that's dope, man

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=quSXoj8Kob0&feature=youtu.be

Here's my contribution to the witcher fandom lmao

Holmes not giving a single damn about where he’ll have to go or how far he’ll have to run, because as long as Watson is there with him it’ll be home to him.

And Watson agreeing to leave everything behind and follow Holmes wherever, for however long, to the ends of the earth if must be, without even a second’s hesitation.

Well, Dorian Gray was barely subtext. The editor censored the first edition without Wilde’s permission and even then there was such an uproar that the second edition (released the next year) was much more heavily edited–that’s the version most of us are familiar with. The original version contained such lines as, “It is quite true I have worshipped you with far more romance of feeling than a man should ever give to a friend. Somehow I have never loved a woman.” And everyone knew Wilde was queer.

Meanwhile, Dracula frames gayness in monstrous terms. This is a literary device that’s been used in many queer stories in homophobic times: make it tragic, horrifying, monstrous, and the cishet audience will feel comfortable in their removal from it, while the queer audience recognizes their otherness.

Intensely homoerotic friendships, love, emotional passion, deep devotion between men were accepted - just - as long as they could be fitted into a paradigm where those men also were married, or were planning on marrying, or even had been previously married to a woman, and any sexual activity was male/female. Women were predicated as the gatekeepers of males’ sexual desires. And a large part of the discourse around what was acceptable between men was played out in those male spaces where women were absent: universities, the church, the army, political fora, clubs. It was there, in the absence of women, that men policed themselves and others most strongly to ensure that friendships remained acceptably pure. Reading the literature, it is quite clear that men who broke the rules - men such as Wilde, who were openly sexual with other men - posed a tremendous threat to all those who carefully constructed their lives to fit with the socially acceptable model. If Wilde could make it clear that sex and love went together, then what of those men who loved other men deeply, whose emotional lives were completely centred around other men, but who refrained from physical expression of their love? When society so strongly condemned genital expression of love, but allowed intense devotion, where does that leave men who felt their affections needed physical as well as emotional, expression?

(This is where my Watson in SFISYF is at the moment. He is deeply, intensely devoted to his Holmes. But where can he go with that love, when society applauds it as an essential aspect of male hegemony when it is chaste comradeship and soldierly devotion without sex, but condemns it as the most vile of sins if it is expressed sexually?

His is the dilemma faced by many. And Holmes’ dilemma is similar, in that he knows his own desires, but has been taught to consider carnality - the matters of the flesh - as incompatible with chaste comradeship and soldierly devotion.)

There was a lot of discourse centred on Greek concepts of love at this time. The Judaeo-Christian contempt for the body and its needs and wants, the neo-Platonist ideas of the ideal society, the Greco-Roman concepts of how men should achieve dominance through Empire, were in conflict with the actual evidence (written materials, art, ceramics) that, whatever Plato said about the best loves being pure, men in Greece and Rome engaged unashamed in genital activity with each other.

Judaeo-Christian tradition condemned sexual activity between males. Plato considered it to be a factor that detracted from the highest form of love. In Rome, sexual excesses and male/male activity were associated with the least praiseworthy emperors - Caligula, Nero, Heliogabalus. For upper and middle class Victorian men taught to propagate and support the societal paradigm of Empire, the need to integrate these two aspects of male/male interaction - the strong homosocial bonding needed to make Empire work, and the intense emotional ties it required - with a complete absence of physical expression of love produced a psychic conflict that many of them struggled in vain to resolve.

This is one reason why when men such as John Addington Symonds and Edward Carpenter did form happy homosexual partnerships, it was often with men of a lower social class - men unburdened by the neuroticism developed by education in public schools and its consequent mindset. It is why Maurice can be happy with Alec, but not with Clive. It is why the Dublin Castle Scandal, the Cleveland Street Affair and the Wilde trials happened: in all three of those ‘moments’ which tipped society into homophobic retreat, one of the things that was most strongly reprobated by judges, juries and public alike, was that there was a transgressive sexual relationship not just between men, but between men of different classes. These relationships between Gustavus Cornwall and the renter, Jack Saul, between Lord Arthur Somerset and the Earl of Euston and their telegraph boys, between Wilde, and his street lads, struck at the basic of the social compact: that homoerotic devotion in the chaste Greek mode was acceptable so long as compulsory heterosexuality was also forcing men to marry and breed to maintain society. If society allowed for men to be devoted to, to marry other men, England might fall, and worse, the hegemony of the monied upper classes might be broken.

(And don’t even get me started on what that meant for women. Nobody even considers the life of Gustavus Cornwall’s childless wife, to whom he’d probably transmitted the syphilis that eventually killed him. Una Troubridge, lesian lover of Radclyffe Hall was treated all her life for the syphilis her philandering husband gave her as a wedding present. Mary Benson, wife of the Archbishop of Canterbury, forced into a marriage with him at an age too young to say no, had lesbian affairs all through her married life. And there are other examples.)

