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by BizarroLand 1186 days ago
The answer is what you make of it. Lot of people are dirty minded at some level, but Melville seems to simply be a person who was not very concerned with what the world thought of him.

I would side on the platonic affection, and the creepiness of the passage seems to me to come more from the desire to communicate the madness of the situation rather than some sort of homoerotic play on words.