Changes in Sherlock Holmes fandom over time

[damned_colonial]

So, this came up in a sub-thread on the asexuality post, and was threatening to get pretty tangential/deraily, so I thought it was worth creating a new post for it.

Sherlock Holmes fandom goes back a very long way, of course. And people have been writing H/W slash for a long time, too. Now we have this new movie, there's a whole new generation coming to the fandom who don't have experience with the older phases of the fandom, and while there is a lot of interesting stuff coming out of the newer fans' engagement with the canon, there are also older fans shaking their walking sticks at those kids on their lawn.

Personally, I'm fascinated by older Sherlock Holmes fandom even if I don't feel very much a part of it. I'd be interested in hearing from anyone who was involved with Holmes fandom in its earlier/older incarnations -- any of the Sherlockian societies, or zine-based slash fandom, or mailing lists, or even LJ/DW fandom prior to the 2009 movie -- about your experiences and the changes you've seen.

And to bring it round to the subject of this comm, I'm especially interested in talking about how different groups or generations of Sherlock Holmes have addressed his (potential) queerness. Obviously it's changed over time -- we can have another go-round on the Watson Was a Woman thing and whether or not Stout was really trying to point out Holmes and Watson's queerness, if you like, and if anyone has any other pointers to older Sherlockiana on gender/sexuality issues I would love to know about them!

As for fic-writing fandom, I know when I read older H/W slash online I find it has a different aesthetic and different tropes than modern LJ/DW-centred slash fandom commonly uses. We're Not Gay, We Just Love Each Other is part of it, for sure. I feel like slash fandom has really changed the way we address homosexuality in recent years, based on the fic I've read. We seem much more likely to show our characters having had previous homosexual experiences, or being happily and openly bisexual, or being connected to a homosexual subculture, or being non-heteronormative in other ways (genderqueer/transgendered, asexual, kinky, etc.) At least, I *think* we're more likely to do that... am I missing stuff from the older fic, and if so, where can I find the fic that talks about these things? And, is this happening because newer generations of fans are more likely to be queer, more likely to be out as queer, more likely to be used to discussing and dissecting queerness online?

Bringing in another post that I found this morning (via), by obsession_inc on the subjection of "Affirmational" vs "Transformational" fandom, do you think Holmes fandom is shifting from affirmational to transformational, and is that a generational shift? (I like obsession_inc's observation that "fixing" the story so that our beloved characters have sex is one of the most common forms of transformation.) I found myself pointing at obsession_inc's post and saying YES THIS and I know I'm going to be pointing to it a lot in future because it resonates very strongly with me, and I'm definitely feeling that resonance in what I see of Sherlock Holmes fandom in its various incarnations.

What do you think?

ETA: I know we're getting linked pretty regularly in LJ comms like holmesian_news, so if anyone comes in from there and would like a DW account to comment on posts here (or post your own), here are three invite codes:

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ARHCWS7ZK2V66AAADRN8
3AKGFN8AF8B5XAAADRN9

Comments

Here from Holmsian_news

[ina_jean]

Not sure whether this is what you want, but, as someone who first read Holmes when I was 12 (12 is the 'golden age' for genre literature!) back in 1965, and then, because the canon, while long by most fandom standards, wasn't long enough for me, went out and found as much periperal/transformative work as I could. Ellery Queen's 'Misadventures' collection, August Derleth's 'Solar Pons', and various of the 'Irregulars' fictional pieces.

All of these focussed far more on the detective problems than on Holmes and Watson's relationship. But by the 70s there were some small press 'relationship' works. Even among the canon purists who claimed that Holmes was never the same after the Reichenbach Falls incident, didn't want to give up on Watson's faint in 'The Empty House', or Holmes' panic when he thinks Watson is wounded in 'Three Garridebs' - so no-one was very surprised when Rohase Piercy's 'My Dearest Holmes' hit the (gay) bookshops in 1988.

By then I was reading (and writing) a lot of slash in TV fandoms (Trek, The Professionals, Blakes Seven), but even the advent of the Brett TV series didn't seem to trigger a lot of slash contributions to the multi-media slash zines - though there were probably dedicated Holmes slash zines circulating these seemed to be wholly among the book-fandom itself and not among the wider sf/detective fiction slash community.

I think the first online Holmes slash I came across was as a result of reading Sheenagh Pugh's 'The Democratic Genre' in 2005. And that, too, was book-based and often Watson pastiche (and there's a whole other essay to be written on the book-canon fandoms who stick to pastiche, and the ones who experiment with style - I'm looking at Jane Austen fandom here…)

I wouldn't presume to shake my walking stick at the kids on the lawn though. In fact, before the 2009 film came out I spent a lot of time defending Guy Ritchie's decisions to make Holmes a more active figure than the Brett version - on the grounds that canon Holmes does have a reputation as a pugilist - and does inhabit an underworld London closer to Ritchie's modern work than the 'gaslamps and hansom cabs' of most other media portrayals. I just wish that a few of the writers who came to Holmes via the movie would at least show some knowledge that there is a book canon. And a bit of awareness of real-life British gay history.

Re: Here from Holmsian_news

[my_daroga]

Thank you so much for this comment--I am fascinated by your observations on zine culture at the time and really wish I had more access to it (especially now that I've joined the Kirk/Spock camp for life). Thank you for this overview.