[This is part of my series on Strangers: Homosexual Love in the Nineteenth Century by Graham Robb. Previous posts can be found here.]
1) Are you a man interested in having a sexual encounter with another man but not keen on visiting a male brothel? Look no further than your nearest Turkish bathhouse. They offered “sex and companionship and were usually much safer than brothels” because your chances of being blackmailed were somewhat lower. You were asked if you wanted a good-looking attendant and the rest was history. Robb writes:
“Bathhouse customers could relax in a world where secret signs were no longer necessary. In the bathhouse, the normal situation was reversed: it would have taken more ingenuity to avoid a homosexual encounter.”
Holmes and Watson visit a Turkish bath together in The Adventure of the Illustrious Client:
Both Holmes and I had a
weakness for the Turkish bath. It was over a smoke in the pleasant lassitude of the drying-room that I
have found him less reticent and more human than anywhere else. On the upper floor of the Northumberland Avenue establishment
there is an isolated corner where two couches lie side by side, and it was on these that we lay upon September 3, 1902, the day
when my narrative begins. I had asked him whether anything was stirring…
Thanks, Granada Holmes – now I need the TAB equivalent. [x]
2) If the Achilles statue (aka the Wellington Monument) in Hyde Park appears in TAB – even a glimpse – I will die. Oscar Wilde mentions “the things that go on in front of” this statue in An Ideal Husband and also mentions it in The Picture of Dorian Gray. It was a well-known and favourite place for men to meet, perhaps for… obvious reasons.[x]
3) Using endearments such as “dear fellow”, “dear boy”, or signing correspondence with “your dear boy” has been noted in surviving letters between men who had relationships with other men. If I’m not mistaken I think these were used quite regularly between Holmes and Watson.
4) Robb notes that “in the present state of research, only about fifty works of western literature in the 19th century can be said to treat the subject of male homosexuality more or less openly.” This number includes works that were written during the 19th century but only published in the 20th, and also those that treated the subject “incidentally or imperceptibly” aka through extremely buried subtext.
So if one was interested in writing a story about two men in love in the 19th century…one would probably have been very, very careful…and used subtext, metaphors, codes, etc etc etc… maybe had the illustrator draw on a moustache…created a wife…and then killed her off-stage… who really knows…
I had asked him whether anything was stirring
screaming
There is a pretty high quality “Yes, my boy” (Holmes to Watson) at the beginning of “The Musgrave Ritual,” from very same paragraph that includes the line about “Ricoletti of the club-foot, and his abominable wife.”
Actually in the context your work, @weeesi, the whole opening of that story is hella gay. Holmes calls Watson “my boy” more than once; he caresses his case files suggestively; this is the same story that talks about Holmes’s Bohemianism and in which Watson talks about being “not in the least conventional…myself.”
