Michelangelo could not have called himself gay, because neither that word nor "homosexual" existed in his century. But he did write love poems and passionate letters to young men, and the best documented case is a young Roman nobleman, Tommaso de' Cavalieri, whom he met in 1532, when Michelangelo was 57. Whether anything physical ever happened, no document says.
Cavalieri wanted to learn to draw, and Michelangelo sent him sonnets, letters and finished drawings as gifts. In 1533 Michelangelo wrote to him that he could sooner forget the food he lived on than Cavalieri's name.
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The harder question is how we know. Michelangelo left most of his poems in manuscript, in drafts crossed out and rewritten. They reached print in Florence in 1623, fifty-nine years after his death, edited by his grandnephew, also named Michelangelo. In that book, the beloved of the sonnets to Cavalieri became a woman.
That was the printed version for 240 years. Only in 1863 did an Italian scholar publish the poems straight from the manuscripts, and the man was back. The grandnephew knew exactly what he was changing, and he explained why in a private note.
What You'll Discover
What he wrote to the young man.
The other young men in his life.
What people said while he lived.
What his grandnephew was afraid of.
How the poems got their man back.