randomness | Of course Tintin's gay. Ask Snowy

Matthew Parris, in the Times:

Billions of blue blistering barnacles, isn't it staring us in the face? Sometimes a thing's so obvious it's hard to see where the debate could start. What debate can there be when the evidence is so overwhelmingly one-way? A callow, androgynous blonde-quiffed youth in funny trousers and a scarf moving into the country mansion of his best friend, a middle-aged sailor? A sweet-faced lad devoted to a fluffy white toy terrier, whose other closest pals are an inseparable couple of detectives in bowler hats, and whose only serious female friend is an opera diva...

. . . And you're telling me Tintin isn't gay?

The French aren't having it.

Charles Bremner, reporting for the Times in Paris:

Tintin, the eternal boy reporter, marks his 80th birthday today but, for France, the celebrations have been soured by a perfidious claim from across the Channel that the comic strip hero is gay.

An article by Matthew Parris, The Times columnist, on Tintin’s “obvious” homosexuality has triggered an outcry in the media and on the internet.

France Info, the public news radio network, got in on the subject, pointing out that Hergé, who died in 1983, scoffed at the gay Tintin theory after it was aired in the 1970s.

No word yet from the Belgians.

I think it's all just publicity for Tintin's 80th birthday.

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Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

(deleted comment)

From:

orichalcum.livejournal.com

Well, actually, the author of the article discusses the comparative evidence and shows that isn't true. Asterix and Obelix both have frequent crushes on local and foreign women, and, canonically, Obelix eventually sires a long line of uber-strong menhir craftsmen. They might be bi, of course, but they certainly aren't gay.

Whereas Tintin never shows any romantic interest in any of the 8 (out of 200) female characters, and his closest friendships are with the rich older man with whom he lives and his slightly younger male Chinese friend (who is his only cause for tears in the books). I don't buy some of the other arguments - I always assumed Thomson and Thompson were twin brothers, not a bizarrely similar gay couple - and I see no reason to paint Bianca Castafiore as a "fag hag," but there is certainly, at the least, absolutely not a shred of evidence that Tintin likes women, and a fair amount that his emotionally close ties are with other males.

That doesn't make you gay, however. Tintin isn't gay; he's just two-dimensional.

Also, the author of the article's research is shoddy; he claims that we don't know how Captain Haddock and Tintin started living together, when that whole saga is told in detail in Red Rackham's Treasure (I believe) and the Secret of the Unicorn. And I'd invite not just a young boy reporter but a brilliant professor and a dog to live with me too if they were directly responsible for my inheriting a massive fortune and I knew I needed help preventing a recurrence of debilitating alcoholism too, which are Haddock's reasons.

I think the argument that Tintin is a spy, not a reporter, to be far more interesting, actually. :)

adrian-turtle.livejournal.com

I still remember being shocked by my discovery that Tintin was supposed to be a *boy*. I'd been reading the comics for a year or so, but I was nothing like a sophisticated reader.

As an adult, I can see evidence for Tintin being gay, oblivious to sex and romantic love, or extremely discreet. It's troubling that the Times in Paris defines support of the latter theories as leaping to Tintin's "defence."