Play it again, queer Bond fans
How many of the Bond songs strike a queer chord? The answer, when I asked Licence To Queer readers, turned out to be ‘quite a few’! Here I reveal my own favourites alongside your top selections.
There is a common misconception that because something is camp that automatically makes it ‘queer’, but it’s simply not the case. Technically, for something to be queer it needs to upset heteronormativity, the idea that the only normal and natural relationship is between one (cisgendered) man and one (cisgendered) woman. So for example, one of the least queer Bond songs, to my ears, is From Russia With Love. It’s a pretty ‘straight’ song, despite being written by Lional Bart, a gay man. The lyrics tell a fairly banal story of a man pining to return from a trip aboard to be back in the arms of his “young bride”. Although, having said that, the man does return “much wiser” than he did before he left, begging the question: what forbidden knowledge did he obtain while out of the country? Maybe not so heteronormative after all.
Just because something’s written by a queer person, that doesn’t by default make it queer, although it probably helps. Writing’s On The Wall, written and performed by Sam Smith (who identified as gay at the time of Spectre’s release and has come out as non-binary since) sounds like a pretty straightforward ‘straight’ love story to me. You could argue that the song speaks of a universal experience, but, when seen in the context of the film, the unusually literal opening title imagery narrows down the possibilities: it’s all about Bond’s history that we’ve witnessed in the preceding three films and flashes forward to his romantic connection with Madeleine Swann.
Daniel Tomlinson-Gray, co-founder of LGBTEd, disagrees. He tells me he, as a gay man, he relates to Smith’s lyrics. When Smith sings that they are struggling to breathe and “suffocating” this is, according to Daniel, a queer person wanting to ‘feel love’ while ‘being scared of consequences’.
Although there are commonalities, every queer person’s experience is different. And maybe if that song had been released in the period I was still in the closet I would have related it to more.
I certainly felt like I was suffocating in the closet when Tomorrow Never Dies came out in 1997. Even so, I am inclined to put Surrender, the deliriously fun closing title song from Tomorrow Never Dies in the ‘not queer but camp’, er, camp. It’s great for vamping around the kitchen to on a saturday night and is performed by lesbian k.d. Lang. But this is mostly because of David Arnold’s dirty brass than Don Black’s lyrics. You are, of course, welcome to disagree (and leave your comments - politely - at the bottom of this page).
But without any further ado, here are four Bond songs that I consider to be unambiguously, brilliantly queer.
After you’ve read what I chose, you will find illuminating (and occasionally scandalous) insights into other queer Bond songs courtesy of Licence To Queer readers.
Diamonds Are Forever
A camp classic for sure, dripping with over-the-top phallic imagery, equal parts hilarious and obscene. But what makes it queer?
A somewhat coy Don Black claims he wrote the lyrics entirely about a diamond, a position that becomes untenable when you get to the verse containing the unambiguous imperative to “touch it, stroke it and undress it”. Composer John Barry was less prudish, revealing in a 1997 documentary that he directed Shirley Bassey, who was struggling to find the meaning in the lyrics, to sing it as if the diamond was a metaphor for a penis.
Not all queer people are terribly fond of penises of course. But what we do have in common is a requirement, in many social situations, to use coded language to speak about sex and relationships. That’s the crux of the song’s queerness: a predilection for innuendo because talking openly about such things is not possible.
Gay singer David McAlmont’s sinuous take on the song for David Arnold’s Shaken And Stirred project not only corroborates Barry’s ‘it’s a thinly-veiled metaphor’ story but turns it into a queer anthem with a video that’s a paean to queer self-empowerment.
My other favourite cover version, by the Arctic Monkeys, is less overtly sexualised, but almost as queer. Barry’s fellow Yorkshireman Alex Turner bravely refuses to straighten out the lyrics, an annoying tendency among many male artists when they take on a song about loving men written for straight women to sing. It’s somewhat thrilling and quite amusing to hear “unlike men the diamonds linger” sung in lugubrious Sheffeldian tones.
You Know My Name
Casino Royale’s song is the most ostensibly ‘masc’ and least camp entry in the whole Bond music canon. But it’s concealing a secret: it’s really a sensitive exploration of what it means to find the strength to go on living a lie while presenting a respectable face to the world. This is a dark-night-of-the-soul searcher of a song. Co-written by score composer David Arnold with singer Chris Cornell, it encapsulates the identity-crisis dilemma of the film itself, right from the opening line:
If you take a life do you know what you'll give?
