I completely agree about the lack of gay heroes in general, and that there is still a lot of work to be done on gay rights, but do you really think that would have prevented the writers from writing gay characters?   All the more reason to increase representation, I would have thought!   There are gay characters in children's TV programmes.  There are gay characters on soaps (I'm old enough to remember the first soap opera gay kiss on Eastenders in the '80s!). Why couldn't there be gay characters in an evening drama series?

Last edited by Liberty (July 26, 2014 5:12 pm)

besleybean wrote:

Possibly because the Sherlock Holmes stories are not about a gay couple.

Neither are they about a female Watson or a Vicodin addicted self-hating medical genius. And yet these adaptations exist and are loved by many. 
 

Weren't they gay in the original? ;)

Seriously, I can accept that it was impossible for Arthur Conan Doyle to write a gay couple at the time, and that his intention may have been that they were gay (reading the stories, I'm not sure either way).   Homosexuality was illegal back then.  It was still illegal (in my part of the world, anyway) when Wilder made Private Life, so I can accept that he may have intended them to be gay but felt he couldn't show it at the time.

I can't accept that Moftiss, writing now, for the BBC, felt unable to write gay characters.

Last edited by Liberty (July 26, 2014 5:59 pm)

Ani: Exactly. We have so many examples of heterosexual love stories that develop slowly and meet impediments, where the couples marry other people or are separated or lose each in other in various ways. Why not the same for gay couples? Do they have to scream I am gay/bisexual and in love with you from the rooftops the minute the show starts? I think really not. 

And they have never said that they are true to ACD in the sense that nothing can be changed. They have changed so many things - why not this one? But this is really getting old. 

Last edited by SusiGo (July 26, 2014 6:02 pm)

SusiGo wrote:

And they have never said that they are true to ACD in the sense that nothing can be changed. 

I was thinking about that a couple of minutes. Yes, you're right, Susi. The series that claimed to be as true as possible to the original was the Granada series with Jeremy Brett.
 

No, the 7% book is better than the film. But I like "The Private Life of SH" also very much. 

No, Holmes goes on his long journey to recover but he does not meet the woman on the boat. If I remember correcty, he takes a train. And he goes away alone with his violin and Watson remains with Freud and hopes to see him again. 

Indeed it is. I really dislike the end in the film. 

Liberty wrote:

I can't accept that Moftiss, writing now, for the BBC, felt unable to write gay characters.

We will see about that.
The idea of "slow burn" actually makes sense on various levels. It makes sense when it comes to a story arch that doesn't give you two characters falling in love almost immediately - how boring is that? I think it's great story telling when your characters have to go through all sorts of tragedy, adventure, separation before they finally end up together. A first hug, then maybe the death of someone's wife...
It also makes sense in terms of warming the audience to the idea of having a gay couple on a prime time tv show. It's a slow, very slow development, I grant you that. But this might also be because they want to prepare the audience for things to come. And yes, it's sad that at least parts of the audience need to be prepared for something like this. But sometimes progress takes a long, long time...

For me personally, when I bring up the fact that The Moftiss has lied in the past, I'm not waving my Johnlock flag and saying they are absolutely, without a doubt, lying about Sherlock and John's relationship. I'm just saying that, based on their history, we shouldn't take their words as gospel.

Of course, there's also the possibility that they may in fact have no current plans to take the relationship beyond a bromace, but they could always change their minds as the stories develop. I've done some writing myself (not fanfic), and sometimes my characters take me in a completely different direction than I've originally planned.