Passing references....

In the Encyclopedia of Prostitution and Sex Work, Volume 1, Melissa Hope Ditmore writes:

"...in his mainstream Sherlock Holmes stories, Arthur Conan Doyle makes oblique references to two London scandals involving male prostitutes. Holmes—now resonant of the classic fin de siècle homosexual aesthete—asks his accomplice, Dr. Watson, to flee to the Continent with him after Holmes almost dies in Vere Street, London, the site of the notorious scandal involving a male brothel named the White Swan ... In another story Holmes adopts a 14-year-old "telegraph boy" as his valet, a reference that Conan Doyle's readers no doubt would have associated with the recent Cleveland Street Affair, where "telegraph boys" serviced aristocratic male patrons..." [pg. 280]