The Marriage of Billie Birdsong by Laurie R. King

In 1923, on his world tour of Spiritualism lectures, Arthur Conan Doyle visited San Francisco. The following spring (or so it is given in Laurie R. King’s Locked Rooms) Mr. Sherlock Holmes and his wife Mary Russell themselves arrived in San Francisco.

What happened there, as described in King’s The Art of Detection, has created something of a controversy in the world of Holmes studies. Either the account was penned by Sir Arthur during his 1923 visit to this skeptical city, then abandoned and left unpublished for fear of shocking his devoted readers—or it was written in 1924 by Mr. Holmes himself, while his wife and partner Mary Russell was away on business of her own.

Readers of the Russell memoirs will accept that the story is nothing short of the actual truth.

Billie Birdsong’s story is but a part of a larger tale, and only finds its completion on the day when the mayor of San Francisco, Gavin Newsome, opened the doors of city hall to the marriage of same-sex couples. From February 11 to March 11, 2004, gay men and lesbian women were given the same rights as the rest of the population. On August 24 of that year, those marriages were annulled—until four years later, when the California Supreme Court ruled that such a ban was unconstitutional. In 2015, the US Supreme Court did the same for the entire country.