Arnold Zwicky's Blog

Stephan Pastis’s Pearls Before Swine comic strip for 8/5:

Dating tip: avoid crazed lunatics; and while we’re on the subject, ax murderers too — when on offer in the sexual marketplace, let caution be your watchword

Now, as for ax murderers, return with me to 1969 and my first male lover, Larry. I was in fact his first male lover as well. We both had had sexual experiences with other men, but what developed between us was a passionate connection of affection as well as raw sex, and I moved him into my household — along with my wife, Ann (yes, it was a gigantically messy situation in which I behaved very badly, while Ann and Larry carried themselves off as genuinely nice adults) — but as a resident in the guest bedroom.

A situation that could not last; Larry eventually moved out of the house (but not out of my life) and, quite reasonably, began to cast about for a way of living in which I was not the central figure. Suddenly: the specter of, omigod, gay dating. And here I have to break the narrative for a bit to say some great stuff about Ann.

Not only did she undertake being in no way a victim when her husband took up ostentatiously having hot sex with a young man, she decided that she and I really did have a strong affectionate bond worth preserving and, in fact, cultivating further. I was entirely on board with that, and we went on to develop our life together (and even the sex was satisfying for both of us; people can be surprisingly complicated).

On top of that, while having Larry around the house, sharing meals with us and so on, she became friends with him (well, he was smart, charming, and genuinely nice), collaborators rather than competitors. So that when he began looking for tricks (or better), she was concerned that someone so young and inexperienced at this scene was vulnerable, open to predators — potential ax murderers, in our household’s joking formulation of the dangers of dating. She felt protective of him. So she encouraged Larry to bring candidates to dinner at our house. To get vetted by the family, as it were. (Ann was also a fabulous cook and warmly hospitable; a whole generation of linguists were well treated at our house.)

This brought us the Other Larry. Who treated our Larry abusively, got very drunk, and then puked all over the dining-room table. As I labored to clean things up some, Ann mouthed the formula to me: AX MURDERER.

Years later, but still years ago, an old friend, female, struck up a romance with an Australian young man, so my daughter — who then regularly traveled to Oz on business — undertook to meet the bloke, so as to assure everyone that he was, yes, not an ax murderer, safe for her to marry. It went very well. (That would be Ann Burlingham and Jason Parker-Burlingham.)

This entry was posted on August 7, 2026 at 11:05 am and is filed under Friendship, Homosexuality, Language of sex, Linguistics in the comics, Marriage, My life, Slogans. 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.