Was Spain's most iconic writer Cervantes gay?

New film El Cautivo (The Captive) centres around the period when Miguel de Cervantes was imprisoned and enslaved in Algiers after being captured by Barbary pirates.

In 1575, after fighting in military campaigns against the Turks in the Mediterranean, Cervantes was captured by these corsairs and taken to the north African city, where he was held for a total of five years.

During this time, Alejandro Amenábar suggests that he had several sexual relations with men, including those who enslaved him.

"That Miguel de Cervantes had a relationship with his captor is considered probable," Amenábar told Spanish broadcaster RTVE.

Amenábar, who directed iconic Spanish movies such as The Others, The Sea Inside and Open Your Eyes, is not the only one to have suggested this theory.

Rumours about the Cervantes' private life and sexuality date as far back as the 18th century, when the first biography about him was written.

According to some Cervantes scholars, the fact that Hazán Pajá, the king of Algiers, spared Cervantes’ life after several escape attempts could be explained by a sexual interest.

Speculation around his sexuality has also been driven by documents from the General Registry of the Seal. Dating back to 1569, they mention an arrest warrant for a Miguel de Cervantes, who was sentenced to the amputation of his right hand and exile for ten years after a duel with Antonio de Segura.

Some authors such as Fernando Arrabal have suggested that the duel was due to the accusation of sodomy, although there is no clear evidence to back up this claim.

Another of these documents is a letter from Cervantes to his wife Catalina where he asks her to manage his property while he is away. Some have interpreted this is a separation agreement and admission of his homosexuality, although again this ‘evidence’ is a little ambiguous.

Professor José Manuel Lucía Megías who advised Amenábar on his film, explained that this theory of Cervantes being gay has gained in popularity in recent decades, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s true.

Megías has now even published a new book on the matter to try and get to the truth - Cervantes íntimos. Amor y sexo en los Siglos de Oro (Intimate Cervantes: Love and Sex in the Golden Age).

In the book, he explains that rumours on Cervantes’ homosexuality began in the 1980s, a period in which "we had to go against power" and heterosexuality was perceived as one of the elements of expression of the established power.

According to him, the theory of a queer Cervantes responds more to contemporary concerns than to historical evidence. He believes many of these stories spread in the 1990s and many were based on myths.

In an interview with the Universidad Complutense in Madrid, Megías explains that all his research on the subject of Cervantes’ sexuality does not definitively prove whether he was or wasn’t gay.

“Perhaps he could have had many sexual experiences, and those sexual experiences could have been of different kinds, but that's part of an everyday life that we'll only be able to understand if we place him in his time period,” he said.

“To truly understand, you have to know the era in which he lived, what sexuality was like at that time, and thus, realise that not everything is black and white,” he added.

He explained that at the time when Cervantes was captive in Algiers, sodomy was something that could be socially accepted.

“He was in that environment, so Cervantes was in places where he could have both those homosexual and heterosexual relationships”.

Cervantes is not the only famous Spanish writer who is rumoured to have been gay. It is now widely accepted that the poet and playwright Federico García Lorca was a homosexual, and likely executed by Franco's nationalist forces for this reason.

According to Lorca biographer Ian Gibson, the writer was definitely gay and “his relationship with Salvador Dalí and other people is quite explicit, as is his homosexuality”.