I've heard from various places that king Richard I was gay. I've also heard that he can't be gay because he fathered bastards in heterosexual affairs. He could be bisexual, which would give credibility both to whatever claims of gayness were made against him and the claims of straightness made against him.
So, what was this famous king's sexual orientation?
We are not 100% sure, but he wasn't gay. He had a bastard son in a heterosexual affair, and is clearly recorded as having sex with many women - often rape - whilst on campaigns. He was certainly attracted to many women.
That means the question is whether he was just attracted to women. The idea that Richard I might have been gay came about in 1948, in The Plantagenets by John Harvey. This was thoroughly disputed by John Gillingham in his 1994 biography of Richard. In 1999, the French scholar Jean Flori argued that Richard was probably bisexual in his book Richard Coeur de Lion: le roi-chevalier. Thankfully it was recently translated from French into English.
The pieces of evidence that Richard I was bisexual or homosexual, from Harvey and Flori, are the following:
His childless marriage is pretty easy to explain, and does not indicate a lack of attraction to women. Richard met his future wife, Berengaria of Navarre, at a tournament. They travelled together on the Third Crusade, and married in 1191. They departed the Holy Land separately, and both got stuck on their way home. Their marriage was either political, or else a whirlwind romance that quickly fizzled out. When they did eventually get back to Europe, they did not often see each other. It isn't clear if their marriage was even consummated, and Richard had affairs with other women. Contemporaries - including the pope - noticed that, although Berengaria loved Richard, Richard did not appear to love her back, and criticised him for it. This does not demonstrate that Richard was not attracted to women, nor does it demonstrate that he was attracted to men, it simply demonstrates that his marriage was not a happy one.
Contemporary authors had a long list of complaints about Richard's behaviour, one of which was his lustfulness. This also does not demonstrate bisexuality or homosexuality, it shows that his sex life was deemed sinful. This could refer to acts of sodomy as a part of homosexual relations, but could also be explained by his infidelity toward his wife. Richard allegedly confessed to sins on two public occasions, both recorded by Roger of Howeden. He alleges that sodomy was mentioned. This is dubious, since no other source mentions these confessions. There was plenty to complain about with regard to Richard's sexual behaviour, but homosexual relations and sodomy do not appear clearly in the source material. Instead, the more hostile source material was far more interested in Richard's poor treatment of his wife, that he was a rapist, and his general hedonistic attitude toward sex. This is evidence against homosexual relationships, as homosexuality would have been perfect ammunition for these hostile writers, but it doesn't come up.
The sharing of a bed by Phillip II and Richard I is one of Harvey's key pieces of evidence. However, both Gillingham and Flori have completely trashed it. The modern reader will read an account of two men sleeping together and probably assume a sexual element to this, but medieval authors did not often see the same connection, especially in a military context. Two military leaders sleeping in the same space was not that uncommon, as they were used to sharing crowded tents. Sleeping in the same room, and indeed the same bed, was a way to publicly demonstrate an alliance. This is the context in which Richard I and Phillip II shared a bed. It occurred in 1187, just after Richard and Phillip had forged an alliance to help rebel against Henry II, Richard's father. It wasn't a routine occurrence, it was a one-off gesture to show their commitment to campaigning together. They just shared a room, there's no indication of sexual relations that night.
So what was Richard's sexuality? He wasn't gay, that much is pretty obvious. He might have been bisexual, but the evidence is very slim, and could easily be explained by how poorly he treated Berengaria. We ultimately do not - and cannot - know his sexuality, but I think he was most likely heterosexual.
A good comparison would be to William II, who was probably gay. He had no children, never married, and there is no record of him ever having sexual relations with a woman despite constant pressure to do so. Men were another matter. The contemporary writer Orderic Vitalis complained that "the effeminate predominated everywhere, and reveled without restraint, while filthy catamites, fit only to perish in the flames, shamelessly abounded themselves to the foulest practices of Sodom." Anselm, the archbishop of Canturbury, warned him about the damage these allegations were doing to his reputation, and William completely ignored him. Although no writer explicitly said he was attracted to men, later writers routinely classified him as a sodomite or catamite, which is probably as close as a medieval writer could get to describing his sexuality, given that they lacked labels like 'gay'.