“The Clark/Lex friendship begins with a bang when Lex, speeding as usual, hits Clark with his Porsche (going 80 mph), and both of them tumble off a bridge (Pilot 1.01). Their first interaction is not verbal at all, but entirely physical. Clark rescues Lex, of course, by peeling open the youth’s car like a can of tuna — a feat that Lex spends the next three years trying to explain, since Clark later denies that it ever happened.

In fact, Clark makes a regular habit of saving Lex from various threatening forces, so much so that Lex himself becomes more of a damsel in distress than either Lana or Chloe. Although Lana is often Clark’s primary “savee,” Lex requires a sort of multi-layered saving, since Clark is constantly trying to rescue him from both physical and moral peril.

And it strikes me as profoundly interesting that, although it takes Clark the entire first season of Smallville before he ever dares to kiss Lana, he kisses Lex in the very first episode. Granted, he is performing artificial respiration, but this is still, arguably, the show’s very first kiss between two principle characters. And it remains rare, except on a program like E.R. or Baywatch, to see a man resuscitating another man.”

http://ejumpcut.org/archive/jc48.2006/gaySmallville/index.html#3

Source: ejumpcut.org

“The question, are they or aren’t they, is ultimately not important. What is important is Smallville’s willingness to render these two male characters as vulnerable, as well as its willingness to celebrate their close friendship without shutting down its erotic potential through masculine stereotyping. Most male characters within SF texts, we must remember, barely have a physical relationship with their wives and girlfriends, let alone with other men.

For Smallville to focus so strongly on a friendship that Lex predicts will be “the stuff of legends” is a risky move in itself, but it is a move that has paid off over four season’s worth of fascinating narrative (with a fifth season in production). While Clark remains the invulnerable man who elicits horror from audiences when his body is actually violated (as in the episode Extinction, 3.03, when Clark is hit with a Kryptonite bullet), Lex’s body is constantly being bruised, battered, and assaulted. Lex practically dies in the pilot episode, and is constantly being tied up, shot at, or placed on the receiving end of retributive violence (usually at the hands of someone whose life he inadvertently ruined). Clark is, of course, the one who routinely comes to Lex’s rescue. But not even Clark can save Lex from his father, whose attempt to erase Lex’s memory through shock-treatment in the episode Asylum (3.09) is startlingly brutal.”

http://ejumpcut.org/archive/jc48.2006/gaySmallville/gaySmallville2.html