I wouldn't blame it on a frayed leash >>; ... as I mentioned in another conversation, there seems to be a trend in the "subtext is now text" Sherlock metas that goes beyond "my reading of subtext might as well be the only reading" to some fans actually *substituting creator responsibility to communicate queerness with viewer responsibility to SEE queerness,* as if it was an ethical/intellectual responsibility, at this point. It's frustrating.
Yes, that’s it exactly. And yes, I definitely think we need to look for the queerness. We definitely need to unearth the queerness, even—perhaps especially—where it’s not obvious. And I frankly love it when people look for it in unexpected nooks and crannies (ha). But sometimes you have sound evidence, and sometimes you don’t, and if I don’t see what you see that doesn’t mean I don’t want to, and it doesn’t mean I’m not looking. It means your evidence and your interpretation aren’t convincing.
I think it’s rubbing me the wrong way precisely because I know what it’s like to have someone not see something I see clearly. For instance, here’s a passage from Poe’s “Murders in the Rue Morgue,” which I discussed in my first dissertation chapter in 1995; it started a very long infatuation with queer detectives:
"Our first meeting was at an obscure library in the Rue Montmartre, where the accident of our both being in search of the same very rare and very remarkable volume, brought us into closer communion. We saw each other again and again….I felt my soul enkindled within me by the wild fervor, and the vivid freshness of his imagination. Seeking in Paris the objects I then sought, I felt that the society of such a man would be to me a treasure beyond price; and this feeling I frankly confided to him. It was at length arranged that we should live together….Had the routine of our life at this place been known to the world, we should have been regarded as madmen—although, perhaps, as madmen of a harmless nature. Our seclusion was perfect….We existed within ourselves alone.
"It was a freak of fancy in my friend (for what else shall I call it?) to be enamored of the night for her own sake; and into this bizarrerie, as into all his others, I quietly fell; giving myself up to his wild whims with a perfect abandon."
My chapter claimed in part that this passage establishes how the relationship between narrator and detective in this first of all detective stories is a deep homosocial love that supersedes heterosexual relations for either man, and sets up a pattern of same-sex epistemological desire that structures a great deal of detective fiction. My queer-theory director loved it; when she got cancer and I had to find another director, he told me I was being ridiculous. Eventually I dropped the dissertation, and while there were personal reasons too, the look on that guy’s face as he told me I was ridiculous, well, that was the clincher.
So I know how it feels. And I know that no one in a Tumblr post puts in the kind of time and effort I did to make a deeply supported and carefully nuanced reading, so I don’t judge harshly. But when I’m condemned for not buying into an unconvincing reading, damn, it really pushes my buttons.
