From the modish tailoring via the vodka Martini happy hours and the glamorous cavalcade of female leads over eight decades and counting, one could make the easy, quick assumption that superspy James Bond is a thoroughbred heterosexual.
And he still is – don’t panic! However, and as a new book illuminates, 007’s very real genesis and actual journey to both the big screen and written page actually suggest otherwise. Bond, Queer Bond – The Fabulous Other History of a Spy is a bold new testament, celebration and introduction to our man James’ and his very gay DNA.
As the world’s goldeneyes wait for the white smoke to rise from a Pinewood Studios chimney confirming the movie gods have finally anointed a new James Bond, and – more crucially – as diversity and LGBTQ visibilities and rights are being thrown under a political bus by bovine forces desperate for othering and distracting headlines – 007 is not just an iconic knight of British popular culture. He is a quiet defender and product of many a queer realm too.
James Bond’s creation was a reaction. Whether it was a new world order, shifting geopolitics, a jet-set 1950s or the impending end of his bachelor days, author Ian Fleming penned Casino Royale (1953) as a response to where his worlds were hinged at the time. And when a principled Oscar Wilde movie propels movie producer Albert R. Broccoli to co-wrestle the book Bond into a movie Bond sensation, it in turn became a groovy new answer to dull 1950s war movies, monochrome rationing and the rise of 1960s youth culture.
However, if the burgeoning Bond phenomenon was some Darwinian ascent of Bond, it was many a queer mind, opinion, intervention and decision that helped the spy stand tall, and fabulous. Often navigating how their own personal and love lives were very illegal in Britain of the 1950s and 1960s, it was a gay publishing editor who steered gay-ally Fleming to not only write the first book but also realise its series potential. It was a brilliantly hedonistic, promiscuous and jagged gay illustrator who first graphically devised just how Bond was branded, how his visual tone would look and how the world soon recognised 007. It was a gay film editor who changed how action cinema itself is constructed. And it was a gay Cockney who not only created the first Bond song and transferred his own loneliness to that inaugural anthem. He also fashioned a new genre of pop music.
And these are just the quiet – and not so quiet – gay figures and stories which helped cut the Bond template whilst ensuring the spy’s crown as heterosexual fantasy. With a wealth of Bond and queer world icons lending new comment, Bond, Queer Bond also catwalks alongside crucial LGBTQ figures, artists and politics such as Andy Warhol, Harvey Milk, John Sex, Doris Fish, Sylvester, Judy Garland, Keith Haring, the AIDS crisis, the Wolfenden Report, Tom Ford, kd lang, RuPaul, Divine, the ballroom scene, Truman Capote, Oscar Wilde and much more. This is a work that reminds drag legends were and are influenced by Bond. This is a story that discovers it was a Bond film that was the first mainstream movie to raise clubland dollars for newly founded AIDS charities way before western governments would even say the phrase. And this is a book that reminds that Ian Fleming himself used the ‘woke’ phrase supportively and intelligently back in the 1960s.
Maybe Bond, Queer Bond is a reaction too – a warm-spirited and welcoming counterpulse looking at the LGBTQ history of an openly straight pop-cultural phenomenon at a time when franchise heroes are distractions and pawns in culture wars that need not exist. With the help of some clever queer voices and icons such as drag legend Peaches Christ, landmark photographer Daniel Nicoletta and Diamonds Are Forever’s homo-cidal killer Putter Smith, this work suggests very much so that diversity is not new, visibility has always existed and James Bond is back.
Bond, Queer Bond – The Fabulous Other History of a Spy by Mark O’Connell is OUT NOW. Published by The History Press and available at all good bookstores and e-book platforms.
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