There are two interesting and fairly popular texts on Leo Tolstoy's attitude to men, often read as proof of Lev Nikolayevich's homosexuality in his boyhood and youth

The first text is a diary entry of 29 November 1851, when Tolstoy was 23:

“I have never been in love with women.
<…>
With men I have very often fallen in love: my first love was the two Pushkins, then the second, Saburov (?), then the third, Zybin and Dyakov, the fourth, Obolensky, Blosfeld, Islavin, also Gautier and many others.
Of all these people I continue to love only Dyakov.
For me the chief sign of love is the fear of offending or of failing to please the beloved object, simply fear.
I fell in love with men before I had any notion of the possibility of pederasty; but even after I learned of it, the thought of the possibility of intercourse never entered my head.
A strange example of inexplicable sympathy is Gautier.
I had no dealings with him whatever, save for the buying of books. I was thrown into a heat when he came into the room.
My love for Islavin spoiled for me a whole 8 months of life in Petersburg. Though unconsciously, I cared for nothing else but to please him. All the people whom I loved felt this, and I noticed that it was hard for them to look at me. <…>
I was very often jealous of women.
I understand the ideal of love: the perfect sacrifice of oneself to the beloved object.
<…>
Beauty has always had much influence in the choice; though there is the example of Dyakov; but I shall never forget the night when he and I were driving from Pirogovo (?), and I wanted, tucking myself under the rug, to kiss him and to weep. There was sensuality in this feeling too, but why it got in there it is impossible to decide; because, as I have said, my imagination never drew lascivious pictures for me; on the contrary, I have [crossed out: innately] a terrible aversion.”

How to judge and interpret these words you will decide for yourselves, but they are often linked with the numerous rumours about Tolstoy, which is of course fundamentally wrong, yet still belongs to the mythological stratum of reports about Tolstoy's intimate ties with Chertkov and, less often, with Chicherin.

The second text is a passage from the autobiographical, yet still fictional, novella “Childhood”, Chapter XVIII, “The Ivins”, where the narrator says the following:

“Soon after our arrival we made the acquaintance of three boys of our own age, the Ivins.
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I loved the two younger ones to distraction, and loved them so that I was ready to sacrifice everything for them; it was not friendship I felt, I was in love, as those are in love who love for the first time: I dreamed of them and wept. That is how I loved him….
<…>
Even if I had tried to convey my feeling, it would have been taken for simple, ordinary attachment, but I did not want that, and, probably foreseeing that I would not be understood, I kept this sweet feeling deeply hidden; and why is it that afterwards, when I had ceased to feel so strongly, I ceased also to be ashamed of confessing to love?”

It is generally supposed that in the Ivins Leo Tolstoy portrayed the sons of Count Ivan Musin-Pushkin, Alexei and Alexander, whom he knew in those same years and who are mentioned in the same context in the diary.

But on the whole this is one of those risqué and ambiguous subjects that the common reader likes to find in the biographies of great men and to interpret so that it sounds piquant or indecent. Though, in my view, there is nothing in these confessions not merely surprising but even remarkable: they are simply the description of an experience in which a person tried to grasp and understand his own sensuality and perhaps sexuality, which is in principle normal and, by rights, necessary to everyone at a certain stage of life, so it is no accident that we are introduced to the text of “Childhood” as early as middle school.