marianhalcombes:

marianhalcombes:

marianhalcombes:

i think a period piece sherlock holmes that portrays him as gay (which i find a plethora of support in the text—not just in an attraction to watson, but through complex connotations and contexts contemporary to victorian gender and sexuality) could do so much on the topic of criminality. 

what does it mean to be a criminal? what does it mean to police, but not be police? to dole out justice on your own terms? to be born a criminal? to be a detective in a period that collapsed the gay man with the criminal with the gender dissident, all of which were considered innate degenerative biological categories? how does someone deal with being born a criminal while also working within and outside the law as holmes does?

one day i will elicit stories for an anthology of lgbt holmes stories 

not to bring this up again but…. it is not just the 19th century, not just the victorian era, but specifically the time period holmes lived on baker street (1881–1904) that presents a unique opportunity for this kind of adaptation. a tremendous amount of cultural changes, events, and seismic redefinitions made the 1880s–1900 a particularly fraught era.

essentially, the turn of the century invoked Extreme anxieties in britain regarding their own decline of civilization and the degeneration of the british body politic. gender and sexuality was not a small part of this. like, at all.

in 1885, the labouchere amendment passed, making it easier to imprison men accused of “gross indecency.” seems better than execution, but it served to significantly broaden what that term meant and put more people in prison under horrific conditions, since it was harder to provide enough proof of someone’s sexual activity to get them killed by the state or imprisoned for life

sexologists first termed “sexual inversion” (homosexuality) in this period. being gay became, for the first time, something you were not something you engaged in. it became part of your identity. it’s worth noting that, even in britain, public sexual ambiguity was much more common and even accepted prior to 19th and 20th centuries (books like Sex Before Sexuality explore this). the victorians—especially post-Darwin, anthropologist-obsessed, imperial ideologues—loved to categorize things. it was their whole shtick. 

there were multiple, high-profile scandals regarding gender and sexual dissidence. the cleveland street scandal (1889) publicized a male brothel, where many of the workers dressed in women’s clothing and makeup, with aristocratic clients, some of whom had to flee the country. oscar wilde’s trial occurred in 1895. but the newspapers rarely even name what the scandals were. you’d be caught in the trap of repression and hyper surveillance all the time

this era saw the new woman: women who rode bikes, smoked cigars, demanded equal rights, and wore trousers. the smallest acknowledgements of women being sexually attracted to women began to emerge.

you get all this happening just as britain is in imperial upheaval, and you get a lot of anxiety about the state of their nation. 

you get men having sex with men who are now their own species basically, women “cross-dressing” and engaging in masculine pursuits, and you eventually have to ask, “what does it mean to be a man? what does it mean to be a woman? and how does sex and love figure into all this?” 

and all these new ideas are developing during the height of criminology.

so, again. what might it mean for a man like sherlock holmes to be gay and to be a detective? to work within the law as a criminal and to actively disregard the law in his personal and professional life?