Part 1 is here.

Before I go any further I think it would be a good idea to state my own opinion on the nature of gay subtext.  My particular area of interest in literary studies extends from about the mid-19th century to the first few decades of the 20th, and given the progression of general public opinion in Europe on homosexuality during that period – from (usually) criminalized sin to (slightly more commonly – yes, really) criminalized mental illness – by now I’m quite used to the veritable storm of euphemisms and flowery classical allusions, redundant moralizing, and coldly clinical diagnoses that characterize writings on homosexuality in a time before any straightforward positive representation was really possible (or at least publishable).  In short, I’m so used to subtext in fiction that I find myself not quite knowing what to do with an explicitly gay work (okay, that’s not quite true, but I still feel it requires a completely different approach as a reader/viewer).  Therefore I’m not as bothered as I probably ought to be by a show like Sherlock repeatedly teasing homoeroticism rather than fully taking advantage of its 21st century setting and seriously considering the issue.  It has, however, led me to question why people accuse Sherlock and not the Guy Ritchie movies of queerbaiting when they employ some of the same methods of characterizing the Holmes/Watson dynamic.  Is it only because of the setting update?

Certainly, when the first episode of Sherlock has John casually asking Sherlock in public if he has a boyfriend, it goes without saying that the writers are aware that the series can be more upfront about homosexuality than could a Sherlock Holmes adaptation set in the late 19th century.  Moreover, for all my reading in erotica, gay autobiography, and other racy publications of the Victorian period, I know that the innuendos and hinted gender/sexual transgressions of the movies are anachronistic to a certain extent.  Jokes about beards and the usefulness of Holmes’s tongue as well as dialogue made to sound like a setup for a date or a honeymoon could only be a product of writers deliberately acknowledging the queer subtext in the Doyle originals and expressing some of the same in a way familiar to a modern audience, without, say, relying on the audience to know what “bohemian” used to indicate or to snicker over the Victorians’ freer use of such various words as “love,” “intimate,” and “ejaculate.”

These adaptations share a 21st century queer eye for at least one ostensibly straight guy, but in addition they bridge the period piece/contemporary update gap via shared responses to conventions of 20th century Sherlock Holmes adaptations.  Two of the most pervasive of these – the designation of Irene as a love interest for Holmes and the characterization of Watson as bumbling and slow-witted (most famously initiated by Nigel Bruce’s portrayal in the 1930-40s films) – constitute attempts at straightwashing, the first obviously so, the second because it reduces the Holmes/Watson dynamic to that of a genius relating his methods to a slightly thick audience surrogate.  All three recent adaptations have actively contested the dumbing down of Watson and have tried to develop a more dynamic Irene.  The latter effort can still be  a bit cringe-worthy – movie!Irene is much more active than the one-off antagonist of “A Scandal in Bohemia” but still comes very close to the girlfriend characterization, whereas Sherlock!Irene is definitely bolder but causes so many queer-related headaches that she’s prompted many a long critical post – but having to work around Doyle’s misogynist Holmes as well as decades of confining the Woman to her assigned gender role requires more work to undo than does Watson inexplicably being an idiot.  At any rate, no one could accuse the 21st century adaptations of not critically engaging with the conventions of their predecessors, such that – anachronisms or not – I’d call the homoeroticism of Holmes/Watson in the movies and Sherlock a restoration rather than an addition.

When does it become queerbaiting, though?  As I said earlier I’m well used to wading through subtext, so if one were to define queerbaiting as teasing queer characteristics and situations without ever making them explicit then I’d have to wonder if there’s even really an appreciable difference.  I’m not talking about the myriad larger problems attached to Sherlock!Irene – fetishization, bisexual erasure, “conversion” – but simply the consistently teased-but-never-fulfilled erotic undertones of Holmes/Watson (and, to a lesser extent, other male relationships).  It would seem that adaptations set at the time of the original series get a free pass, because publicly or privately acting upon such feelings would be criminal in 1880-1910s England and, with regard to the primary narrative device of the Doyle stories, Watson would necessarily have to leave out any such behavior in his accounts of Holmes’s cases if they were to be fit for publication.  

The converse of this mindset, that 21st century adaptations must demonstrate more than snarky nods at the homoerotic subtext of the original canon in the context of today’s much more open attitudes toward homosexuality, that they must either bring it to the level of text or dispense with the situation entirely (as Elementary does since Holmes and Watson are not of the same sex), does bother me a bit.  For all our greater freedom of expression compared to the Victorians, we still have many people who are sexually conflicted, who willingly identify as a sexuality that doesn’t fit their behavior, or who are not straight but are perfectly comfortable remaining “discreet” or closeted.  As someone who has been openly gay for years and has participated in hookup culture for some time, I can say that there’s still a place for subtext in gay culture, for doing things without talking about them or even thinking about them too deeply, for having meaningful silences that don’t feel oppressive even if they seem to run contrary to the message of being loud and proud.  Perhaps that’s why this particular sort of queerbaiting doesn’t bother me much if at all, and even though I’m not a hardcore Sherlock fan (I think I slightly prefer the Guy Ritchie movies, honestly) I can still watch and enjoy it without feeling betrayed that Sherlock and John haven’t snogged yet.

