thinking about the fact that The Maltese Falcon is directly responsible for the American public and subsequent noir media unknowingly describing all gunmen as twinks

For context: The Maltese Falcon was originally published in 1930. It’s pretty obvious that the villain’s henchmen are gay in the most homophobic way Dashiell Hammett could manage, and he uses the then-current slang “gunsel” several times to describe one of them. His publisher and every other writer in the genre assumed that the word referred to the henchman’s guns. It definitely did… not. But it got picked up so for a couple of decades you’d just see fictional private detectives constantly getting menaced by gun-toting murder twinks because they’d use it interchangeably with “gunman” or “hit man.”