It arrives just seconds after the pre-credits sequence in which Bond has cold-bloodedly assassinated a ‘bent’ member of his own organisation. The rest of the song presents no easy answers to this question, which is rhetorical. It’s a rumination, going around and around in Bond’s head. Unusually, the lyrics are written in both the second and first person. The ‘you’ is Bond himself, talking to himself. A reflection in a sixth Martini that he’ll regret in the morning.
At the beginning of the chorus, Bond has a flash of insight:
Arm yourself because no-one else here will save you
He will always be alone, the lesson he learns the hard way through the course of the film. Bond is marked by his profession, Cain-like, as a murderer but he’s also a man apart from society by choice, a man who “must pretend” to be a “harder” man than he really is. He tells himself to “hide his hand” and repress his feelings. And for what? A “prize” that will “never fulfil” him. In a heteronormative world, many queer people feel there is no way to ‘win’ at life, to be ‘complete’ (spouse, kids, etc). Similarly, Bond cannot see a way to live that will ever make him truly happy. One sympathises.
GoldenEye
The lyrics for this title song are some of the most suggestive since Diamonds Are Forever. It’s unclear how much of the film’s story songwriters Bono and The Edge (half of U2) were familiar with when they wrote the song but it externalises Trevelyan’s repressed, bitter, recriminatory, sexually frustrated thoughts about Bond to perfection:
Goldeneye, I found his weakness. Goldeneye, he'll do what I please
Goldeneye, no time for sweetness. But a bitter kiss will bring him to his knees.
Yes, it’s Trevelyan’s power fantasy, not Xenia’s. Most people assume, perhaps because its delivered so deliciously by gay icon Tina Turner, that it’s from a female persona. But although the song’s ‘she’ refers to “other girls” in the second verse, it’s clearly not Xenia talking; this is Trevelyan’s inner monologue, his feminine side. Despite the reference to a “golden honeytrap” (or ‘gold and honey trap’ in some versions of the lyrics), it’s a bad fit for Xenia for who “revenge” isn’t a “kiss”. It’s Trevelyan who was “left behind” by Bond (at least in his addled mind) and who now has Bond in his “sights” with his “GoldenEye”. Well, quite.
Everything or Nothing
The lyrics to the title song from the 2003 video game are not just queer but very, very thirsty.
According to singer Mya, who co-wrote the song with Randy Bugnitz and record executive Ron Fair, the meanings of the phrase ‘everything or nothing’ are practically “infinite” so she squeezed in as many different romantic cliches and analogies as she could. There’s everything from Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet (“What’s a rose / Without a name?”) to an allusion to swingers’ parties (“Can’t drive a car without the keys / Give me the bowl cause a bite’s just a tease”).
The most obviously queer, or at least gay, reference comes near the end of the chorus
What good's the bottom without the top
And until I get it all, no, I'm not gonna stop, so
You can take that any number of ways (so to speak), but it sounds like a rather elementary sex education lesson to me. Ben Williams, of MI6-HQ fame agrees, calling it a “great line”.
More broadly queer is the early verse that declares (presumably about Bond himself):
He thought he knew who love was
'Till he fell in the arms of another extreme
What does Mya mean by an ‘extreme’? The possibilities are endless.
The whole song pulses with a queer energy, particularly in the techno version, a music genre with its roots in gay subcultures of the 1970s. There are three versions of Everything or Nothing: a synth-heavy version played over the opening titles, a jazz arrangement used diegetically in a New Orleans-set level of the game (where a digitised Mya herself appears singing it) and a techno version. It’s telling that Mya wrote the lyrics to the techno version before recording the others. If we ever get a scene in a Bond film set in a LGBTQ+ club I expect this song to be playing in the background.
Readers’ selections
Some of you will have read this far thinking the whole time: ‘when will he get to The Man With The Golden Gun?’. Lulu’s penis-obsessed powerhouse was a verrrrrry popular selection with Licence To Queer readers (I’m not sure what that says about me or my readers). Author of Quantum of Silliness Robbie Sims (aka @TheTchaikovsky) commented “Who will be bang…? We shall see.” Who indeed?! Or, dare I say, what? Maarten Vande Wiele asserted that the lyrics were “very naughty” and the presence of gay icon Lulu helped. Christopher Eeles went as delaring it the final word on the subject of queer Bond songs. For him, merely the opening lines were ‘all you need’. But is being a borderline-unhealthy fan of phalluses necessarily make something queer? Surely some ‘straight’ people are similarly besotted (and I include both straight women AND boys who are very proud of their toys in this). Retro horror aficionados Octoberpod suggest it fulfils the queer criteria by involving elements of kink, which is a valid argument. They also detected queer vibes in Make It Last All Night, used as source music in the pool scene in For Your Eyes Only. They described it as a “disco era key party anthem”. Perhaps it could go on the ‘Pop your keys in the bowl’ playlist, right after Everything of Nothing. Incidentally, I advise everyone to NOT look up the lyrics to this ode to filth. All right, I’ll save you the bother. They’re: here. NSFW.
