Arnold Zwicky's Blog

From Tim Evanson on Zuckie’s Playroom this morning, this snapshot from the superhero archives:

It’s a come-on, promising surprises, offering to show the boy delightful things; homoeroticism shimmers beneath his words

The lexical background, from NOAD:

noun come-on: informal a gesture or remark that is intended to attract someone sexually: she was giving me the come-on.

And then the great homoerotic come-on to a boy in film:

— from Airplane! (1980), Capt. Clarence Oveur (played by the famously tall, handsome, and ruggedly masculine Peter Graves) to a young boy (on his first airplane trip) visiting the cockpit:

Joey, you ever seen a grown man naked? … you ever hang around a gymnasium? … you like movies about gladiators?… have you even been in a Turkish prison?

This is a truly wonderful string of dialogue, all the more so because it starts with the grown man naked question — utterly outrageous, and utterly unprovoked by anything beyond Joey’s bubbly enthusiasm — and then riffs on two somewhat more coded references to end up with an allusion to men getting raped in prison by Turkish villains.

Ok, way over the top. But it’s a genius scene because it’s so preposterous, so far over the top that the taint of real-life pedophilia doesn’t arise, so far that the unspeakably appalling notion that a boy would enjoy being raped anally by swarthy strangers gets no traction. We just skate right past that, laughing uncontrollably.

Anything short of that bold balls-out outrageousness would have just been disgusting.

Meanwhile, if you know anything about my early life, you will have recalled that I was a sweet, ingratiating, “sensitive”, and not markedly butch boy, who also went out in the world on his own a whole lot (on foot, by bicycle, on many forms of public transportation, all over the area where I grew up, but also in NYC). Any guy with a nose for prey would have recognized me as a potentially vulnerable fagling, and no doubt many did. But all of them except one must have recognized that coming on to me would be a bad idea. The basic vignette, without crucial details, from my 4/6/18 posting “Family matters”:

the story starts with a day Luc Vartan Baronian and I spent together back in late December, talking about linguistics and our lives.

… Along the way we talked about the #MeToo movement, and our own stories, from when we were young teens, of being aggressively approached sexually by men: in his case, in Montréal, in mine in Penn Station in NYC (the original, true Penn Station).

Now some of those crucial details. The initial scene unfolded in a big mensroom underground in Penn Station, with a line of men waiting to get to a few urinals. When I stepped up to take my turn, a guy came up beside me, saying something like “Can I help you with that?”, feinting to take hold of my dick. Now my first idea was to use paralyzing aggression: kick him in the balls and punch him him the nose when he doubles up; I had already used this routine to dispatch a schoolyard bully who thought it would be a good idea to beat up a fairy-boy. But in Penn Station we were in an incredibly public space, with other men all around us, men who would include fathers and older brothers and so on, some of whom would surely come to my aid — if I shouted out that I was being molested and needed help. That would surely have worked.

But then cops and other authorities would get into things, and my father would learn about the episode, and maybe come to think I wasn’t safe moving around in public on my own. In a flash, I realized that I almost surely knew more about the layout of Penn Station than my molester did, so I just tucked my dick back in my pants and took off at a run to an out-of-the-way set of stairs, climbed to (as I recall it) an observation spot on the second floor, where I waited until the coast seemed to be clear, used a toilet on the second floor, and took a side entrance out to the street. And on with the day.

As it happens, my sexual imagination was in full swing at that age, and my fantasies were heavily focused on adult men. But they were just fantasies (with a lot of kissing), and in fact I had worked out that a sexual relationship with an adult man, no matter how decent and trustworthy he was, no matter how mature and responsible I was, would probably not be a good idea for either of us, so I waited, and eventually my male-male connections were almost all with guys around my age or younger. Meanwhile, teenagers can be sexually inventive, so I didn’t want for pleasure.

This entry was posted on January 17, 2025 at 2:02 pm and is filed under Gender and sexuality, Language of sex, Lexical semantics, Linguistics in the comics, Masculinity, Movies and tv, My life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.