"What makes you think it's my first time?"

If this is your first visit to LicenceToQueer.com, I recommend you skim your eyes over this page first. In the grand tradition of a monologuing Bond villain, allow me to explain my dastardly plan…

While the site features my takes on many aspects of Bond where I take a queer interest, the main focus (initially at least) will be re-watching each of the films again wearing a set of queer lenses. The resulting re-views are each split into five sections which are broadly: the Bond character; his allies; the villains; the girls and, in the final section, anything else about the film which is particularly camp, including some of the songs. The sections are the same for each film but are of varying lengths, depending on where the most queer interest lies. So, for instance, in one film the villains are particularly queer, whereas in another there’s more to say about the girls.

Each review finishes with a final Queer Verdict, which does not reflect the quality of the film as a piece of art or entertainment but my judgement about ‘how queer’ it is relative to the other films in the series. Each film is graded 001 (least queer) to 007 (most queer).

“The name’s Bond, Flaming Bond?”

In this first section, I will look closely at this film’s presentation of Bond and the extent to which he exhibits stereotypical queer traits. An obsession with fashion; wanting to looking good to the point of narcissism; being rampantly materialistic; honing a taste for the finer things in life; being fastidious over food and drink; sexual promiscuity; an unwillingness - or inability - to commit to a stable relationship; problems with addiction; a love of innuendo; always having a pithy comeback; a predilection for skimpy swimwear… are these descriptions of 007 or The Stereotypical Gay Man? Of course, stereotypes can be incredibly damaging and should be approached with caution. I doubt any gay man demonstrates all of those traits, certainly not simultaneously. And yet, across the series, Bond does. In some films, he’s more ‘flaming’ than others, the term ‘flaming’ being applied (often offensively) to overtly flamboyant gay men since at least the 1970s. Clearly, I don’t intend it to be taken offensively. I’m a gay man who warmly embraces many of the stereotypes but shuns others (my ‘love handles’ preclude a predilection for skimpy swimwear for instance).

My intention is not to ‘out’ James Bond as gay. As explored here, being gay is an identity which 007 never claims for himself. Instead, I will be highlighting the qualities that make him appealing to queer people and attempt to explain why, for some of us at least, he’s something of a role model.

Friends of 00-Dorothy: 007’s allies

Perhaps because of his line of work, 007 doesn’t really ‘do’ friends. All of his friends are also work colleagues.

For the first three decades of the Bond films, all of Bond’s longstanding relationships (Felix Leiter, M, Q) were with men in the intelligence services. Except for the amazing Moneypenny of course, who often comes across (to my queer eyes at least) as the archetypal gay man’s work BFF, someone to share confidences with behind the boss’s back, as well as flirty-but-chaste office innuendos. One Moneypenny incarnation even tries to tempt Bond over to her place so they can listen to her Barry Manilow collection.

You don’t have to be Sigmund Freud (“analyse this… this… this…”) to appreciate the maternal angle Judi Dench’s M brought to the role. Could Bond’s relationship with his boss be seen in stereotypical ‘gay men love their mothers’ terms or is there something more going on here? We’ll see.

This section will also include analysis of the various ‘helper’ characters Bond encounters on his adventures, Men like Kerim Bey and Rene Mathis who are often like grown-up, worldly-wise versions of Bond himself. Are these relationships strictly avuncular or can we read them differently?

This section of the review is adapted from the old-fashioned euphemism people use when they can’t bring themselves to say ‘he’s gay’, as in ‘he’s a friend of Dorothy’. The reference is, of course, to The Wizard of Oz, with Dorothy played by queer icon Judy Garland.

Shady characters: villains

It’s become something of a cliche to observe that the villains are often a reflection of Bond himself. I prefer to think of them as refractions: what happens when the light (Bond) changes direction. One always gets the feeling that it wouldn’t take much for Bond to swerve away from the side of righteousness. Several of the villains articulate this explicitly, nakedly tempting 007 to hang up his state-sanctioned licence to kill and put his shady skill set to more profitable use. Several of these scenes are outright seductions.

Although few are explicitly gay, lesbian or bisexual, the subtext of the villains is a rich vein for exploration. All of them are ‘other’ in some way: often their race or ethnicity marks them out as different. The subtext gets closer to text when the difference is manifested in scars, or a physiological anomaly. If not all queer audience members relate to Bond himself, do they find a point of identification instead with these damaged, different, social outcast versions of the protagonist?

You go gurls!

So called ‘Bond girls’ are a thorny issue from a feminist perspective: tradition holds that Bond is a “sexist, misogynist dinosaur” and there is plenty (O’Toole) of onscreen evidence to support this view. However, there is an argument that even the older Bond films gave girls/women a lot more agency than other mainstream movies of their time periods. From a queer perspective, female characters have often been the ‘way in’ to movies for gay men in particular. They operate as a point of identification for anyone who can’t relate to the Alpha Male. I’ve felt this with lots of movies but not particularly strongly while watching Bond. Having said that, I surely can’t be the only gay man of my generation who alternated playing as Natalya and Xenia in the GoldenEye 007 video game on the N64? There must have been a reason for it. I’ll be looking at the roles the ‘girls’ occupy in each film. Some are mere sex objects (used to move on the plot or perhaps to make Bond hypermasculine), whereas others are Bond’s equals. Like the spectrum of sexuality, the majority are somewhere in between.

Camp (as Dr. Christmas Jones)

A notoriously difficult word and concept to pin down. In 1909 the Oxford English Dictionary included ‘camp’ for the first time with the following meaning: “ostentatious, exaggerated, affected, theatrical; effeminate or homosexual; pertaining to, characteristic of, homosexuals…” The term has been considerably broadened since then, making it even harder to define what is and isn’t camp. In this section, I’m going to be drawing out the elements of each film which, don’t fit into the other sections but do, in my mind at least, fit under the umbrella labelled ‘camp’. These will be anything from suggestive song lyrics to examples of conspicuous excess in the production design. The section is of course, a riff on the phrase ‘as camp as Christmas’ and here named in honour of everyone’s favourite nuclear physicist: Dr Christmas Jones, ostentatiously performed by Denise Richards in The World Is Not Enough.

Queer Verdict (score out of 007)

This will be a best fit, weighing up all of the elements above. I have used a 7 point scale in honour of Alfred Kinsey’s groundbreaking research which went some way to changing public attitudes to queerness.

001 will be the the least queer Bond films with 007 being the most queer.