How queer is James Bond?
Bond’s response to his interrogation at the hands of Silva in Skyfall only confirmed what many of us had known for years: Bond is a bit ‘gay’. Maybe more than a bit.
‘Skyfall: Silva/Bond’ by Fishik
Silva unbuttons Bond's shirt and peels it back to expose the scar tissue where Bond removed the bullet
Silva: Ooh! See what she's done to you.
Bond: Well, she never tied me to a chair.
Silva: Her loss.
Silva begins caressing Bond's neck
Bond: Are you sure this is about M?
Silva: It's about her... and you, and me. You see, we are the last two rats. We can either eat each other... mmm... or eat everyone else.
Silva strokes Bond's neck
Silva: How you're trying to remember your training now.
Silva smiles
Silva: What's the regulation to cover this?
Silva strokes both of Bond's upper legs
Silva: Well, first time for everything.
Bond smiles
Silva: Yes?
Bond: What makes you think this is my first time?
Silva sits back, mock flustered
Silva: [in the manner of a traditional Bond girl] Oh, Mr Bond!
Skyfall (2012)
This isn’t the first time Bond has been tied to a chair. Or a table. Or anything which means 007 is powerless to resist the advances of the villain. Sometimes, the advances take a more subtle form. As they wine and dine Bond, the villains make it clear how much they admire and respect their adversary. They incentivise Bond but, ultimately, don’t succeed in inducing him to join their nefarious plot. He spurns their advances - for Queen and country.
The scenes often employ the cinematic grammar of a classic seduction scene, the camera moving even closer and closer to the two ‘lovers’, to the neglect of everything else in the scene, pushing the henchmen, and sometimes even the girl, out of the frame.
Skyfall pushes this to extremes, but it is merely making more explicit what has always been there: the Bond villains are pretty queer.
And arguably, so is Bond.
You could easily put together a case to straight-wash Bond’s line: “What makes you think this is my first time?”. Even the screenwriter John Logan, an openly gay man, downplayed it at the time of the film’s release as the villain’s attempt to “intimidate” Bond and make the audience feel uncomfortable, like Bond might be feeling in the scene. Anything Bond says in this situation should be taken as a defensive witticism, in the tradition of Connery’s riposte to Goldfinger: “I think you’ve made your point, thank you for the demonstration”. What else could you do to allay the danger of having an industrial laser pointed at your nethers? The only option is to play it cool. Mask your fear. It’s blokey banter, not to be taken as gospel. Yes, that must be what’s happening here. Skyfall presents an almost identical situation to the iconic laser scene in Goldfinger. Bond is restrained. There are no gadgets to get him out of it. Only his words can save him. He would say anything he needed to in order to escape, wouldn’t he?
Except, there’s not a hint of disingenuousness in Daniel Craig’s performance.
And if we take Bond at his word, this is not his first time. Far from it.
The more you look back over the film series with queer lenses on, the more you find. That scene in Skyfall might represent a coming out moment of sorts. But it only confirms what many of us have suspected for years: James Bond is a bit gay. And maybe more than a bit.
But, people might say, what about all those women he’s slept with?
Let’s leave to one side that sexual promiscuity is a trait more commonly (erroneously) associated with queer people than ‘straight’ people. For a straight man, the ‘love them and leave them’ approach could be taken as Don Juanism: sleeping with as many women as possible in an attempt to make up for perceived inadequacies. The psychoanalyst Carl Jung even connected homosexuality and Don Juanism through the idea of the mother-complex, something that has definitely come to the fore in recent films through the relationship between Bond and Judi Dench’s M.
Bond’s conquests usually function, narratively, as rewards: a dramatically cathartic coupling with a girl, often rendered uncomfortable/impractical by the circumstances, whether it be in a rickety boat, a life raft, attempting re-entry in a space shuttle or on a bed of diamonds (talk about camp…).
And then the cycle starts all over again.
I surely can’t be the only queer person who recognises this vicious cycle of denial from their own lives, prior to coming out?
Okay, you might be thinking: this sounds like another attempt to make something else that is avowedly heterosexual something that it isn’t. While it’s true that lack of representation on screen has led LGBTQ+ people to latch on to anything that has even a whiff of queerness about it (can you blame us?), you have to question:
Why do so many queer people love James Bond films?
When I use the term ‘queer’, I am using it as the umbrella term that has been used in academic circles for decades but has only recently become the preferred term in wider society. Like all words associated with minority groups, it can be used to exclude or include, depending on whether you say it with hostile or friendly intent. It has been reclaimed by many in the queer community because LGBTQ+ is sometimes taken as not being inclusive enough. Where are the intersex people? The pansexuals? The non-binaries? The asexuals (an umbrella term itself for a whole range of identities)?
The language for sexual orientations and gender identities has flowered exponentially in recent years, mirroring the increasing range of identities in society.
A 2015 YouGov survey revealed that nearly a quarter of the British public said they did not think of themselves as ‘heterosexual’ or ‘homosexual’. It was nearly half for 18-24 year olds. The British government used their 2017 national LGBT survey in 2017 to estimate there are up to half a million transgender people in the UK and an increasing proportion identifying as neither female nor male. Finally, as a society, we are starting to be more open about, and find the language to express, something that’s been scientifically proven since 1948: sexuality is not a binary choice (hetero/homo) and neither is gender (female/male).
Not long before Bond was brought to life at the typewriter of Ian Fleming, Professor Alfred Kinsey and his team interviewed over a thousand people about their sexual histories. His most celebrated - and, in some circles, condemned - finding was that sexual orientation is a spectrum. A 0 means you’re exclusively heterosexual and a 6 you’re exclusively homosexual. X, somewhat controversially to modern eyes, was used for asexuals, a group that is still largely neglected by researchers. Even so, Kinsey’s research was groundbreaking in its day. By building people’s trust and asking them the right questions, Kinsey revealed that most people are somewhere in between the two extremes.
When Kinsey published his findings as a book in 1948 it scandalised parts of society. The human brain loves a dichotomy. It’s more comforting when things are either/or. But that’s not how sexual orientation works.
Source: Kinsey Institute [my highlighting]
If we apply Kinsey’s methodology to Bond, using his own testimony in the ‘intimidation’ scene in Skyfall, he would probably come out (so to speak) in the 1-2 range. He tells Silva he’s had at least one homosexual encounter before. We have no idea whether this was what Kinsey termed ‘incidental’ – I.E. he found a man attractive and he didn’t deny himself. ‘Incidental’ could describe most of Bond’s onscreen encounters with women too. How many times has the situation just presented itself? Sometimes, sex is just used to pass the time, most ephemerally in Moonraker: “how do you kill five hours in Rio when you don’t samba?” Bond says to the female field agent he’s just met in his hotel room, unfastening her silk robe before we quickly cut away from a scene which plays a little uncomfortably nowadays. Perhaps on the same level of uncomfortableness some non-queer viewers may have found the similar scene in Skyfall where Silva puts his hands on Bond’s thighs.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, most queer fans embraced the scene. To an extent, it validated what many of us had been thinking for long before 2012.
For those of us who have been in love (romantically or otherwise) with Bond and his world since our formative years, this scene is just the tip of the queer motorised iceberg (see: A View To A Kill).
