From the introduction (Prologue) of Straight Acting: The Hidden Queer Lives of William Shakespeare, Will Tosh, Seal Press, 2024, the best book I have read on this topic:
I don’t see the need to look for incontrovertible signs that Shakespeare the person was gay or bi, because I don’t see anything wrong in taking it for granted that he was a queer artist, working in a culture that both enabled and frustrated his imaginative exploration of same-sex desire. For far too long, the burden of proof has been on scholars and biographers to provide ‘evidence´ beyond reasonable doubt that esteemed men like Shakespeare were anything other than robustly, swaggeringly heterosexual. Well, I don’t accept the terms of a methodology that has homophobic distaste baked into its requirements. Why prove something that is manifestly evident to anyone with the wit to see it? As the poet Don Paterson put it, with just the right degree of irritation, in his commentary on the sonnets: ‘The question “was Shakespeare gay?” is so stupid as to be barely worth answering, but for the record: of course he was? I’m going to take Paterson’s briskness as my guiding principle in this study of William Shakespeare, a queer artist who drew on his society’s complex understanding of same-sex desire to create some of the richest relationships in literature. (…) My book finds most to say about the obscure, poorly documented, much-fought-over period of Shakespeare’s life known as the ´lost years’: the era before his establishment in 1594 as a key member of the theatre company in which he’d make his name as a dramatist, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men. And along the way, this queer quasi-biography gives stage time to the work of other Elizabethan writers who profoundly influenced the way Shakespeare thought about desire, sexuality and homo-eroticism: John Lyly, Christopher Marlowe and the pathbreaking queer sonneteer, Richard Barnfield.