Straight from the Canon

I received a letter recently from a gentleman who is working on proving that Holmes and Watson were homosexuals. It's not entirely a new thesis, but usually its proponents don't try to prove it. They just write books or make porno movies that show Holmes and Watson behaving as they want them to behave and leave it at that.

This letter-writer, however, seemed actually interested in building a case, and was eager to hear any arguments, for or against, that I might have. The first argument to come to mind, of course/was the ever-popular:  BECAUSE THEY WEREN'T GAY, DAMMIT.  

Not that there's anything wrong with that, as we say in TV-influenced middle America.  

Perhaps my conservative mid-western roots are showing too much in that initial reaction, but let's look at the facts.  

Take Holmes, to begin with. When you get down to brass tacks, it doesn't matter whether he was gay, straight, or amorously involved with cauliflower. As he once told Watson, "You say that we go round the sun. If we went round the moon it would not make a pennyworth of difference to me or to my work." So it is with Holmes's sexual preference.  

When Watson wrote, "He never spoke of the softer passions, save with a gibe and a sneer," in the opening to "A Scandal in Bohemia," the words are not gender specific at all. It doesn't matter if you're trying to prove he was having a torrid romance with Irene Adier or with Dr. Watson, the words mean the same.

"...as a lover he would have placed himself in a false position."  

"All emotions, and that one (love) particularly, were abhorrent to his cold, precise but admirably balanced mind."  

Whether you're trying to prove that Holmes was homosexual or heterosexual, first you have to prove that he was just plain sexual. The bulk of the evidence points to Sherlock Holmes being asexual.  

Dr. Watson is another matter entirely. In his own words:  

"Because I love you, Mary, as truly as ever a man loved a woman."  

How much closer can the good doctor come to saying, "I am as heterosexual as heterosexual can be." Even if you want to claim that that one line was just a cover-up, the rest of the novel The Sign of the Four reveals otherwise. Watson frets and fusses over his courtship of Mary Morstan in ways that only a man who is truly in love can do:  

"Was it fair, was it honourable, that a half-pay surgeon should take such advantage of an intimacy which chance had brought about? Might she not look upon me as a mere vulgar fortune-seeker?"  

Fuss and fret. It's almost a relief when Mary Morstan accepts Watson's proposal, just because he'll quit going on about whether or not he's worthy of her. This is definitely a man in love, and not with Sherlock Holmes.

If you're going to try to prove that Holmes and Watson were gay, there's even a third person whose heterosexuality you have to question ... the man who supposedly created them and their relationship. Sir Arthur  Conan Doyle. Writers put something of themselves in their work, and when you write as much about two people as Doyle did about Holmes and Watson, he had to put a lot of himself into his work.  

But with a life filled with two marriages, five children, and such quotes as "There is no such thing as an ugly woman ..." coming from stories about his life, Doyle would be a hard man to prove as having a homo-sexual streak, even suppressed.  

You can start rumors about anyone. There's not a male alive that is so absolutely masculine that you can't point a finger at them, say the word "gay" and convince somebody that you know the real facts. And that's especially true of celebrities, a category Holmes and Watson defi- nitely fit in.  

If you're a gay Sherlockian, and you want to try to prove they were, too, there's plenty of Sherlockian precedent for it. Golfing Sherlockians like to prove Holmes was a golfer. Members of numerous religious groups have tried to prove Holmes was among their number. Chess players have tried to claim him, Americans have tried to claim him ... everybody wants Holmes in their club.  

Just remember Holmes's own admonition not to theorize in advance of the facts. Or in spite of the facts....  

(Printed in Plugs & Dottles, September 1996)