He had to be gay.
He certainly wasn’t gay. The big question is was he bisexual? My guess, and it is only a guess, is that he was not. His supposedly sexually charged sonnets to the fair youth brought absolutely no criticism at the time. This suggests his contemporaries realized the sonnets concerned themselves with platonic love.
Compare these to the sonnets to the Dark Lady. The Dark lady sonnets are pure filth in comparison.
Why did he write about the Court and foreign lands and not Stratford? Because the nobleman Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford, was a member of the court, visited foreign lands and did *not* live in Stratford.
This will ignite the usual controversy but the case is overwhelmingly stronger for de Vere than it is for Will of Stratford. I recommend “Shakespeare by Another Name” for a detailed discussion of the issue, written by a scientist who applys pure analytical thinking to the data as it is currently known rather than by a souvenir shop owner in Stratford who has a stake in the controversy (as do most literary scholars who wrote their theses on Will of Stratford).
I have no skin in this game and don’t care who wrote the works; the Oxfordians have the stronger argument at this time.