It turns out I’m not alone in being obsessed with Ben Whishaw’s incarnation of Q. Plenty of queer Bond fans have taken the lovable nerd to their hearts since he first appeared on screen in Skyfall. But does that mean the character himself is queer? And what would it mean if he was to come out in No Time To Die?

Skyfall, Odeon Greenwich, 2012, 11 years old. Pretty certain I was into girls given a few months ago I’d seen Anne Hathaway in Dark Knight Rises. National Gallery scene happens. That hair. Those eyes. F*ck, I’m gay. Cue 3 years of repression before outing bisexuality to world.

@hayhoenstuff on Twitter

When I posted on Twitter that I was planning to write an article about Ben Whishaw’s Q I didn't expect to receive in response a whole coming out story, impressively packed into one tweet. Of course, as soon as I read it I wanted to know more. So I asked Oliver about how this particular scene in Skyfall had such a life-changing impact on him.

Looking back now, as an out and proud 18 year old, Oliver told me that seeing Q made him think he was gay “for about a year”. He “didn’t know being bisexual was a thing” and it was another couple of years before he came out as bisexual, after finding “a label I liked”.

I’m a generation older than Oliver. I turned thirty the year Skyfall was released and I had already been out as a gay man for four years. I came out a lot later in life than Oliver did. In part, this is a generational difference. I’m immensely gladdened that many younger people feel confident enough coming out rather than keep putting it off like I did. If I had been born a couple of decades later, like Oliver, maybe I would have come out a lot sooner. Who knows? One thing I can be sure of though is that, if I had been 11 years old when I saw Ben Whishaw as Q, it would have definitely confirmed for me that I was attracted to men.

I’ve been stalking Whishaw (through a TV and cinema screen only, honest) for the better part of two decades, well before he played Q in my favourite film franchise. I first saw him in a short film which I accidentally caught when I had videoed something else (remember the joys of programming VCRs?) on Channel 4, in the early 2000s. In Baby (2001), a twenty year old Whishaw plays a socially-awkward young man being bombarded with sexualised images, both in the media and real life. Much of the film takes place around a swimming pool and his gaze takes in both men and women. It’s a mostly wordless piece about growing up and finding out what you’re into. It had a profound effect on me, even though I was pretty sure I was mostly drawn to men rather than women. What made it profound was Whishaw, who presented a figure that it was effortless to project myself onto.

Little did I know then, but Whishaw was going through a similar experience to me at this point in his life. He came out as gay to his family some years before Skyfall’s release. And although he entered into a civil partnership in 2012, Whishaw himself didn’t come out publicly as gay until 2014. More recently, he has spoken about his experiences of having to hide who he was, even from his family: “There was a moment in my early 20s when I did not feel very good about myself. It was to do with my sexuality and not knowing how to be myself and hating myself.”

While we should always be cautious in drawing parallels between an actor’s own life and their characters, I was always drawn to Whishaw’s performances where his characters were at odds with the world, mostly notably 2006’s Perfume: The Story of a Murderer, which I watched repeatedly. Although he played a character who was not terribly likeable (he murders people in an effort to capture their unique scents, leaving corpses wherever he goes) his otherness appealed to me.

At the risk of making this sound like a fawning love letter (although, what would be wrong with that?) Whishaw can play more than damaged outsiders. In the two films he made with Daniel Craig in 2004, Enduring Love and Layer Cake, he could not be more different (nervy, introspective, repressed in the former and ebullient in the latter). And he’s been passionate in advocating for more gay actors playing straight roles, something he is hardly a stranger to himself. But, for my money, he plays multi-dimensional queer characters better than anyone else. I particularly enjoy his nuanced performance as a gay man mourning his partner and trying to connect with said partner’s mother in Hong Khaou’s delicate drama Lilting (2014).

As Shakespeare’s King Richard II in The Hollow Crown (2012) he brought out the flamboyance and pathos of the character. And as the boyfriend of a murdered MI6 operative in London Spy (2015) he was heartbreaking. Cloud Atlas (2012) deserves a special mention because, not only is it a vastly underrated film, but Whishaw, like all the actors, plays many different characters. Unlike some of the actors though, he play characters with different sexual orientations AND genders. At one point he plays the wife of a character played by Hugh Grant, making it possible to programme this film with Paddington 2 in a very curious Whishaw/Grant double bill.

So where does that leave Whishaw’s interpretation of Q? Should we consider him one of his queer characters?

There’s certainly enough evidence in the films themselves to support it.

For bi Bond expert Ben Williams, “Bond uses Q’s attraction to him in a fairly manipulative way. He definitely flirts with him to get what he wants and you get the sense Q knows this, resents him for it, but can’t help himself.”

For Williams, this is more explicit in his second appearance. “The scene in Spectre where Bond asks Q to cover his tracks in particular feels very much like Bond playing on Q’s attraction to him. Contrast a similar scene in Skyfall where Bond asks for the “breadcrumbs” to be left and it’s a very different vibe. I put this down to Q not being really fully developed as a character in Skyfall. He’s more of a know-it-all boffin, there’s a smugness in him, he openly considers himself more effective than Bond, considers Bond a dinosaur. The attraction isn’t really there. But by Spectre, Q is definitely more obviously a gay character. It was certainly there in Skyfall, but far more subtle.”