Paul Anderson was even more upfront about sexual matters when he picked The World Is Not Enough, mostly because the lines "I feel safe I feel scared / I feel ready yet unprepared" read (according to Paul) ‘like your first time bottoming with no idea’. Paul says he has yet to share this interpretation with Garbage lead singer Shirley Manson but he has met her several times in his work as a nightclub manager. We look forward to finding out what she thinks.
Rather more romantically-minded was Joseph Buckle, who took me by surprise by choosing Moonraker. He spotlighted ‘the rich yearning of the lyrics which are simultaneously hopeful and hopeless. The dream filled lyrics about a need for a somewhat unfinished life to be completed by someone who is, by the end of the song, still a kiss away. It’s an song full of longing which brings to mind potential love that needs to be sought out and is seemingly hidden away, waiting for discovery.’ What a poignant analysis.
Licence To Queer supporter Michael Gillespie alerted me to the fact that “when Martin Fry covered Thunderball he noted how homoerotic it is: it’s a man watching a man in adoration.” An excellent insight. And long-time reader Jon (aka @NotPerfectedYet) was typically erudite in identifying Goldfinger as queer because it’s about “the love of material possession over a person”. It certainly fits the definition.
All three of the Bassey title songs were strong contenders for From Colombia With Love, although they also thought Thunderball’s Mr Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (Bassey or Warwick versions) hinted at more than just liaisons with “damoiselles”. Who or what was the “danger” that filled Bond’s past?
Adam (aka @lowbellstudio) claims to be better at pictures than words. His pictures ARE incredible, but I also love his words about All Time High from Octopussy:
“I think the lyrics play to the idea of romantic/sexual discovery very deliberately. But considering the queer angle I like the positivity it paints that discovery with (“my heart was telling me lies, for you they're true”) while still acknowledging that maybe there's a struggle for acceptance (‘we'll take on the world and wait’).”
Krissy Myers only had eyes (and ears) for For Your Eyes Only and took the time to explore their feelings about the song:
“Maybe I'm an open book because I know you're mine,
But you won't need to read between the lines.
“Aside from the obvious benefit of lacking any kind of gendered pronouns, the eponymous theme for For Your Eyes Only represents a key motif that can be found throughout the film: vulnerability and intimacy.
“FYEO marks a lot of firsts for the Bond franchise: it’s the first film that properly acknowledges the death of Tracy Bond - as Roger Moore’s 007 visits his wife’s grave, only to be confronted, once again by the man responsible for her death - Blofeld. It’s the first time you see a performer of a Bond theme, Sheena Easton, feature prominently in the opening credit sequence (a rarity in films generally). It’s the first and only Bond film to feature an openly transgender actress, Caroline Cossey.
“The lyrics of Bill Conti’s theme touch upon a desire for any relationship - LGBT+ relationships in particular - the need to feel safe, secure and accepted. Not only within the relationship itself, but in its perception from others. A lot of LGBT+ relationships often have added challenges of acceptance, legally and interpersonally. Think of the plight of same-gender marriages and unions being recognised, someone coming out as trans or nonbinary to a partner, or managing the dynamics of a relationship between someone who is monosexual and bisexual+. For Your Eyes Only is a song about someone that has achieved the ultimate goal for queer relationships: to be with someone with whom one can be an open book. Someone who has found a love that allows them to love openly, intimately and with freedom. A partnership where, above all other things, love wins.”
Finally, Lotte movingly unpacked the connection between queer identity and You Only Live Twice.
“There is the whole 'what could've been' aspect of the song. The idea of a secret liaison or tryst. If you add in the 'danger' and 'paying the price' aspect then of course it could with someone of the same sex.
“[I relate to] the whole two lives aspect. Living your normal dull life, while dreaming of getting to live your other life as yourself. Still lots of danger, and definitely a price to pay.
“I think it's a closet song. Whether straight, gay, bi, pan, cis, or trans, it's about thinking about what it could be like on the other side. Being brave enough to take the opportunity and living your dreams.”
