I wanna take Craig to a gay bar - here’s why

How are we supposed to feel about Daniel Craig’s ‘revelation’ that he prefers gay bars to straight equivalents? Why are some appalled while others are applauding? Why is this even a story anymore?

Even Homer Simpson sees nothing noteworthy in spending time in a gay bar. In one of my favourite ever gags from the long-running sitcom, the Simpsons’ patriarch relocates to the She-She Lounge after being banned from his usual haunt, Mo’s Tavern. Looking around what is quite obviously a lesbian bar, the symbol of everyman American masculinity makes an observation:

“Wait a minute, there’s something bothering me about this place… I know! This lesbian bar doesn’t have a fire exit. Enjoy your deathtrap ladies!”

It’s brilliant, of course, because it plays on our expectation that Homer might be bothered when he comes to the realisation that he’s the midst of a queer space. Instead, he’s perturbed by a health and safety violation. He couldn’t care less that he’s the only straight man in the place.

This episode was first broadcast in 1994.

So I’ll admit, I was surprised to find that here and now - in 2021 - a straight man talking about going into gay bars could still make headlines, even when the straight man in question plays that symbol of British masculinity, James Bond. 

Isn’t it time the world moved on?

Perhaps it’s a big story because of the media furore around the release of Craig’s final Bond film and editors are eager for anything that ties in with No Time To Die. Perhaps - with Craig’s claim that one of his motivations for going to gay bars was to avoid fights - it’s intended to tap into the zeitgeisty discourse around sexual violence, which is long overdue its time under the spotlight. Or maybe, just maybe, it’s a thinly-veiled (carefully non-libellous) suggestion that Craig is not-so-straight. 

After all, it wouldn’t be his first time.

Back in May 2010 the National Enquirer ran a cover story:

“Daniel Craig caught kissing a man at gay bar!”

The incident remained largely unremarked upon for eleven years. That was, until Craig opened up on the podcast of his friend Bruce Bozzi. After several vodka Martinis, both men related what really happened: they were spending the day together in the Venice Beach area of Los Angeles, a famed gay hotspot. Craig was insistent they go out to a bar. Bozzi, a gay man, took him to one of his favourite places. Both men got “tanked up” (Craig’s words) and got a bit physically affectionate with each other. For Craig, it was “no big deal”. As he talks about it on the podcast there’s not a hint of defensiveness in his voice. Rather, he gets somewhat irascible when talking about being ‘caught’ by a paparazzo: “We love each other, we give each other hugs. It’s okay, we’re two f*cking grown men. … For me, it was one of those situations and the irony is, you know, we kind of got ‘caught’, I suppose, which was kind of weird ‘cause we were doing nothing f****** wrong.”  It was, according to Craig, a “sh*tstorm in a teacup”.

Nevertheless, Bozzi says he “got in trouble” with Craig’s publicist for taking Craig to a gay bar, presumably because said publicist was fearful that Craig’s image would be put in jeopardy. 

Would a straight male celebrity spending time with a gay friend in a gay bar still warrant a front page story in 2021? Well, if the amount of coverage generated by Craig’s revelation that he is a veritable veteran of gay bars is anything to go by then yes, it probably would.

On the podcast, Craig said:

“I have to say, it wasn’t my first gay bar. … I’ve been going to gay bars for as long as I can remember. One of the reasons is I don’t get into fights in gay bars - that often. The aggressive d*ck-swinging in hetero bars, I got very sick of that as a kid. ... You didn’t have to state your sexuality. It was okay. And it was a very safe place to be. And I could meet girls there because they were there a lot of girls there for exactly the same reason I was there. There was kind of an ulterior motive.”

I know many straight men who visit gay bars, for all of the reasons Craig mentions on the podcast. He has drawn some ire from queer commentators because they see it as a non-queer person invading queer space. I am sympathetic to this viewpoint to an extent. Interviewed by Grace Walsh in 2019, the always brilliant Meg-John Barker summed it up succinctly:

“LGBTQ+ people often become used to having to come out repeatedly, to being asked intrusive questions about their bodies and sex lives and being treated as an object for people (the weird one in the office, or the gay best friend, for example). It’s understandable that they might want some spaces where they don’t have to worry about that stuff. Where they can assume that everyone will ‘get it’, relax and breathe easy.”

Perhaps if I had summoned the courage to visit gay bars earlier in my life it would not have taken me until my mid-20s to come out. Seeing people like me and getting to know them might have made me more comfortable with my gay identity. The problem was, I just couldn’t see myself fitting in inside the gay bars I saw represented in TV shows and films. I’ve never been one for loud noises and late nights. I prefer classical music to pop and dance music (although I’m partial to a bit of trance now and then). I like a well-made drink but I don’t do drugs. The latter seemed to be an integral part of ‘the scene’ in all those media representations and I was not remotely interested. Of course, now I realised internalised homophobia was partly responsible for these impressions, along with (and perhaps partly as a result of) the mass media’s misrepresentation of gay bars.

I didn’t go to a gay bar until I was in my early 20s, when I was still closeted. Ironically, it was for a straight friend’s birthday party. He chose the venue in the centre of Birmingham because it was the only place which would allow a group in fancy dress through the door. The theme he had chosen for his birthday bacchanalia was American Psycho, so all the women were in 80s gear (shoulder pads!) and the men were dressed as iterations of Patrick Bateman. Being the ‘extra’ one of the group, I even bought a semi-transparent raincoat and smeared it with fake blood in a bid to make it look as if I had just axe-murdered a work colleague while listening to Huey Lewis and the News. Can you imagine most straight venues allowing me to enter their premises wearing that get up?