Plus I don’t think Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman are that hot anyway.

This post had a number of false starts at the organizational stage, because the ideas I wanted to convey were so generally broad that before I knew it I was mentally bringing in writers as disconnected as Dumas, père and Woolf to discuss the handling of homoerotic content in popular mainstream 19th and early 20th century fiction.  However, in the end I was forced to recall that the collective Sherlock Holmes canon is already gigantic and beyond my ability to analyze comprehensively – the abstract for this prompt in this post details the extent of my familiarity with the canon, which doesn’t even include all of Doyle’s novels and short stories.  Thematically speaking at least this should prove a very pointed analysis, as I’m writing partially in indirect response to multiple conversations that have cropped up on my dash in the past weeks on how issues of gender and sexuality have manifested themselves in the two most popular contemporary Holmes adaptations.  For the purposes of this discussion I’d like to throw in another recent adaptation for consideration – the two Guy Ritchie movies – but beyond that I think keeping mainly to a comparison of the Doyle originals and 21st century interpretations will suffice.  My familiarity with other versions like the Basil Rathbone movies and the Russian adaptation is so sparse that I can’t really comment upon them.

This will be a multi-post series in two parts, though I’ll hopefully be able to get them done in a week so I can stick to my larger posting schedule.  While the eventual goal will involve the argument of the title, before I can get to that I believe it’s worthwhile to ponder a rather unusual question: why does the enduring popularity of Sherlock Holmes seem to have so much to do with its queer content?

Academia is a good place to start, because outside of queer theory one doesn’t often see critics paying much attention to Doyle.  Popular fiction of the late Victorian period is generally very hit-and-miss and dependent on future adaptation to save it from obscurity – that’s why, for example, most people today have heard of Sweeney Todd but no one has heard of Varney the Vampire even though both began as penny dreadfuls.  Sherlock Holmes is without question the most frequently adapted work of detective fiction in existence, though Doyle didn’t invent the genre and he was hardly the last writer to achieve notoriety through it.  By the late 20th century it had become effectively subsumed under the larger genre of crime and legal drama – Law & Order, CSI, and the like – and the continued popularity of these shows suggests that solving criminal cases is still a reliable source of entertainment over a century later.

As I said, though, snobbish literary types like myself don’t like to put much stock in such pedestrian concepts as broad public appeal and timeless entertainment value, and I’ve gotten the impression from Doyle criticism that queer theory is genuinely the main thread of analysis for his work.  No doubt that part of this is simply because of the remarkable ease with which one may find queer subtext in the novels and short stories – I once jokingly placed Doyle’s stories among the likes of the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and The Lord of the Flies and called them “baby’s first queer theory” – such that, in addition to straightforward homoerotic readings of Holmes/Watson and analyses of Holmes’s asexuality, interpretations exist claiming that either one or both characters may be a woman, or that one of them is the invention of the other and so they’re actually one person who is Holmes or Watson or neither of them.  Obviously, such theories could only work in a non-visual medium; Elementary gives us a female Watson, but there’s no question of her sex and she’s not writing about their cases as if she were a man.  

However, as Elementary demonstrates with Watson the ambiguity of the Doyle stories simply allows for greater flexibility with characters in visual adaptations, such that the more inclusive cast comes across as fitting for a canon that generates so much queer discussion.  That applies not only to academic circles but to large portions of the online fanbase(s) as well, as if one were to judge the interests of the fandom based on the character and thematic emphases of fanwork and meta I’d say that with crime/legal dramas (or at least Sherlock Holmes adaptations) the cases are largely backdrop against which to develop emotionally and/or intellectually engaging characters.  Characterization – including queer characterization – is arguably what continues to hold up what would otherwise be a rather tired literary genre.  The detective always solves the case and the villain is always apprehended, punished, or disposed of, if not in the same episode/story then eventually, and even the thriller aspect can’t survive on its own indefinitely.  Therefore, if the narratives aren’t populated by figures who catch and retain our interest then there’s little reason to keep returning to this particular genre.

That’s why I don’t mind Elementary giving more attention to women, people of color, trans people, etc. even though I’m a literary snob and a white cis male (though gay and not in the least British/Anglo-Saxon).  It’s a great way to highlight marginalized groups in a way that the  21st century setting freely encourages, and it also keeps the Holmes canon from becoming stale.  Nevertheless, (white cis male) homoeroticism is practically the heart of both Sherlock and the Guy Ritchie movies (aside from the criminal cases, that is), and in the second half of this post I want to look more closely at both of them in comparison to Doyle (and, briefly, to earlier and decidedly less queer adaptations) to arrive at some idea of what separates subtextual homoeroticism from queerbaiting and, by extension, whether Sherlock in particular is guilty of the latter.