No one can say for sure exactly when William Shakespeare (1564-1616) composed his sonnets. The first reference to them occurs in someone else's writings where they are praised as "sugared sonnets among his private friends." The first were published in 1609, but some were apparently in circulation privately as early as 1593.

Their main subject is the author's love for a handsome young man he wants to immortalize in verse. Shakespeare's mistress, the "dark lady," cheats on him with this fair-haired young friend. Rejection, growing old, betrayal, the complexity of the feelings of love, are the principal themes of the sequence of sonnets dedicated to the mysterious Mr. W. H.

There's no end to the ingenious speculations which critics have indulged in to explain those two initials. Apparently Shakespeare did not want his readers to know who Mr. W. H. was---and all one can say is that he succeeded.

I first read the sonnets when I was in my mid-teens and struggling in search of my own sexual identity. I did not know where to turn for answers. I was already sexually experienced with both sexes on a sophisticated level. I never did really get it sorted out until I was 26 and unequivocally fell in love with another man.

Until then, I was a bouncing ball from one sex to the other, including two marriages to women and various non-marital relationships in several parts of the world with older and younger females. All the while, from the age of 13, I was in hot pursuit of males of my species and loving every inch of them I got wherever I got them---in hand or before or behind, on planes, trains, buses, in beds or behind the barn.

I have often wondered, after studying Shakespeare's bisexual dilemma in his sonnets and his plays, for it crops up here and there, if he ever got it sorted out himself.
I have asked him in his picture on the right (thought by some to represent Shakespeare as a young actor), but he never answers back!

I love many of the sonnets, but the one which has stayed with me the most, and has given me the most trouble understanding where the bard was coming from, is Sonnet 20. I may first have read it at 14 and subsequently abused myself over its images for years.

I really don't know why. On the gay side, it's disappointing for its turning away from the physical connection male to male, but, on the other hand, I have had relationships with straight men in which my feelings were much the same as Will's, but only because I knew I could never get the guy.

That did not stop my imagining his getting the girl, and me, in fantasy, being her! I got lucky sometimes, though, in the right circumstances, when the female object of his physical affection rejected him, and he turned to me. That happened on more than one occasion, with many men, leading me to conjecture: Is everybody, deep down inside, beneath the layers of cultural conditioning, actually bisexual after all?

I often wonder if Shakespeare actually broke through the barrier prohibiting sex between men. Sonnet 20 might be one of the key sonnets which could unlock the secrets of his heart. At some stage any reader has to come to terms with the implicit sexuality contained in it, for it is an open declaration of love by one man for another man, something which few ages in the history of the world have been able to view with complete equanimity.

Reduced to synopsis, Sonnet 20 says of Shakespeare's male friend:

"You were created by nature as a woman but more beautiful than any woman, for you do not have their faults. But nature changed her mind as she made you, and turned you into a man, for she herself adored you, and, perhaps desiring copulation, gave you male parts. Therefore I cannot love you with the fulness that I would love a woman. But let me have your real love, while women enjoy the physical manifestation of it, which I know to be merely superficial."

Now, that does not turn me on, whereas Shakespeare's phrasing does:

A woman's face with nature's own hand painted,
Hast thou, the master mistress of my passion;
A woman's gentle heart, but not acquainted
With shifting change, as is false women's fashion:
An eye more bright than theirs, less false in rolling,
Gilding the object whereupon it gazeth;
A man in hue all hues in his controlling,
Which steals men's eyes and women's souls amazeth.
And for a woman wert thou first created;
Till Nature, as she wrought thee, fell a-doting,
And by addition me of thee defeated,
By adding one thing to my purpose nothing.
But since she prick'd thee out for women's pleasure,
Mine be thy love and thy love's use their treasure.

That last line has been reprised in my emotional vocabulary for more than fifty years, every time I fell for a straight.

Another of the male-directed sonnets offers an especially beautiful way of looking at one's older partner in the Silverfoxes Syndrome. This, the beginning of Sonnet 104, may be my favorite selection from a Shakespearean sonnet today:

To me, fair friend, you never can be old,
For as you were when first your eye I ey'd,
Such seems your beauty still.

THE END