Even though I was posing as a straight man at the time, I remember feeling much more at ease in my first gay club than in any of the other venues I had visited up to that point. I was able to recognise it as - to echo Daniel Craig’s phrase - a “safe space”, while also appreciating that the gay clientele might have felt threatened by a group of mostly straight people in their space (the additional irony here is that several more of my friends who went out that night have subsequently come out - maybe this was an awakening moment!).

Straight appropriation?

Contemporaneous with my first experience of a gay bar, academics were getting to grips with the shifting boundaries of straight/gay spaces. In a 2007 essay, Tatiana Matejskova observed that many scholars “interpret the presence of straights in queered spaces as, at best, diluting the queerness of these spaces or, at worst, as a straight spatial re-appropriation”. Matejskova cautioned against taking a too-reductive stance and encouraged her peers to look more carefully at the “diversity of motivations” for straights visiting gay bars.

Craig himself gives three reasons: feeling more relaxed because he doesn’t have to avoid fights; not having to wear a sexual orientation label; meeting girls. It’s this last one which many have fixated upon. And, yes, I find the part where he talks about an ‘ulterior motive’ part a little distasteful, but at least he’s being honest. 

What I find more distasteful, however, is the reporting of this non-story in some outlets. Many versions want to have their cake and eat it by playing up the sensational implication that Daniel Craig might be a bit into men (otherwise, why is this worthy of quite so many column inches?) while also shutting it down by reassuring them that this couldn’t possibly be the case. In almost every version, Craig’s marital status is dropped into the sentence in the form of a subordinate clause (”who married actor Rachel Weisz in 2011”). Craig’s being married to a woman has nothing to do with the story. The subtle grammatical trick of nonchalantly reminding us that Craig has been married to a woman for a decade seeks to normalise heterosexual monogamy while playing up the alternatives as newsworthy.

The story is a curiously queasy mix of queer exploitation and queer erasure. Few versions of the story - which has received worldwide attention - even refer to the sexual orientation of Craig’s friend, Bruce Bozzi, despite the fact that in the podcast itself (which I imagine most haven’t bothered listening to) Bozzi refers to his husband throughout. The 2010 National Enquirer’s reporting of his taking Craig to a gay bar didn’t only get Bozzi in trouble with Craig’s publicist but, according to Bozzi himself on his podcast, his husband too. The way it was represented made it appear like Bozzi and Craig might be having an affair.

It appears that we still have some way to go until gay men and straight men in the public eye can spend time together without some narrow-minded people making erroneous assumptions. The tabloid coverage of Craig’s post-Quantum of Solace Christmas vacation with Bozzi and another gay friend, Andy Cohen, led some to conclude it was a ‘Gay Old Christmas’, even though Craig’s girlfriend was there.

Ian Fleming counted many gay men among his closest friends and Daniel Craig is the same. It’s to Craig’s credit that he shrugs off any innuendoes about his sexual orientation that are thrown his way without resorting to flat out denials that might be misconstrued as homophobia.

Queer spaces

Spaces where queer people can breathe a little easier have always existed in some form, although the gay bar is not very well-documented through history. In Britain, we have evidence of proto-gay bars, called ‘molly houses’, from the 17th Century. The USA’s oldest (and still operating) gay bar is Cafe Lafitte in Exile, in New Orleans, although this only dates back to 1933 and there were surely earlier examples which, because of their essentially secretive nature, have been left out of recorded history.

While Craig is correct in observing that there are fewer fights in gay bars than their straight counterparts, it’s worth remembering that they haven’t always been havens of tranquility. The difference is that the violence usually comes from without than within. Let’s not forget that Stonewall was a riot, incited by police harassment, as was Compton’s Cafeteria, a landmark event in the fight for trans rights three years before Stonewall. Prior to legalisation, gay bars in the UK were regularly raided by the police and history continues to repeating itself to this day in those countries around the world with less tolerant attitudes and legal protections.

There are many who decry the decline in queer venues. And lest anyone think this is merely a generational thing, it was recently brought to the attention of younger queers through a viral Tik Tok video which maintained that there were only 21 lesbian bars in the United States remaining, from a grand total of 200 at some point in the unspecified past (citation required!). Even if the data is not always reliable, it’s undeniable that there are fewer gay bars than there were a decade ago. Although some claim that “Grindr killed the gay bar”, the reasons why queer venues are closing are more complex. Sad as these closures are for some patrons, I would like to hope that they can partly be attributed to many queer people feeling more comfortable in straight spaces.

In my own life, I’m eager to build bridges between the queer and non-queer communities, which extends (beyond this website!) to visiting queer spaces with non-queer friends. I count several straight men and women among my inner circle of most trusted friends, many of who think nothing of coming along with me to queer-themed plays, film-showings and bars without a thought to what conclusions onlookers might reach.

It appears I’m not alone in this. In their 2018 paper, Jaime Hartless argued that while “gay bars have long been understood as havens from heteronormativity… a shift towards greater LGBTQ tolerance has led to more heterosexual involvement in these once marginal places.”

Quite rightly, many LGBTQ people feel ambivalent towards straight people sharing their spaces. In an ideal world, we wouldn’t need separate spaces and we’re still a long way off. But if we’re to make steps, or even strides, towards this ideal world, we all need to acknowledge that mutual understanding between queer and non-queer people cannot thrive without encouraging people who are different to us into each others’ spaces.

One day, maybe, this sort of thing won’t be a news story. In the meantime, if Daniel Craig ever reads this: I would most definitely buy you a drink in a gay bar.