This week is going to be very light on the blogging due to excessive travel. Here’s stuff I have been saving up while I have been in Ireland.
– In The Guardian Jon Ronson meets the boss of SETI.
– At Lambda Literary Cathy Camper tackles the Was Holmes Gay? question.
– In SF&F Elizabeth Hand explains why Jonathan Clements deserves a Nobel prize (though I think he’d be quite happy with a Hugo nomination – hint).
It’s interesting that people seem to want Holmes to be gay, or to think that he was “really” gay in some sense. Since Holmes is a fictional character, the only sense in which he could be gay is if it’s on the page. It isn’t. Can two men live together in a flat with seperate bedrooms without being gay? Can two men be close friends without having a physical relationship, or wishing to have a physical relationship?
It’s left open whether Holmes had physical and/or emotional yearnings, and it’s left open as to whether he gratified them. Certainly Victorian London was a place where he could find companionship of any kind without much difficulty.
Fiction is far more than what is on the page. Everyone who reads a story fills in details, and everyone does it differently. It is what we humans do. I suspect that if I was a gay man and I read a story about two men living together I’d naturally assume that they were gay.