peripathetic

Long-dead gay people
Sounds positively sickening, doesn't it. But a new book, Strangers: Homosexual love in the 19th Century, written by Graham Robb of Oxford Uni, runs the gamut of social, medical, and legal responses to homosexuality before turning to the ways gay people lived and wrote themselves into society. There's apparently one very interesting part which deals with whether Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson were gay, which I've linked to a lengthy NYT treatment thereof. Just in case it expires, here are a few snippets from the article copyright Laura Miller:

...there is something decidedly unconventional about the sexuality of Holmes and several other popular fictional detectives... Holmes was partly based on Edgar Allan Poe's Auguste Dupin, hero of the first detective story, "The Murders in the Rue Morgue"... The brilliant amateur sleuth, a man of aristocratic family, lives in reduced circumstances as a result of ''untoward events.'' He is ''enamored of the night'' and frequents the dicier parts of town. The unnamed (but more solvent) narrator immediately perceives that ''seeking in Paris the objects I then sought . . . the society of such a man would be to me a treasure beyond price.'' They set up housekeeping together. By day, they remain indoors with curtains drawn, burning candles and incense -- exactly the sort of behavior that, Robb notes, scandalized a London courtroom when Wilde admitted to it decades later. ...Great critics have struggled to define the eccentric charm of Doyle's tales. It has so little to do with adult sexuality because it has so little to do with adulthood. The Holmes stories take place in an idyll of perpetual boyhood, at the stage Freudians call ''latent,'' when love scenes are something to retch at and the ambivalence of grown-up life is held at bay. For all its solemnity, ''The Lord of the Rings'' partakes of the same dream. That's why sex is of small consequence in either work and the word ''adventure'' is essential to both.