Tintin's not gay

Oh, fuck off, Parris, you odious old queen!

Matthew Parris used to go cruising on Clapham Common near where I live. For all I know he still does, though I've never actually seen him there. In any case though, it's an almost unbearably sad, lonely sort of passtime - lonely in the sense of being surrounded by lots of other desperate, dysfunctional men of all ages, wondering around in circles, never talking to each other or having meaningful human contact. But then meaning is something that Matthew Parris clearly has little familiarity with.

Like the vast majority of gays, Parris is of course a closet pedo. Yes, he'd be happier with himself (and a less unbearable person to others) if he admitted it, if only to himself. As it is, of course, he can't (because paedophilia is of course "wrong" - and so not like homosexuality at all!). What we have to put up with, therefore, are things like this in this morning's Times (Yes, them again!), in which he tries to "out" the famous Belgian children's strip-cartoon character Tintin as gay. As usual, this is what psychologists call projection: not so much "takes one to know one" as "takes one to wish the other one was one - even if he's not". In fact I vaguely wonder if Matthew Parris the hack was quietly taken with Matthew Parish the actor, who played the boy-reporter on stage in the acclaimed theatre-version at the Young Vic.

As it happens, of course, Tintin is not gay. He's just a boy. And in the very last Tintin book, Tintin and Alph-Art, he actually has a girlfriend, in the shape of one Martine Vandezande. (Personally I'd have warned him off, but what can you do?) Parris, unfortunately, who doesn't know much about Tintin or human nature (especially his own), clearly wants to tell us about all his secret sexual fantasies about Tintin. But he can't (as I said), and so he has to let "it" leak out in this sort of thing, and he dresses it up in a joke article with lots of amused irony. At least, one assumes he's joking. (Rupert Murdoch's other British daily - which is also the country's most popular straight porno mag - gives Parris a little, er, puff, which is not a far cry from their "Ten Ways to Spot a Poof"-genre of earlier years.)

The sad thing is that taken together the Tintin books make up a hugely important part of European boy-culture. Partly this is because they're the sorts of books that every boy should be allowed to read and enjoy. But partly also because of their huge moral seriousness. The best story, Tintin in Tibet, is quite explicitly a love story between a boy and younger boy (between Tintin and Chang - named after the author's real-life best friend). But it is also about love between a boy and a man (Tintin and Captain Haddock). It is this sort of love that "gays", with their Wagnerian renunciation of true love, cannot really understand.

There is something deeply revealing about the homosexual condition (or perhaps I should say the "gay-pedo-in-denial"-condition), with all its hypocrisies and neuroses, that Matthew Parris cannot cope with this sort of thing. Yes, it's sad the Parris knows nothing about the Roman Catholic Scout movement in Belgium (and later France), which really laid the imaginative "ground" that Tintin as a character grew out of. In fact he knows nothing about religion (being an atheist) and nothing about Scouting - apart from the usual gay innuendo, which they of course always hotly deny is paedophilic.

In reality the Tintin books are a wonderful and beautiful expression of the nobility of Scouting, of friendship and intelligence and hard work, and most of all of boyhood itself. Men who liked boys once understood all of these things implicitly. Matthew Parris, sad to say, will probably never understand them.

[No pics for this, yet! Apparently there's an "internal error" going on! Finally! Only twenty-four hours late!]