johnlocktentacles:

i still can’t believe the fact that private homosexual acts weren’t even punishable in england and hadn’t been for a while until the criminal law amendment act of 1885 went into effect at the beginning of 1886 and that the section prohibiting private homosexual acts was really controversial and people referred to it as “the blackmailer’s charter”

and then in 1887 doyle gave us a secretly gay detective and his secretly bisexual boyfriend and sherlock holmes hates blackmailers