Rohase Piercy's Blog - Posts Tagged "oscar-wilde"
New Holmes for Sale!
A big thankyou to everyone who entered my Giveaway for My Dearest Holmes and congratulations to the fifteen lucky winners - shiny new signed copies should be arriving on your doorstep any day now and I wish you happy reading!
I do hope that readers who enjoyed MDH back in the day will buy and review this newly edited version, now available from Amazon in both paperback and Kindle. It kicks off with a few samples of the reaction it inspired back in 1988 from both mainstream and Gay press - I still have all the original clippings in a very tatty old scrapbook, beginning with Page Three of the Sun (carefully cropped so as not to feature the lady with the boobs; British readers will understand how amused I was to find myself on that particular page, and what fun I had persuading friends to buy a copy), and finishing with a much more sane and balanced piece from The Guardian. Non-explicit as it was, this story exploring the possibility of John Watson's love for Sherlock Holmes, set against the ramifications of the 1885 Criminal Law Amendment Act (Section 11 of which outlawed all acts of a sexual nature between men and brought about the downfall of Conan Doyle's fellow author Oscar Wilde) caused quite an outcry thirty years ago!
In her thoughtful and interesting Foreword, Charlie Raven looks back on the heady days when she and I, at that time a same-sex couple ourselves, first fell under the spell of the man, the myth and the magic that is Sherlock Holmes on the back of a few chance remarks made to her by a work colleague. It's shocking to remember how hostile a decade the 1980s was for gay people, with Section 28 of the Local Government Act outlawing anything that could be seen as a 'promotion' of homosexuality in Britain, the U.S. Court of Appeal ruling that no-one had a 'fundamental right' to be gay, and Pope John Paul II ordering the Catholic Church to withdraw support for gay and lesbian Christian organisations. It's a sobering fact that even today, with equal marriage available in twenty-six countries, homosexuality remains illegal, and in some cases punishable by death, in seventy two others – several of them members of the Commonwealth, as Olympian Tom Daley bravely highlighted at the recent Commonwealth Games.
So can My Dearest Holmes claim a modest place in LGBTQ history? Charlie kindly concludes that it can, pointing out that 'the prominence of its heroes in popular mythology instantly caused readers to think a little harder about the implications of being a same-sex couple living under legal and social restrictions' and asking 'how many of the spin-off novels, fanfics and homoerotically-charged movie or TV interpretations of the Holmes/Watson dynamic would now exist in their current form if it were not for the first step represented by this little book?'
Do give it a read (or a re-read) and let me know what you think - I'm very happy to answer questions, and will reply to any politely-worded comments - and please don't forget to leave a review, however brief, both here and on Amazon!
I do hope that readers who enjoyed MDH back in the day will buy and review this newly edited version, now available from Amazon in both paperback and Kindle. It kicks off with a few samples of the reaction it inspired back in 1988 from both mainstream and Gay press - I still have all the original clippings in a very tatty old scrapbook, beginning with Page Three of the Sun (carefully cropped so as not to feature the lady with the boobs; British readers will understand how amused I was to find myself on that particular page, and what fun I had persuading friends to buy a copy), and finishing with a much more sane and balanced piece from The Guardian. Non-explicit as it was, this story exploring the possibility of John Watson's love for Sherlock Holmes, set against the ramifications of the 1885 Criminal Law Amendment Act (Section 11 of which outlawed all acts of a sexual nature between men and brought about the downfall of Conan Doyle's fellow author Oscar Wilde) caused quite an outcry thirty years ago!
In her thoughtful and interesting Foreword, Charlie Raven looks back on the heady days when she and I, at that time a same-sex couple ourselves, first fell under the spell of the man, the myth and the magic that is Sherlock Holmes on the back of a few chance remarks made to her by a work colleague. It's shocking to remember how hostile a decade the 1980s was for gay people, with Section 28 of the Local Government Act outlawing anything that could be seen as a 'promotion' of homosexuality in Britain, the U.S. Court of Appeal ruling that no-one had a 'fundamental right' to be gay, and Pope John Paul II ordering the Catholic Church to withdraw support for gay and lesbian Christian organisations. It's a sobering fact that even today, with equal marriage available in twenty-six countries, homosexuality remains illegal, and in some cases punishable by death, in seventy two others – several of them members of the Commonwealth, as Olympian Tom Daley bravely highlighted at the recent Commonwealth Games.
So can My Dearest Holmes claim a modest place in LGBTQ history? Charlie kindly concludes that it can, pointing out that 'the prominence of its heroes in popular mythology instantly caused readers to think a little harder about the implications of being a same-sex couple living under legal and social restrictions' and asking 'how many of the spin-off novels, fanfics and homoerotically-charged movie or TV interpretations of the Holmes/Watson dynamic would now exist in their current form if it were not for the first step represented by this little book?'
Do give it a read (or a re-read) and let me know what you think - I'm very happy to answer questions, and will reply to any politely-worded comments - and please don't forget to leave a review, however brief, both here and on Amazon!
