marcus said:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michelangelo
scroll 2/3 of the way down to the paragraph on his sexuality.
The account cites scholarly sources and seems to me reasonably well balanced.
But what does "gay" and "non-gay" mean when one is looking back to the 1600s?
In the paragraph right above the "sexuality" section:
Condivi said he was indifferent to food and drink, eating "more out of necessity than of pleasure"[21] and that he "often slept in his clothes and ... boots."[21] These habits may have made him unpopular. His biographer Paolo Giovio says, "His nature was so rough and uncouth that his domestic habits were incredibly squalid, and deprived posterity of any pupils who might have followed him."[22] He may not have minded, since he was by nature a solitary and melancholy person. He had a reputation for being bizzarro e fantastico because he "withdrew himself from the company of men." [23]
He was a hermit and indifferent to personal hygiene to the point of squalor. In reference to sleeping in his clothes it's reported he wouldn't even take off his boots for months at a time, and when he did a layer of the skin beneath would come off with them.
In
Michelangelo and the Pope's Ceiling the author reports that religiously, Michelangelo was on the fanatic side, and was a devotee of the fire and brimstone preacher Savonarola, who took Florence by storm. Michelangelo heard Savonarola speak in person a few times, spoke about him approvingly often, and kept copies of his tracts. Savonarola was, incidentally, very anti-gay:
After Charles VIII of France invaded Florence in 1494, the ruling Medici were overthrown and Savonarola emerged as the new leader of the city, combining in himself the role of secular leader and priest. He set up a republic in Florence. Characterizing it as a “Christian and religious Republic,” one of its first acts was to make sodomy, previously punishable by fine, into a capital offence. Homosexuality had previously been tolerated in the city, and many homosexuals from the elite now chose to leave Florence. His chief enemies were the Duke of Milan and Pope Alexander VI, who issued numerous restraints against him, all of which were ignored.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Girolamo_Savonarola
What was motivating Michelangelo was essentially that he was anti-sex, feeling that sex was tantamount to physical and spiritual corruption, as comes out in the story of his
Pieta:
The Madonna is represented as being very young, and about this peculiarity there are different interpretations. One is that her youth symbolizes her incorruptible purity, as Michelangelo himself said to his biographer and fellow sculptor Ascanio Condivi:
"Do you not know that chaste women stay fresh much more than those who are not chaste? How much more in the case of the Virgin, who had never experienced the least lascivious desire that might change her body?"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pietà_(Michelangelo)
Indeed, it's easy to see that Mary looks as young as, if not younger than, her own son in that sculpture, and Michelangelo's own given reason can be taken as the kernel of his beliefs about sex. I'm not sure where that idea comes from but it's similar to other ideas in the Catholic Church, such as the ones about Saint's bodies not decomposing after death. It was obviously an important concept to Michelangelo since he incorporated it into the work of months.
These things don't add up in my mind to something consistent with a gay man. Gay men are, first and foremost, well groomed, style conscious, and social. You also don't find sincerely religiously fanatic gay men, nor gay men who hold female chastity up as a virtue: they're as likely to pal around with troubled or 'fallen' women, as not. Gay men almost always have a lot of female friends. There were precious few in Michelangelo's life.
It seems clear to me that what we have here is an 'in-the-closet-heterosexual': a man who is disturbed by his own sexual feelings for women. Admitting "lascivious desire" for women would be tantamount to admitting a desire to corrupt their immortal soul. He became a kind of self-ordained monk, head and only member of his order.
His male nudes are remarkable for how at ease they are: nearly always relaxed and serene. The artist is completely comfortable with the subject. There's no sense of him hiding anything, no sexual tension. Female nudes, on the other hand, seem to make him nervous, there's an obvious inability to face the realities of female anatomy, as if he must avert his shy eyes. The result is often what seems to be a male body with breasts stuck on it. His most beautiful, feminine woman is Mary of the Pieta, who is also the most clothed. His strangest may be "Night": an obvious male model with completely incongruent breasts.
http://www.shafe.co.uk/crystal/images/lshafe/Michelangelo_Night_1526-33.jpg
Rome was seething with vice at the time and there was never anything preventing him from doing what all artists used to do for female nude models: hiring prostitutes to pose nude. It's to be suspected from the masculinity of his female nudes he never did this and that he may never have actually seen a naked woman outside other artist's work, much less sketched one. A Gay man wouldn't be so coy. Gays are not repelled by naked women and they wouldn't balk in the least at a female nude model. Although a gay artist might prefer male subjects, if he can realistically render a horse, a tree, a dog, or a rock outcropping, he can also easily render an anatomically correct woman. Michelangelo was, I'm convinced, afraid to. Too sexual, too lascivious. Nude women had to be "defused" by rendering them essentially as men, which were safe, non-sexual, allowing him to maintain his delusion that he was a non-sexual person.
Later in life people who can make young friends often become infatuated with them. There is an element of surrogate parenthood in this for those who have no children, but mostly it is a matter of regaining your youth by association with youth. I can see Michelangelo throwing the term "love" at younger friends, doting on them, lavishing them with affection, not just because it was acceptable between men at that time in that place, but because he had the fear of old age and loneliness in him. (That can compel people to extravagance in finding ways to get company. I knew an old British actor who, because he was generally charming and had remarkable stories about many famous actors he'd worked with, had ammunition against loneliness. In his 80's he took a life drawing class and soon was inviting his fellow students, girls in their 20's, over to his house for more private sessions. He'd have five or six there at once taking turns stripping down and posing for the rest. He, himself, would strip down and pose. He was having the time of his life doing what precious few 80 year old's could ever do.)
I don't believe that, after a lifetime of idealizing women from afar, regarding himself as remarkably ugly, and neglecting his personal grooming, Michelangelo had the option of collecting an entourage of young women. He was limited to the gender he was already comfortable with when he came to feel the need to lavish affection on youth. Would any of these young guys have really had sex with this very ugly and personally filthy person, even had Michelangelo wanted to? Seems very doubtful.
Then we have this from the wikipedia article you linked to:
When an employee of his friend Niccolò Quaratesi offered his son as apprentice suggesting that he would be good even in bed, Michelangelo refused indignantly, suggesting Quaratesi fire the man.
"Rough and uncouth", living in squalor, swept up by fire and brimstone preaching, misanthropic, admiring of the "fresh" untouched virgin mother: all this sounds like a man trying to mortify his flesh to protect the ideal of women...from himself. Gay men are sociable, well groomed, religiously not given to fundamentalism, and very, very friendly to women. I really think the explanation for Michelangelo is that he was a 'closet heterosexual': a man trying to pretend he had no sexual feelings for women.
And there isn't a song of his I don't like including this one. 
