jan 1, 1971 - The Sexual Adventures of Sherlock Holmes

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The Sexual Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, Larry Townsend, 1971.

"As best I can tell, the first expression in print of the idea that Watson and Holmes were lovers came with the publication of Larry Townsend’s The Sexual Adventures of Sherlock Holmes in 1971 (it was reissued in 1993). In that decade, an explicitly gay retelling of some of Holmes’s canonical adventures, no matter how elegantly done—and Townsend’s work was indisputably of high quality—was far from socially acceptable, and might well have attracted censorious attention. Thus it came to be that when the newly established Arthur Conan Doyle Collection at the (then) Metropolitan Central Library had a chance to acquire a copy, it was brought into Canada through special arrangements made by Eric Silk (“The Blue Carbuncle”), who was Commissioner of the
Ontario Provincial Police. Silk arranged for an FBI official in Buffalo to ship the book to him as “law enforcement documents,” avoiding the eyes of Canada Customs. At least, so I have been told—I wasn’t there, of course. The shabby maroon paperback volume remains in the Toronto collection to this day, and perhaps
raises fewer eyebrows than it once did."

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