Hello and welcome to Queer as Fiction, where we discuss queer media from around the world and throughout time.

I'm Alice and I'm Irene.

And today we're talking about Sherlock Holmes.

Before we get started, I'd like to acknowledge the Bonarong-Bunurang people of the Kulin Nation

as the traditional owners of the land on which we record this podcast, and pay my respects

to their elders past and present.

We recognise them as the custodians of an oral history tradition far older than this podcast.

We have some content warnings for this episode.

This episode will include discussions of historic misogyny and queer phobia, mentions of

racism and colonialism, one mention of somebody being shot, discussions of historic misogyny and queer phobia, mentions of racism and colonialism,

one mention of somebody being shot, discussions of drug use, and brief mentions of war and disability

caused by war. If any of that is something you don't want to listen to, feel free to skip this

episode and check out our other content. So this episode is about Sherlock Holmes. Obviously,

there are many angles we could take on Sherlock Holmes,

and specifically on the queerness in Sherlock Holmes, and its many adaptations. I think I tried

taking pretty much every angle as I wrote this script. This started as an episode about

Sherlock Holmes fan fiction. It's not that anymore. This is just an episode about Sherlock

Combs now. Is the fanfiction episode a later episode now, or are you like that was too much? Yeah, so I started off thinking, I'll do Sherlock Holmes fan fiction. Then I was like, well, what's the line between adaptation and fan fiction? Because that's not always clear in the context of Sherlock Combs. And I was like, okay, so we're doing Sherlock Holmes adaptations. And then I was like, well, I obviously have to start with my introduction on who is Sherlock Holmes. why are we talking about Sherlock Holmes on a queer history podcast? And then I wrote that and I was like, oh, that's a podcast script. So we might return to the questions of adaptations and fan fiction at a later date in a future episode, maybe a bonus episode for our patrons. There's definitely a lot of queer stuff going on in Sheller Combs, adaptations, and obviously in Sherlock Cohn's fan fiction. So there's a lot to talk about, but that's not

what we're talking about today. Okay. What we are talking about today is the original

Sherlock Holmes stories and what they tell us about sexuality and gender at the turn of the

19th century. And then we're going to also talk about Rex Stout's 1941 speech and article called Watson was a woman.

Why did you choose this one?

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