “emotional blackmail” of Amenábar’s approach, nor Serés see any homophobia in their rejection of the “conjecture” of The Captive , but rather simple philological rigor, since, in addition, Cervantes made a “fierce denunciation of the sexual use” of young Christians in The Baths of Algiers.

Despite their relative discomfort, both scholars agree that "that would not take away any merit" from the great writer, but it is Carme Riera who goes further and affirms that Cervantes' homosexuality "is a possibility like any other," even though the texts do not allow anything to be deduced and Amenábar's film is an "interpretation" by a filmmaker, yes, "with every right" to make it.

"Every era," adds the academic specializing in the Golden Age, "approaches the classics according to its own interests; in this case, the creator gives his point of view, which is very worthy of respect." Furthermore, Cervantes's possible homosexuality had been discussed for some time, Riera recalls.

“Already in his thirties and with his hand in tatters, Cervantes was not an ephebe,” argue critics of Amenábar’s idea.

Apart from the insinuations, which were moreover very typical of the time, that Lope de Vega, the literary enemy of the author of Don Quixote , might have made in his satirical verses, Fernando Arrabal, in his capacity as enfant terrible of Hispanic literature, but who “knew nothing,” Serés replies, let his imagination run wild in a boutade work that served as the basis for “this crazy invention.”

"I try to dismantle the myth that has been created and talk about the man behind this exemplary hero," says José Manuel Lucía Megías, author of the iconoclastic biography Cervantes íntimos , who advised Amenábar on the script for his film.

Italy and Algiers, the places where the novelist stayed before returning from captivity, were freer than the Spain of the time, where religion made homosexual relations a sin and civil law a crime, the Complutense professor reasons, so Cervantes was able to live different experiences there, outside the control to which sex, desire and love were subjected in his homeland.

But that doesn't mean Cervantes was gay in the way we understand the concept today. In the 17th century, sexuality wasn't as prevalent as it is in today's society—where pornography lurks on screens—and the homosexual community, which didn't exist as such, was far from proudly celebrating its status and adding acronyms to the LGBTI+ community.

Therefore, both Amenábar and Lucía Megías respond with a resounding no to the question in the title. No, Cervantes was not gay. Even so, it is plausible that he had sexual relations with men. Why? Because he spent five and a half years captive in Algiers, from where he tried to escape four times and received no punishment.

And here, the role of the renegade Venetian Hassan Pasha, governor of the city under the Ottoman Empire, becomes the key to the mystery. "I subscribe to every comma of Amenábar's fiction, which presents a love story between him and Cervantes in the film," says Lucía Megías, who describes The Captive as "a hymn to tolerance."

Fiction is fiction, and in real life, there are no written records of sexual encounters, desires, or dreams, reasons the Cervantes scholar, aware of the stir and controversy the film has sparked among those who have not yet seen it.

Amenábar believes that even if Cervantes was not gay, he could well have had a relationship with the Pasha of Algiers, a Venetian renegade. A “Horatian friendship” “He frequented the palace, not the bed”

Excusatio non petita, accusatio manifesta . One of the reasons that has led to speculation about a love affair between Cervantes and Hassan Pasha is that after his costly ransom of 500 gold ducats, the writer returned to Spain with a statement in which a series of testimonies denied that he had renounced the Christian faith or that he had had sexual relations with other men. "Everyone did it; it was a kind of safe conduct after having been in a dangerous place," explains Lucía Megías, who does not see the need for this hypothesis to lend credibility to the fiction. The years spent in Algiers, Serés admits, could have shed light on a "Horatian friendship" between lord and captive, because the Venetian and the Spaniard shared a taste for the arts and reading: "Just because he frequented the palace doesn't mean he frequented the bed," she concludes.

In any case, since it is difficult to find evidence of actual sex with other men, and the "vicious, ugly and dishonest things" referred to by the envious Juan Blanco de Paz upon seeing Miguel de Cervantes leave Algiers are of no use, nor will it be easy to find evidence of his homoerotic desire, if there was one, of which there is hardly any trace in his work, what leaves no room for doubt, according to experts, is the hymn to friendship between men that shines through in his literature, with Don Quixote and Sancho hand in hand.