John Watson: Not Gay

 (Sherlock Meta by Ivy Blossom)

Sherlock tends to have multiple readings built into it, which is part of the reason why I like it so much, and why I can keep writing about it months (or years) after a series of it has aired. And the question of John’s sexuality fits into that paradigm. We can discuss it for years, because you can read it so many different ways.

John’s refrain of “not gay” makes the question of his sexual orientation open and shut to many people. To me, those scenes, in conjunction with his actions and decisions in the rest of the show, only serve to highlight the fact that John’s attractions are a difficult subject for him, and he feels like he has something to prove (or disprove). It seems to me that it represents an argument he has in his head, and people making assumptions about him and Sherlock fall into his internal debate.

John flirts with women; he dates women, and practically forgets their names while doing so; he sleeps with women; he marries a woman. Sounds pretty straight.

However.

John Watson develops crushingly intense emotional relationships with men that are so close to being romantic it’s impossible to distinguish with the naked eye. Once might be a fluke, an “exception,” if you will; but we see two of them. For all the women we’ve seen John date, it’s these two men he doesn’t want to shake. He never gets over Sherlock, and his admiration for Sholto is so obvious that it makes Sherlock jealous.

If it stopped there, we could say that John lives at least on the border of homoromanticism while considering himself a straight man. But it doesn’t stop there.

John’s attraction to Sherlock is also physical, and probably just as intense as his emotional attraction. I could tabulate all the longing looks, but that’s been done a million times. Insert those arguments here. We’ve talked about how John thinks Sherlock looks cool and mysterious with his…cheekbones, and how he tries to adopt some of Sherlock’s look when he wants to be appealing himself. It’s “a tiny bit sexy,” and he knows it. How does he know it? Because he thinks it’s sexy too! And then there’s John’s reaction to hearing Janine get into the bathtub with Sherlock. That pretty much says it all.
John is jealous of Janine. There was no “I’ll give you a little privacy!” or “Wow, so great that my best mate has a girlfriend now, terrific! I’m so happy for him! He won’t feel like a third wheel with me and my wife!” Not in the slightest. He’s jealous of that woman kissing Sherlock, that woman sharing his bed. That woman he watches Sherlock propose to. That jealousy is absolutely the flip side of John’s intense and (as far as he knows) unfulfillable physical desire for Sherlock. John is attracted to Sherlock in every conceivable dimension.

But he’s not gay, you know! In case anyone is listening!

I think it’s important to note that no one accuses John of being gay. They suspect, as they should, given the circumstances, that John and Sherlock are together, because they are together (as Irene said). Bisexual!John can be in a relationship with Sherlock without being gay, so there’s no reason for him to assert this when people assume a relationship between them. But he does. It’s logical to presume that John identifies as straight in spite of the intense emotional connections he makes with men. And in spite of his physical and emotional attraction to Sherlock. Straight.

But I think it’s fair to say, it’s arguable at any rate, that John is aware of the fact that he has these feelings and desires for Sherlock. As much fun as it is to write about repressed!John who has no idea how deeply smitten he is, I don’t think John is unaware of how he feels, what he wants, and what it means.

To me, the entirety of series 2 is the story of John trying to fight and deny his overwhelming attraction, then coming to accept it, and finally giving in to it as much as he feels he can. We see John go from grabbing every woman available to help him disguise the fact that Sherlock is the centre of his universe, to accepting the weird unspokenness of their arrangement and giving up on dating women altogether. TRF contains the most potent silent “because I love you” I’ve seen in ages. John knows how he feels.
If Sherlock had reverted a bit by series 3, so had John. The “not gay”s returned, even as John stands glassy-eyed and gutted in 221b, claiming to have moved on. Just like Molly, he hasn’t.

John’s feelings for Sherlock are not a mystery to him, but they must be a sore point. They seem to be struggle for him. They keep him up at night. Sherlock becomes an issue in his marriage. It’s hard to argue that his feelings don’t exist at that point.

But in spite of the scaffolded but bald-faced “I love yous” Sherlock and John both say to each other in series 3, neither of them can actually articulate what they are to each other.

John is in love with Sherlock. John is sexually attracted to Sherlock.

Why doesn’t he just admit it? Surely after Sherlock died he could have finally put it into words, but we know he can’t. He won’t admit it to his therapist. He won’t say it out loud to a headstone.

Does Mary know? She knows Sherlock is important to John, but it isn’t until HLV that she seems to feel the tension his presence causes. Does she know that Sherlock is, for all intents and purposes, John’s ex?

I think she does. “Neither of us were the first,” she says to Sherlock. Us. That’s twice, from two different characters, that Mary and Sherlock are classed together like that. Two of John’s romantic entanglements. Two people he’s in love with. Two people he’s sexually attracted to (with a nod to a third).

So why is John trying to get back what he had with Sherlock when he’s with Mary? Nothing’s going to change, he says. Just because he’s married. That suggests that he thinks he and Sherlock have a friendship, not a romantic relationship, because I don’t recall a scene where Mary told him it was fine for him to develop an extracurricular romance with Sherlock, but hey, who knows!

Or, John’s decided that framing the whole thing between him and Sherlock as a friendship pure and simple is how best to retroactively understand it, even though that’s a lie. It’s definitely what Sherlock demonstrated that he thought was going on. Is that John saying, “let’s go back to doing that thing you thought we were doing in the first place. Being friends. Best friends. Friends who solve crimes together. Let’s do that again.”

What did Sherlock think was going on? Did he ever stop to think about it? Did he question it, try to work it out? Not until it was too late.

Will John only admit to his sexual and romantic attraction to Sherlock if it’s requited? And once he is convinced that it isn’t, he’ll deny it ever existed in the first place?

Mary will say to John, “You were in love with him, weren’t you.” And John will say, “Shut up. Of course not.”  There’s no reason for him to admit it. There’s nothing to gain from admitting it except for embarrassment and pain. “Not gay,” he says, like that will shield him from feeling things he doesn’t know what to do with. But it won’t.