Thomson and Thompson: What is their relationship, if any?

In the scene in "Picaros" when the Thom(p)sons are about to be executed, Thomson says something about kissing Thompson. Are they meant to be a gay couple?

They are not gay. Back in those days the scene you described was known as brotherly love.

I'm not sure, but I believe his statement 'Kiss me Thompson' is a reference to a movie of the time or a historical event. Anyone able to clarify this?

Paul

It sounds very much like 'Kiss me, Hardy', which is supposed to be what Admiral Lord Horatio Nelson said when he was about to die.

"Kiss me, Hardy" Nelson reputedly said to his Captain, as he lay dieing at Trafalgar, though some claim he actually said "kismet, Hardy".

The Thom(p)sons being gay is quite possible, and their long-term relationship is something to be admired! But I don't really think they are.

Um... Herge was Catholic, I doubt he would have gay people in his comics.

I agree that Hergé almost certainly - 99.9% and a bit more - didn't have any gay characters. But it's amusing to discuss things like this, otherwise a fair amount of this very interesting forum would be redundent. I mean, they're just pen and ink. But some of the fun of Tintin is thinking about the character's lives outside the pages, isn't it? Well to be honest, I'm not one for doing a lot of that myself, mainly because I'm more interetsed in Hergé as a creator than the characters and stories, much as I love 'em!

Hergé seems to me to be refreshingly liberal, generally. And anyway, the most likely gay character is Tintin himself. We'll never know...

Following on from Tintinrulz' post, I've started a topic on which to discuss Hergé's Catholicism because it's an interesting point that you can't really escape in any serious critique of the Tintin books.

In principle I'd agree with the general feeling on this topic that Hergé didn't have gay characters in his books. I'd also agree that this was due, at least in part, to his Catholic background and the strong morality that he inherited from it. However Hergé's faith was sorely tested through personal turmoil and I think that, while he didn't really officially renounce his Catholicism, he was more or less agnostic in the latter half of his life.

Tintin always stood up for the underdog and was ready to help any minority in the face of oppression. If Hergé had been born into today's generation then, who knows? But during the Golden Age in which Tintin really established his popularity and gained a mass following, homosexuality was probably something to be discreetly ignored. And while Tintin changed enough during the 1970s to wear a CND symbol and flared jeans, Hergé let the deeper, more sensitive issues of the time pass the stories by. He commented in 1971: "I don’t put any eroticism into my work. Besides, that isn’t my aim!…". Hergé's traditional values allowed him, perhaps unfortunately, to link alternative sexuality with the slightly unsavoury "eroticism" that was to be avoided. He wasn't being unduly prudish, simply that he didn't feel that it had any place in the stories he was trying to tell - a view which I think most of us would agree with.

I think you'll find Catholics are no less different to any other christian faiths. They aren't any less or more obsessive than protestants or orthodox.

In many cultures males kiss each other on the shoulders as a form of salute.

I remember reading an article in which Herge, when confronted with the issue of sexism, mentioned something to the extent that the Tintin adventures celebrate male friendship and companionship.

For many reasons, male bonding in Western societies changed dramatically in the last three decades of the 20th century. It's not as strong as it used to be in the early decades when the Tintin adventures were created. Male bonding has nothing to do with sex, and it doesn't imply a homosexual relationship.

These days, with over-sexed everything, the Tintin world is a welcome refuge for me. It brings up fond memories of innocence and nostalgic yearning for the childhood years.

We don't really need to shove sex into that world.