This post was submitted by Jack

Happy 2010, true believers. This winter has been pretty good for major genre film releases so far. We’ve had 2012 and, of course, the much discussed Avatar. The one that really captured my attention, though, (perhaps predictably) was Guy Ritchie’s rendition of Sherlock Holmes.

When we were waiting in line on Christmas day, my sisters were already accusing me of reading my own sexuality between the lines when I described my expectation that Holmes and Watson would have some sexual tension, but there really is some evidence to suggest that Doyle’s heroes were coded queers. Sherlock was a quirky, old confirmed bachelor and a user of specific suggestive drugs and although Watson was married, his wife is a mere shadow in the stories, getting no more than a mention here and there and eventually being killed off.

But what’s turned out to be a more interesting possibility is a reading that cropped up in a livejournal community I follow, in which a fellow member suggested that they had always identified with Holmes because he seems asexual.

For those in need of Asexuality 101, I will happily point you to the online resources of the Asexuality Visibility and Education Network (AVEN). One short answer is, however, that community formation around this particular identity is relatively recent – AVEN was founded in 2001 by David Jay – and therefore most everything about it is still heavily contested. For example, the generally held definition is that asexual people do not experience sexual attraction. Some masturbate, others do not. Some form long-term intimate bonds with partners, some do not. Likewise, many asexual people still also identify as straight, gay, lesbian, bisexual, or another sexual orientation in terms of the gender of the emotional partners they seek out, but some also simply represent their sexual identity as asexual. The upshot of all of the confusion and discussion is that the community is very welcoming to any number of people who may share all or some of their experiences.

The person who reported reading Holmes as asexual issued the statement amidst general discussion of the trailer for this film that was released last summer, in which it became evident that regardless of one’s particular queer reading, this manifestation of the Holmes story would feature a straighter, more sexed up hetero Holmes. And for me, having spent much of my life whining about LGBT representation, it begged closer examination of what it would be like seeking out a media space for someone who did not experience arousal.

It’s become cliché to point out that our media is awash in sex, and most of the time when people say that, it’s born from a sex-negative politic that I am not behind. But what if it was simply another group looking for their own experience in films and television programming. In my own definition of sex-positivity – the belief in everyone’s rights over their own bodies and the pursuit of happiness through individual sexual decisions with consenting partners and/or alone – certainly people deciding not to pursue sexuality in resonance with their lack of impulse to do so (or for any other reason for that matter) is as legitimate as anything else, and, by extension then, they have the same claim to consume media which best reflect their experiences as I or anyone else does.

The case of Sherlock Holmes is also an interesting one because of its history with same-sex sexuality and how that relates to the public’s response to asexuality. It seems one response asexual-identified people encounter most often upon coming out is an assumption that they’re “actually” gay and either not ready to accept it yet or just not ready to tell everyone. Of course this runs contrary to the basic progressive principle of taking seriously people’s self-identification, and it’s interesting to see how sharing a character like Sherlock Holmes, whose apparent lack of sexuality comes across as gay, falls into that same pattern.

Also mixed up in all of this is the portrayal of women in the film as well as the novels and short stories. From the preview that got released this summer, I actually thought this was going to be a lot worse and that the two female characters were going to be used only as sexual props to straighten out and sex-up the flick. But actually Irene Adler turned out to be pretty awesome (though she was still written into a “damsel in distress” situation, which was really unnecessary). Mary, on the other hand, reads as something of a tragic figure, shunted to the side by the Holmes/Watson relationship regardless of how one reads it, but she certainly seems to get more screen time than she did in the old stories.

I was disappointed that the movie didn’t pass the Bechdel test, which requires that there be at least two female characters who have at least one conversation with one another about something other than men, but it could have been a lot worse. In fact, neither really stands in the way of the homoerotic undertones (Mary’s line about Sherlock loving Watson in the same way that she did was pretty poignant), nor to oversex them in a way that completely destroys the asexual reading (the scene in which Sherlock is left naked tied to a bed, clips of which led everyone to believe one thing about the film when showed in the preview, turned out to mostly be about embarrassing him rather than him and Irene getting it on). They were basically two strong, albeit supporting, characters.

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