Wait… what do you mean there was a queer Sherlock Holmes spin-off in the 1900s?
Somehow an even queerer serial was happening alongside Sherlock Holmes
Mark
At this point, queer readings of Sherlock Holmes and his faithful “friend” Watson are par for the course.
But what if I told you that in the Edwardian age, a B-version of the Holmes-Watson dynamic put the queer subtext front and center, both on the page and off?
Meet Raffles, Gentleman Thief. Like Holmes, Raffles was a popular figure in turn-of-the-century serialized crime. But unlike Holmes, Raffles was not on the side of law and order. With the flustered help of his best male friend Bunny, Raffles stumps Scotland Yard, cracks safes, wears disguises, and get away with all of it.
The best part? Raffles was based on a gay man who fought for the decriminalization of gay sex in the Victorian era.
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Raffles is the partial inspiration for a new mystery book by writer Arvind Ethan David, who gives us the scoop on the whole backstory in a recent piece for Crime Reads. But as David explains, theories about Raffles’ basically canon queerness as as old as the series itself.
Raffles’ creator, English writer E.W. Hornung, was pretty blatant about ripping off and “inverting” his friend Arthur Conan Doyle’s formula for the Sherlock Holmes stories. But Raffles was more than a Temu version of Holmes—his creation was inspired by one of the most mythic real-life queer heroes of all time, Oscar Wilde, who Hornung also knew, well enough to give his son the middle name of “Oscar.”
Hornung himself might not have been queer, but queerness is threaded throughout the Raffles story. The gentleman thief’s rakish, handsome appearance was openly based on gay cricketer George Cecil Ives, who worked with sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld to study queer life and sexuality in the 20s. Ives was also an early advocate for decriminalizing sex between men in an age when being discovered could send you to prison, or worse. Ives also knew Wilde and his lover Bosie Douglas, and after Wilde’s death, Ives and Douglas even enjoyed a short tryst.
Hornung was also a part of this mix, and if he based his iconic character on the dashing Ives, he based the kinky, almost abusive dynamic between Raffles and Bunny on Wilde and Bosie. By the account of all of Wilde’s biographers and friends, Bosie was trouble from the minute he met Wilde as a student being blackmailed for an affair with another boy. The two were deeply in love, but Bosie was often abusive to the older man who couldn’t break away from the relationship. After Bosie’s father openly accused Wilde of seducing his son, Wilde went to court on Bosie’s insistence, and lost. His prison term destroyed his health, and he died only a few years later, penniless and abandoned in Paris.
The Raffles-Bunny relationship is far less depressing, though with a similar flavor of one man beguiling another into taking risks he wouldn’t usually take, all for the sake of the “friend” he’s devoted to. We learn that Raffles and Bunny know each other from school, where Raffles “saved” Bunny from disgrace. If we read between the lines, the disgrace in question feels quite queer coded: in the English public school system, sex between boys was, and remains, commonplace, though this sex isn’t necessarily viewed as queer.
For Raffles and Bunny, the subtext was so blatant that as early as the 1970s, critics remarked on how obvious it is that these two are more than just roommates.
“When you read them closely,” David writes, “it becomes manifestly clear that Raffles and Bunny are coded homosexuals, that Raffles’ corruption of Bunny is not limited to the realm of property acquisition, and that his control over him is best understood as sexual, indeed, as sadomasochistic.” David also notes that another famous English writer, Graham Greene, said the quiet part out loud in a 1974 play about the pair in which the queerness leaps off the stage.
I mean…sounds gay, we’re in. There’s just one problem: the Raffles stories are only still in print in the UK. With some fancy footwork, you can find used copies here, but be forewarned: unlike the still-vibrant Sherlock Holmes stories, they haven’t aged too well.
If you’re looking for a middle ground, however, our recommendation would be to check out yet another queer-coded (thought slightly less so) turn-of-the-century crime series: Fantomas.
Unlike Raffles and Holmes, Fantomas is a masked figure whose identity is never fully known. We don’t get the story from his point of view, but we do see him creeping through Paris pulling off all kinds of daring heists, and never getting caught, all while driving his detective counterpart Juve crazy. He even dresses in drag a few times.
Let’s face it: there’s always been something thrilling about crime fiction where the criminal actually gets away with it. For both straight and LGBTQ+ audiences reading Raffles, the subversion of the usual “law-and-order “happy” ending was part of the thrill. These days, we know exactly what Hornung was getting away with: his friends were gentlemen who were seen as outlaws simply for who they loved and how they had sex. Today, we know the truth: the real villain is, and has always been, society.
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