For years I have been following the widely popular BBC adaptation of Sherlock Holmes, actually since it first started. Through this show I made many friends, and together we analyzed and theorized and saw something that...according to the finale of series 4...wasn't there. I thought I would be writing this article feeling triumphant, feeling proud and strong and exhilarated. I was wrong, and this is what I believe will always be one of the biggest disappointments of my life.

When I talk about queer people deserving EXPLICIT queer media I'm very serious. I'm willing to argue with almost anyone about it because I am correct. There just simply isn't enough. Our stories do not get told enough, and when they do...or when we think they do...we're getting queer baited or things are left ambiguous. It's extremely not fair.

Sherlock Holmes has always been a gay man, in love with Dr. Watson. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wrote it in the subtext of his stories when it wasn't allowed to be explicit. Queer readings prove that over and over and over again. So when Moffat and Gatiss (a gay man), set out and started to make this show at the same time that BBC was commissioning and searching for LGB representation...when they both said that everyone else got the stories wrong in their adaptations and they wanted to get it right...well it wasn't such a reach to expect them to create LGBT representation within their two main characters on their show. Actually, it made the most sense structurally speaking within the narrative. Many things about the series don't make sense without that exact explanation. Yet, as the finale of series 4 indicated mere hours ago, that was not the direction in which they were going. Loose ends and plot holes are through the roof and the writers think they're much more clever than they actually are.

I'm angry. Extremely, irrecoverably angry. The thing is that it doesn't matter if we were right or wrong, it matters that it would've been so easy. So extremely easy to create this story and create this representation. It's already there, so much of it is already there, and it would've been more groundbreaking and history making than whatever just happened in front of my eyes. We weren't wrong either, we saw what was there. Whether that be queer baiting or just sloppy writing that some how coincidentally managed to form an entire gay conspiracy...we were right. Our reading was right and these writers just couldn't go through with it, and the entire 4th series was nothing but a garbled mess of episodes that make absolutely no sense.

And I really think it boils down to the fact that sometimes one can't even trust members of their own community to do what makes sense or create the representation that is needed. So what does that say to young LGBT fans who's lifeline was this show because it was their escape when they thought the world was falling apart? That was me, hell that still is me. See though, I'm stronger. I can hold myself up and tell myself that I'm angry and I want to live in spite of all of the writers who have ever queer baited before. Some can be strong in the same way but there are some who cannot. There are some who are going to fall into depression or worse and the only question I have is why would anyone want to let down their own entire community in that way?

Don't say you're telling the story that no one ever got right before, telling the story that will make history and it's just a Secret Edgy Sister and consequences don't matter and no loose ends are tied up at all. Don't create plot lines with aborted declarations of love, gay jokes, and story structure that quite literally doesn't make sense unless it wraps up in a queer romance. Yet they did, and I'm extremely angry. But when the fanbase turns out to be more clever than the writers themselves, well... that's saying something in general. (And I haven't even brought up all of the blatant misogyny with the women characters on top of actual homophobia with every villian being explicitly gay...because that's not what this article is about, and it's for another time).

So now I will say what I am currently living by in the wake of the terrible things that have been continuing to happen...courtesy of the late Carrie Fischer, "take your broken heart and turn it into art." I encourage all of the queer youth ever to be devastated by the lack of explicit queer representation to go and tell their stories in as many ways as possible. As for me, I want to prove that queer people get to be people like Sherlock Holmes. Because we deserve that, and WE will have to be the ones who tell the story and get it right this time.