““I always thought what Russell [T Davies] did in Doctor Who was extremely ground breaking in a slightly more subversive way than it looked like. It never occurred to me that it was too on the nose, what he did brilliantly was incidentally gay characters obviously as well as some more in your face ones. One of my favourite stories is Gridlock, there’s an elderly couple of ladies who are together and it just sort of passes by and that’s the way – softly, softly. That’s how the revolution happens as it were, you just become aware that people are incidentally gay. I think when the day comes that you have a big detective show where the first half hour was this man at work and he’s a maverick and all the usual things and then we went home and his boyfriend says, ‘Are you alright?’ it was just a thing, then something genuinely changed. I think the problem still is it becomes the issue. I think the thing with gay characters is that it has to be an issue as opposed to being part of everyday life, which of course as we all know is what it is.””— Mark Gatiss in an interview in Gay Times, February 2012
This is engraved on my heart. I will do this thing.
Sometimes I wonder idly if Sherlock is actually the product of a vast compromise between Gatiss and Moffat.