Why not a gay James Bond? The return of an eternal debate

A gay James Bond? The idea was posited on September 3 during a presentation at the Venice Film Festival of Queer, the latest from Luca Guadagnino. In the hot seat was Daniel Craig, the sixth cinematographic and, perhaps, the best Bond (begging Sean Connery’s pardon, of course) from more than 60 years of representations of the character. At his side, Guadagnino, the man who brought the British actor out of his comfort zone to play Craig’s first openly homosexual role of his career.

In continuation of the Italian filmmaker’s reflection on representation, sexual diversity and resisting convention, a journalist asked whether, at this point, it would be possible to depict an Agent 007 in love with another man. Craig received the question with a skeptical smile, shrugged, and reached for a glass of water. But Guadagnino took the bait with amused reticence. “Guys, let’s be adults in the room for a second. There is no way around the fact that nobody would ever know James Bond’s desires, period. Now, the important thing is that he does his missions properly.”

Images of the press conference had a notable impact on social media. Some accused the journalist who asked the question of engaging in the most blatant of “woke” journalism. Others surmised, with various degrees of sincerity, that an “obvious” gay subtext exists in the Bond interpretations of George Lazenby, Timothy Dalton and even Craig himself. There were even those who claimed that the saga’s producers were corrupting the character and “ruining the film,” as if gay James Bond was a project already underway and not the simple imagining of a reporter determined to bring a little brio to an otherwise-bland press conference.

(Always) an open book

Amid the media deluge that followed the controversial exchange, journalist, screenwriter and activist Paco Tomás brought up the obvious fact that Bond is not real. His fictional character, moreover, is not hermetically sealed, and involved in an evolutionary process that began many years ago and continues to this day. He could be “as gay as Harry Potter, Indiana Jones or Superman” if the people behind those franchise decided to give a queer twist to their characters. That’s already been the case with figures like SpongeBob SquarePants, Loki, Barbie’s Ken and Batman.

In the case of Bond, it could even be a twist in keeping with the character’s history to establish him as bisexual, given that his frequent sexual dalliances and erotic tension (which nearly always comes to fruition) with female characters like Vesper Lynd, Pussy Galore, Wai Lin, Tiffany Case, Holly Goodhead and Paris Carver are well-documented. But there’s no reason why a timely reboot couldn’t reset this counter to zero and show us an unexpected 007 from a parallel dimension, as happened to Spider-Man and Caesar, the messianic leader from Planet of the Apes. The creation of fiction is a game adept at tolerating the breaking of its own rules.

Zing Tjeng, iNews columnist, presents a different view: “Some LGBTQI+ people like myself are beginning to get a little tired of the lack of imagination implicit in questions like this one. Why does on-screen representation of communities like ours have to necessarily go through a reboot of traditional franchises to change certain characters’ sexual orientation?” Why, Tjeng asks, do we not create future gay icons from zero instead of insisting on the routine recycling of old while, masculine, heteronormative archetypes, augmenting them with a diversity that satisfies no one and that no one asked for?

Maggie Baska adds an interesting layer to this debate in an article for Pink News. Instead of adding an artificial queer patina to a character who perhaps does not need one, why not give the Agent 007 role to a LGBTQI+ actor or actress? Such was the subject of a piece that Baska wrote months ago after it became public that the most probable candidate to be the next Bond was Aaron Taylor-Johnson. That is to say, another heterosexual white British actor, the sixth in a row (Lazenby was Australian.) In this context, the journalist advocated for introducing diversity not necessarily (or not only) to Bond scripts, but rather, to their casting. She proposed 13 different candidates from Elliot Page to Billy Porter, Kristen Stewart and Colman Domingo, a list on which everyone was queer, five Black and four, women. If James Bond is truly one of the marquee roles of the acting world, why is the 007 throne restricted to white guys who sleep with women?

The spy brother of Hoagy Carmichael

There’s no doubt that Ian Fleming, the character’s creator, conceived of Bond as a heterosexual man approaching middle ago, although certainly not the alpha male and serial seducer into which he’d be transformed, in part, due to the movies. Already in his first novel Casino Royale, the secret agent was accompanied by a sidekick, Vesper Lynd, who would wind up becoming his sexual partner and target of his affections.

It’s interesting to note that Fleming, who was 43 at the time the first book came out in 1953, imagined Bond as a cross between himself and the U.S. singer-songwriter Hoagy Carmichael. That is to say, an old-school dandy, fan of a certain kind of elegance, but with a more conventional, circumspect appearance. The characteristics that made Bond stand out, at the beginning, were his icy efficiency, lack of scruples, patriotism and his affinity for a dry martini — not his sexual attractiveness.

Bond has been met with several well-known TV and movie parodies (such as that of Barry Nelson) and has passed through the hands of a vast quantity of performers, scriptwriters, producers and directors, not to mention necessary adjustments for sociocultural changes and fan expectations that have evolved generation after generation. In a certain sense, he’s like Barcelona’s Sagrada Familia cathedral, a permanent work in progress that never quite crystallizes. A creature so hybrid and elusive that, it could be argued, he has no identity at all.

Those who tore their clothes in recent years upon reading that the next Bond could end up being Afro-British actor Idris Elba, or a woman like Lashana Lynch, are concerning themselves over the purity of a character who was never pure. Connery’s exquisite and carnal 007 has little to do with the worldly charm of Pierce Brosnan, the much more tortuous and cynical version presented by Roger Moore and the raw and stoic turn of Craig. The elasticity of the character is virtually infinite. Bond can stretch and twist at will and never break. He never had a wholly defined comfort zone (or coherence), so it is just short of impossible to bring him out of it.

A fresh-out-the-closet Bond could be as thought-provoking as the gay cowboys of Brokeback Mountain, who many, back in the yesteryear of 2005, saw as an outrage to the memory of John Wayne. In actuality, they represented a widening, an enrichment, a democratization of Wayne’s legacy. A Bond who loves men is conceivable, could make artistic and narrative sense and would likely be easily accepted by his public, or at least, part of his public. Though, it might not hurt to wonder, as have Tjeng, Baska and perhaps even Craig, to what extent such a rehaul is necessary.