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calling holmes/watson readers
I encourage anyone who has read Sherlock Holmes slash fiction at all widely to respond to this discussion post at ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
cox_and_co (filtered to community members, but it's worthwhile to join if you've any interest, even currently inactive, in Holmes slash). ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
potatofiend is writing a paper on Holmes slash for presentation at an academic conference and could no doubt use all the interested reader opinions she can get; they always like you to quote other people for that.
ETA: I've reproduced my thoughts here for accessibility/posterity.
cox_and_co (filtered to community members, but it's worthwhile to join if you've any interest, even currently inactive, in Holmes slash). potatofiend is writing a paper on Holmes slash for presentation at an academic conference and could no doubt use all the interested reader opinions she can get; they always like you to quote other people for that.ETA: I've reproduced my thoughts here for accessibility/posterity.
I have to wonder, though, if you have documentation that queer Holmes fanfic doesn't predate the internet? I know that Holmes has one of the oldest fanfic communities, and it might have existed but been largely underground and thus harder to discover after the fact? I've read at least one critical analysis book about queer readings and implications in Holmes, which says nothing about fanfic but confirms the long history of queer readings...
Anyway, on to your questions!
1. Commonest/recurring tropes
- Blackmailers! Usually because they have evidence that Holmes is gay.
- Holmes hires a prostitute who looks like Watson. I've seen this several times but, interestingly, I've never seen Watson seeking a replacement for Holmes. Not that I've ever really seen this trope used in het romance/erotica, but at cursory reading Holmes seems to be cast as the "hero"/"masculine" role in this scenario - even if he's being all furtive and underground about it, it's sort of inherently masculine, that desperation for some sort of outlet for his Desperate Sexual Urges that cannot! be! bottled! up! (You don't see women in het who are so desperate they're going to explode if they don't have a stand-in. But perhaps that is more about the unthinkability of women objectifying/buying/commodifying men.)
- Oscar Wilde Issues - that is, dealing with the illegality of homosexuality, fear of discovery, etc. Usually mentioning Wilde by name in this case.
- He's Not Emotionless, He's Just Queer. That is, Holmes's distaste for women is a consequence of his being very very gay. Any statements made about love or romance were misinterpreted or a cover for his homosexuality.
- Pining!Holmes. You see far more of this than pining!Watson. He's usually a bit feminised when he's been pining, I'd say. Perhaps from sheer passivity.
- Watson Learns to Deduct. Either he has an epiphany and deduces that Holmes is in love with him, or Holmes wants him to figure it out and gives him clues/poses the problem. Perhaps I'm exaggerating the frequency of this one in my own mind because it's one of my favourites? It might not be particularly likely (canon Watson isn't that good at it, or that into it), but it's pretty cool.
- The Return/The Empty House. Watson is pissed off, with good reason, about being lied to. Also, absence might have made the heart grow fonder. And there's the fact that the canon of this story is one of the more affectionate/emotionally-laden. I think a fair number of stories deal with this time.
2. Mary
It's important to differentiate canon from fan readings, because I certainly think that Doyle's INTENTION was for Mary and the marriage to have been real. And when I describe my personal interpretation, I don't mean to indicate that it was even unintentionally implied by the text. In fact, I was reading Holmes slash before I discovered the Granada productions with Jeremy Brett, and when I first got into it I went through the typical reader's hair-pulling trying to work out a chronology of canon events, whether he had one or more wives and when, etc, etc. (It's not possible without some finesse. Canon disagrees with itself because Doyle didn't pay that much attention to the dates when he was writing, early on, or so I've read.) At any rate, the printed material that comes with the dvd boxes of Granada tv series starring Jeremy Brett explains that they did away with Mary entirely, and kept Watson living at Baker St all along, for simplicity's sake. The episodes each focus quite closely on a case, so that makes sense, but it incidentally is fertile ground for a queer reading. Jeremy Brett doesn't hurt in that regard either of course.
But personally, I prefer to imagine this - the way events are presented on-screen - as "reality" within the fictional universe, and the written canon as the very slightly fictionalised stories that Watson wrote. This has the advantage, also, of explaining inconsistencies (because they're written inconsistencies, not inconsistencies in reality).
I don't think this interpretation is very common, though. It seems to me, without recourse to counting, that quite a large number of Holmes slash stories do mention Mary, although there are also quite a few which ignore her.
3. In general fanon, Watson ranges from a ladies' man (who doesn't realise that he's Gay for Holmes) to actually functionally bisexual. I've seen a very few where he had homosexual experience, either from school and the army (heh) or from the illegal gay scene. But I think overall he is shown to swing both ways, with the majority fanon Watson being mostly-straight and making an exception (or maybe having made a handful of exceptions in the past). You read elsewhere about the overall fanfic conception of slash moving away from "they're not gay, they just love each other" a decade or more ago and towards a conception of the characters with gay identities. It does, in fact, seem that this might apply to Watson too, because it seems that the frequency is lower now of repressed!Watson who never even thought of a man That Way before.
Personally, I lean towards a Watson who is not a stranger to physical attraction to other men, but has very little experience of it. And I don't particularly envision him as a dashing manslut, either, with or without the sexual connotation.
4. My reading of Holmes is that he's extremely queer, and I think this reading is defensible from ACD's text, although it's debatable whether it could possibly have been intentional (I tend to think not, but you could argue for it I suppose). Characters can be coded as queer, since 'queer' as a concept and constellation of symbols exists, without their sexuality being the intended/thought of focus. I do think that queer-but-asexual is the most literal interpretation of the text, and asexual seems a defensible sort of queer. But I prefer to envision Holmes as a sexual, sensual being, obviously. I don't think that his asceticism necessarily precludes that. But I do see asceticism as important to him, so, while I'm not 100% behind Virgin!Holmes (I don't mind reading about him, but he's not my canon), I also don't really buy him being so overpowered by physical desire that he just HAS to hire a Watsonesque prostitute, for example. Or even so overpowered by desire that he can't concentrate on a case, which I'd find out of character for him specifically, though it's a common element in romance fiction.
In fanon there's a tradition of Virgin!Holmes that should probably have been mentioned in the list of tropes above, which can be cute. There's also a tradition of Gay!Holmes who knows all about the underground gay scene in London and might or might not make use of prostitutes.
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