I have spent 25 years studying Cervantes, 8 of them exclusively. I have defended and published a doctoral thesis on the Quixote. I have read dozens of books and articles about the author and his work. I have published a monograph on love in the Quixotean edition of The curious impertinent, y I have published six book chapters, seventeen articles and a prologue on aspects of Cervantes, and I have presented fourteen papers or communications at conferences. Finally, I have also given seminars and conferences on the one-armed man of Lepanto and even led guided tours.
After these years of study, the proposal of Cervantes' homosexuality seems strange and impostured to me. Our author had a natural daughter, was married, and paid special attention to women: his work is full of strong female characters. I do not use this to prove that he was not homosexual, but I do affirm that it is neither shown nor demonstrated that he was.
It is clear that since the beginning of this third millennium a particular obsession with homosexuality has emerged. But it makes no sense to reread the past based on the prejudices of the present. I remember a magnificent doctoral course directed by a wise professor at the University of Granada. It dealt with the mysticism of St. Teresa and St. John of the Cross. A student raised the possible homosexuality of the apostle St. John, Jesus' favorite. The professor explained that not every relationship of friendship had to be sexualized, that our current prism suffered from a certain distortion in relation to these issues.
I have no special interest in denying Cervantes' homosexuality, but it is surprising the tendency to turn everyone into a homosexual. It seems as if such a prototype should displace the hero, the athlete, the wise man, the orator, the martyr, the saint, the knight, the donna angelicata, the courtier and the discreet. Because these anthropological models that I have just mentioned are so because of their actions, not because of their sexual orientation. The merit of the human being lies, as Cervantes precisely defended, in virtue, and not in blood (and I add, not in sex).
Cervantes was held captive in Algiers for five years. He tried to escape unsuccessfully on several occasions, and he never slipped up: he acknowledged the facts. Paradoxically, he did not receive the punishment that those escapes deserved. And some think that one cause of the leniency towards him could be in his homosexuality. It is a hypothesis. Cervantes carried with him some letters, one of them from Don Juan de Austria, which presented him as a brave soldier, which caused a higher ransom to be demanded for him and, probably, that he was treated with greater tolerance, besides his strong personality made him a very unique person. In any case, a hypothesis is not proof. It is a very contemporary attitude that the critical subject neutralizes or kills the object. But it is fairer for the subject to respect the object, whether texts or people.
However. We own his writings. As I said, I have published a study of love in the Quixote. The conception of love that emerges from Cervantes' great novel is wonderfully humanistic, a synthesis of Judeo-Christian and Greco-Latin thought, with the virtues of prudence, justice, fortitude and temperance being the cornerstone on which this cartography of love rests. Love emerges not only as a mere sentiment ("love in young men for the most part is not, but an appetite", we read in chapter 24 of the first part of the Quixote), but a knowledge, a will, a surrender in freedom.
As a good man of the golden century, Cervantes is captivated by beauty, particularly feminine beauty, an ecstasy that is rooted in the troubadour, stylnovist and pertarchist lyric. The quixotic epicenter is rather the friendship between Don Quixote and Sancho: a love of friendship that should not be confused with erotic love, nor with love of necessity. The Banquet Plato's De amicitia of Cicero or The four loves by C. S. Lewis, among many other works, can illustrate the marvelous and polyphonic mosaic of love in the European tradition.
The monotonous obsession with sex is a contemporary "contribution". But the reading of Cervantes or other classics could free us from this corset, already so tiresome.