Sir Ian McKellen on Sherlock Holmes and Love ~ from his interview in support of Museum of London’s Sherlock Holmes exhibition. 

“There was a gleam in his eyes and a suppressed excitement in his manner which convinced me, used as I was to his ways, that his hand was upon a clue […].”

“Sherlock Holmes preserved his calm professional manner until our visitor had left us, although it was easy for me, who knew him so well, to see that he was profoundly excited.”

“In spite of his capacity for concealing his emotions, I could easily see that Holmes was in a state of suppressed excitement.”

“Holmes listened with polite attention; but I, who knew him so well, could clearly see that his thoughts were elsewhere, and I detected a mixture of mingled uneasiness and expectation beneath that mask which he was wont to assume.”

“His eyes shone, and his cheek was flushed with the exhilaration of the master workman who sees his work lie ready before him.  A very different Holmes, this active, alert man, from the introspective and pallid dreamer of Baker Street.  I felt, as I looked upon that supple figure, alive with nervous energy, that it was indeed a strenuous day that awaited us.”

The example that comes to mind is ACD dialed down Holmes’s creepiness, part of his transgressive Aestheticism, after A Study in Scarlet.  

Maybe, though, Conan Doyle tidied up the Holmes/Watson relationship more than Holmes himself.  Watson’s first marriage was the conventional end to a bachelor adventure, and ACD undid it for the sake of more stories.  What bugs me is why he bothered to separate Holmes and Watson after that.  Why do we get estrangement, geographical distance, and another marriage to boot?  

ACD doesn’t seem to have made Holmes and Watson less intimate in reaction to either Wilde’s conviction or Hornung’s queer spoofing.  Also, ACD allowed different men, Malone and Roxton, to end up together in The Lost World in 1912.

One explanation for why Holmes and Watson couldn’t ride off together into the smoggy sunset could be this:  the public exposure of Casement’s homosexuality in 1916, after ACD had written two books about him, finally hit too close to home.  The ultimate separation of Holmes and Watson occurred after this, first within His Last Bow in 1917 and then in Case Book stories.  

Research done in Germany by Ulrichs, Hirsch field and Kertbeny, work by Havelock Ellis and Kraft-Ebing had an effect that I think they didn’t expect:

There had always been men who had sex with each other, and if this involved sodomy, it was, until 1861 in England, punished with the death penalty. But the increasing exposure of the fact that there were men who preferentially focused their affections on men - that these were loving, consensual arrangements - threatened the fabric of a society that needed homosociality to function, but required heterosexuality to reproduce itself.

Before the advent of mass literacy, and mass distribution of news, such lifestyles had been able to fly under the radar. (Even Boulton and Parke got away with it - just.) But later high profile scandals that were widely disseminated dragged into prominence that this group of men existed.

Efforts by men such as Ulrichs to explain WHY these types of men existed, focused on medical and psychological explanations - genetic abnormality, parental deficiency or excess, innate weakness. And the descriptions of the people they interviewed as subjects for their research also focused on physical stigmata - small build, effeminate manner, blue eyes, weak chin, a high voice, as well as medical: debility, neurasthenia, anxiety, so that homosexuality chosen as a lifestyle, became a disease. If you were a healthy man or woman, you weren’t homosexual. If you were homosexual, you weren’t healthy.

And although the pioneers of sexual and gender studies were, I think, attempting to prove that homosexuality was not a crime (so homosexuals would not be punished for something they couldn’t help) what they actually did was to define it as an aberration from the norm: a disease (so homosexuals were punished for being abnormal.)

Conan Doyle was well aware of all this. He argued that both Wilde and Casement were subjects for medical care, rather than a prison. For us now, it looks as if he was being extremely homophobic. For him, in his time, he was arguing for the most compassionate ‘treatment’ possible - and I say ‘treatment’ because at this time in the late 1800s and early 1900s, aversion ‘therapy’ and the use of electro-convulsive shock and emetic drugs were not a big thing. (I need to check dates on those.) Don’t forget that it was only in the 1880s that the defence of criminal insanity stopped people going to the scaffold: that was progress. So was not treating homosexuality as a crime, but as a condition.

So on balance, if Conan Doyle ended up distancing Holmes from his homosexual origins, it was because he increasingly saw homosexuality as a disease … not as an adjunct of romantic Aestheticism.

@johnlock-empire thank you for messaging me!  (If I ever miss a post feel free to point it out.  The tags don’t always work as they should, and sometimes I miss a notification.  I don’t mind links if you think I missed something.)