I assume you’re responding to my bottomjohn meta, anon? In which case, you’re either talking about my belief that we’re not going to see them have a homosexual interlude on the show, or else you’re talking about my interpretation of Sherlock and John’s relationship as being more complicated than just sexual attraction.
If the former: I am not saying that it’s my preference that they don’t get together on the show. I’d be overjoyed. I’d throw fucking parties and send pretty purple “Sherlock Holmes is queer!” cards to all my friends.
But I don’t think Moffat particularly cares what I’m hoping for.
If the force of my will could bend reality, then believe me, anon, I would be there for you.
If you were talking about the latter, then read on!
I think that narrowing down the vectors of their relationship only to whether they’re sexually attracted or not is putting an artificial limitation on their relationship. In a world where we have homo-romantic asexuals and all sorts of other orientations, ‘no homo’ becomes a more complicated phrase than it first appears. For example:
Are they queer? OH FUCK YES. SO QUEER. They ADMITTED NON-PLATONIC ATTRACTION IN ACTUAL WORDS ON THE SHOW. Boom. Done.
Is their attraction romantic? Well… This is not me mincing words, here, because this is actually a question I’ve asked myself over the course of my life and I have yet to figure it out. Our ideas about ‘romance’ are so knotted up with sex and marriage and normative heterosexuality that I truly can’t tell where one ends and the other begins.
In the absence of sex, what constitutes ‘romantic attraction?’ Is it a desire to join their lives together and be permanent companions? In that case, then FUCK YES THEY’RE HOMO-ROMANTIC TOO. If romantic attraction is something else when you splice it away from sex, then I’m not sure, because I don’t have a clear enough idea to be able to say.
Actually I’d love to hear from you folks about your thoughts on this because like I said, I’ve never worked it out.
Is their attraction sexual? As I said in my bottomjohn meta, I don’t think that sexual attraction is the primary force powering the attraction and bond between them.
But how much does that actually mean, I ask you? For most people, right, it’s pretty common to start with a sexual attraction and then see if it grows into an attraction of other sorts. For asexual or demisexual people, you start with an attraction of another sort, and then in some cases you might develop the sexual attraction. For some people—as Mrs. Hudson says, her relationship with her husband was “purely physical.” She never developed other types of attraction with him.
So the fact that I don’t think sexual attraction is a priority in whatever is powering Sherlock and John’s relationship doesn’t mean a whole lot, really.
Could they have sex? Hell yes, I think so! If it’s the bottomjohn meta you read, you might have noticed me saying that. Maybe I wasn’t clear enough about it, though. After all, I was writing in a speculative voice in those paragraphs, so it might have sounded more dubious than I meant it to, so I’ll say now: I believe that Sherlock and John are in a passionate queer relationship where they could feasibly choose to express their love and attraction for each other sexually.
Is that no homo? Is that homo-demisexual? Is that a queerplatonic homosocial kink relationship with a side of asexual desire sublimated into sexual arousal? I have NO IDEA. I am not an academic in queer/sexuality studies.
But I hope it answers your question.