Cervantes was born in Alcalá de Henares, and died in Madrid. His father Rodrigo de Cervantes was a doctor of few means. Nothing is known of his mother Leonor de Cortinas. It appears that Cervantes studied with the Jesuits in Córdoba or Seville and perhaps in Salamanca.

It is fairly certain that he was a pupil of López de Hoyos in Madrid. In 1569 he went to Italy as part of Cardenal Acquaviva's retinue and after signing up as a soldier in 1570 fought in the battle of Lepanto aboard the galley "Marquesa". For the rest of his life he would boast of the several wounds that he received in his hands and in his forehead. Subsequently, he fought in the Corfú, Navarino, and Tunis campaigns. On his way back to Spain in 1575, the galley "El Sol" was attacked by Turkish ships and Cervantes was taken captive to Algeria.

During his five years of captivity he wrote the Epístola a Mateo Vázquez. Juan Gil obtained Cervantes's freedom in 1580 in exchange for 500 ducats. Once back in Spain, he became a tax collector for the Invincible Armada. He had one daughter, Isabel, from his liaison with Ana de Villafranca.

He married Catalina de Salazar y Palacios in 1584. He was twice imprisoned for embezzlement and for not paying his debts. He went to jail in 1603 when the corpse of Gaspar de Ezpaleta was found on his doorstep, but he was released for lack of evidence.

His most famous work is El ingenioso hidalgo don Quijote de la Mancha (1605 - 1615). From 1613 one of his books will appear every year until the last one, Persiles, with its dedication in which he takes leave of his readers signed three days before his death.

That Cervantes might have had homosexual desires and experiences was first suggested in print in 1982 and restated more explicitly in 1987.

There is much to support this suggestion: his teacher Juan López de Hoyos, to whom he remained close until his death in 1583, called him "my dear beloved disciple".

He spent five years a captive in Algiers, where he was on surprisingly good terms with a homosexual convert to Islam; he refers several times in his writings to the pederasty that flourished in the Ottoman empire; on his return from Algiers he was accused of unspecified filthy acts.

Cervantes had an illegitimate daughter, but his childless marriage was unhappy, and he and his wife lived separately for long periods.

While Cervantes presented the male-female relationship as the theoretical ideal and goal for most people, the use of pairs of male friends is characteristic of his fiction, and questions of gender are often close to the surface. In his masterpiece Don Quixote, which includes cross-dressing by both sexes, the middle-aged protagonist has never had, and has no interest in, sexual intercourse with a woman.

A boy servant who appears fleetingly at the outset is replaced by the unhappily-married companion Sancho Panza. The two men come to love each other, although the love is not sexual. Part I of the book was dedicated to the Duke of Béjar.

Source: excerpts from an article in the Encyclopedia of Homosexuality, ed. Wayne Dynes (New York: Garland, 1990)