The name’s Leflour, Jill Leflour
Growing up in rural France, Jill created a James Bond persona to try to process his gender dysphoria. Now out as a trans gay man, living and working in London, Jill attended the premiere of No Time To Die and has been processing his feelings about the film ever since. We talked about why James Bond means so much to us as queer people, why we see things others overlook and how our partners accommodate our Bond obsessions.
When I created Licence To Queer my main aim was to create a space in the Bond fandom where queer people felt they belonged. So it’s incredibly exciting when someone gets in touch to tell me that something I - or another contributor - has written has resonated with them. I’m very aware that as a cisgender gay man, occupying a position of relative privilege in the queer community, I cannot speak for lesbians, bisexuals and trans people, much as I try to see Bond through their eyes. So when Jill messaged me that he, a trans gay man, had found my queer re-view of No Time To Die very emotionally affecting, I was eager to find out more and I suggested we meet (virtually) to talk about it.
You can watch our conversation here, or listen to it as a podcast, although if you choose the audio only route you miss out on the opportunity to take in the full glory of our Christmas knitwear. The choice is yours!
Podcast
A note on Jill’s name
Although Mr Big may think they’re merely for tombstones, I believe names are important - and this includes their pronunciation.
Jill is pronounced not with a hard ‘J’ as in James but more like the sound at either end of the gay slang term zhuzh (also heard in the middle of words like treasure, measure and vision). And the second part of Leflour does not sound like the stuff you make cakes and bread with but is closer in sound to ‘floor’ (the long vowel is the one in ‘Dufour’, as in Moonraker’s Corinne Dufour). Despite Jill giving me a short phonetics lesson before we started recording (at my request) I still didn’t quite get it right. I’ll nail it next time!
Some highlights
All quotes are from Jill.
“Craig’s my Bond… this poster’s been here for 15 years.”
“The whole daughter plot… in fiction, it’s probably the number one trope I hate the most… It’s probably linked to queer stuff, right?”
“As a trans man, just the idea of carrying your own child, some guys deal with that just fine, but it’s always been a massive source of anxiety for me, way before I realised I was trans.”
“The fandom, from afar, looks like a bunch of middle aged white guys.... I didn’t want to engage with people who were like ‘M’s a woman now’ or ‘Oh no, we’ve got a female 007.’”
“For 15 years it was just me, my partner, my uncle a little bit… he was the only one really until this year to who I could chat with about nerdy Bond stuff.”
“I never felt the work itself was missing queer stuff. Like you, I read between the lines to see what I want to get out of it.”
“I was nine when my dad took me to see [Casino Royale]. I saw Bond’s character as effortlessly cool, oozing the kind of masculinity I really wanted for myself but thought I never could have because I didn’t know trans was a thing. It was this remote fantasy kept me going for years when I thought ‘well, I can’t be like that but then I’ve got this other character I can have for emotional support’.”
“I don’t know if it’s a gay trans thing or if it’s just a gay thing but when you see someone who’s so cool I’m confused between two things: do I want to be him or do I want to be with him?”
“I wanted to say I grew up to be Bond but I grew up to be Q. I’m a nerd, like a data scientist, I spend my life in front of a computer screen.”
“After my fifth time seeing No Time To Die, I just kept thinking ‘What’s that scene that we’re missing between where Moneypenny and Bond are at Q’s and the scene after that where they’re in M’s office?’”
Read Jill’s story here: https://www.licencetoqueer.com/blog/00q-one-nice-evening-before-the-world-explodes
“The scene of Leiter’s death compared with Vesper’s… it’s shot the exact same way. The cinematography, colour-grading… the same succession of shots. There’s no way this wasn’t intentional. I took this as visual confirmation that Bond is bisexual.”
On listening to the No Time To Die queer re-view podcast in the gym:
“I got to the gym, got on a treadmill to warm up and within ten minutes of listening I was tearing up… so I hid in the toilet for 10 minutes, trying to pretend everything was fine. So I listened to the rest of it at home, crying in my kitchen.”
“The part about Bond as a myth… it resonated with me because Bond has been a mythological presence in my life in general. From very early on, from 2006 when I saw Casino Royale for the first time, I created this persona for myself that I named Jill Bond. I now see this was a way of trying to keep my gender dysphoria at arm’s length. Basically it was James Bond but it was me and he was nine and he was a guy. Pretending to be this character was me being me and living my normal life was me pretending to be someone I was not.”
“There were some low points in middle school. Back when I didn’t know being trans was a thing and just thought I was kind of strange and I didn’t think it would ever get better, there were points at that time that I really wished I hadn’t been born because I was born a girl and I didn’t like that. And that’s when I came back to that Jill Bond character, when I was 12 or 13 years old. It was a way to process all these gender feels.”
“When you wrote that Bond chooses to die rather than live an empty life... that’s really the part when I was full on crying! I’d rather die than go back in the closet, ever.”
“I was never discouraged. I never came out and got shoved back in the closet by parents or anything. I just didn’t know it was a thing. I’m from a rural town in Normandy. No one could understand what was going on in my head. Every character I’ve ever played when I was role playing with my brother or every character I’ve ever played in a video game has always been a male character. I’ve always tried to vicariously live through media. When The Hunger Games came out I couldn’t relate to the strong female characters. I was into Alex Rider!”
“I came out two and a half years ago. It hit me like a tonne of bricks.”
“When there’s something in your life that you know you can’t change… I was not going to let it prevent me from enjoying life. That’s how I dealt with it until I met other people like me.”
“This is going to sound really vain but you know that image of Daniel coming out of the water in Casino Royale? When I was a kid I was like ‘I wanna be like this when I grow up!’ And I was like ‘Obviously, that’s never going to happen’. And actually, now, it can happen and I can absolutely work towards this. I’ve been able to direct a lot of energy into changing stuff that I can change.”
“I did buy a replica of the Casino Royale swimming trunks. That’s my goal for next Summer. One anxiety I do still have: being a trans man, there’s nothing there. Do I want that attention at the beach? I care about this stuff less and less as time goes on.”
“When [my partner and me] first got together ten years ago, in high school, we gave each other a list of films that we wanted the other to see. He gave me a list of Kubrick, Tarantino… quite serious stuff. I just told him: watch all the James Bond films! You have to watch them all!”