I agree with Williams: it’s subtle in Skyfall, but it’s there, albeit coded.

Cutting straight to the subtext, regular Licence to Queer contributor Lotte makes a typically astute observation:

“Major Boothroyd's obituary might have stated that 'he never married'”

It’s an allusion to the euphemism that used to be common in news media when gay men in had died. For example, the phrase appeared in several newspapers when On Her Majesty’s Secret Service director Peter Hunt passed away in 2002.

Justin reminded me that, in his Bond continuation novel Solo, William Boyd recast Q as Quentin Dale, “a young bespectacled man… about twenty-five years old.” Boyd was clearly influenced by Whishaw’s portrayal. Although there’s nothing explicitly flirtatious like in the films, he does flash Bond a “boyish smile”, which Bond doesn’t reciprocate. The novel was released in 2013, between Skyfall and Spectre. Perhaps if it had been released after Spectre Boyd may have pushed the queer frisson between Bond and his quartermaster.

In an essay I recommend to everybody, Claire Hines examines many facets of the new Q, taking as her cue (or Q… sorry/not sorry) Bond’s muttered line of dialogue from Skyfall: “Brave new world…”. She sees this as “a deliberate aside to the film audience about what Q’s demeanour might represent for Bond and the franchise.” These include his queer aspects.

When I first posted on Twitter about the queer appeal of Whishaw’s Q, I suggested that it was due to a combination of factors, including the fact that the actor is a gay man, the character’s stereotypically feminine tastes in tea and pets (“I also have a mortgage and two cats to feed”) and the palpable sexual tension he has with Bond on screen. Claire Hines concurred that all of these things were part of the picture. But one thing I hadn’t considered in any detail until I read her essay was their relative ages. Hines observes that Q being younger than Bond but closer to his age helps to open up more possibilities than with previous Qs, who were always much older, or played as such.

I would argue that a romantic or sexual relationship between older Q and younger Bond has never entirely been off the table. So-called ‘May-December’ romances are generally thought to be more common between same sex couples, although that doesn’t mean they are any less frowned upon by some. Substantial age gaps between gay men is a particularly “complex” phenomenon according to Adam Bloodworth, but one with a long precedent. He cites the example of Oscar Wilde, who was in his early forties when he defended his relationship with Lord Alfred Douglas, aged 24 at the time of Wilde’s famous trial, by framing their relationship as one of an older man with “intellect” and a younger man with the “joy, hope and glamour of life before him”. This could be applied to Desmond Llewellyn-era Q quite easily. But with Ben Whishaw, the dynamic is reversed: the younger Q is the intellectual and the older Bond is the one who lives a glamorous life. Hines finds the relationship between new Q and 007 to be “gently antagonistic” but there is also a“playful, teasing quality” and “perhaps even a new sexual undercurrent.” Hines reads Q’s pause between ‘a small…’ and ‘prick’ when Q injects Bond with the smartblood in Spectre as “sexually suggestive”. And Bond’s leaving Q a bottle of chilled Champagne when he steals the Aston Martin is a “playful flirtation”.

It’s not a stretch to see this as a parallel to Bond’s now-customary flirtations with Moneypenny. Indeed, the Q/Champagne reveal comes immediately after Moneypenny finds a gift box on her desk, left by Bond. The juxtaposition is irresistible.

Elizabeth Nielsen observes that the only reason Moneypenny turns up to shave Bond in his Macau hotel room in Skyfall is that (according to Moneypenny), Q is afraid of flying. In their fantastic essay, “A Bloody Big Ship: Queering James Bond and the Rise of 00Q.” Nielsen tells many of us what we want to hear:

“Since [Moneypenny’s] assistance seems to consist of shaving him with a straight razor and a great deal of sexual tension and then providing him with some attractive yet underutilized backup up at the casino, the possibility of Q filling these roles instead is an intriguing idea.”

So intriguing is the idea of Q and 007 being paired up that quick search of ‘00Q’ returns hundreds of stories, even whole novellas, the best of which do an impressive job of emulating Fleming’s style and turn of phrase. Just be cautious about searching for artwork if you’re on any device other than your own and not in your own home - much of it is NSFW!

A common thread of the stories and art work (trust me on this… I’ve done extensive, er, research) is Q being presented as the ‘passive’ character in the relationship (and bedroom), perhaps because of Whishaw’s unconventional masculinity and Craig’s hypermasculine physical presence.

Many of the fan works return Bond and Q to their first meeting in the National Gallery. Clearly, Oliver (above) was not the only one to feel the impact of this scene. For Nielsen, the scene is blatantly intended to be a hook-up because it’s a public space. I would argue that it could also be read as a meet-cute, straight out of a romantic comedy. Personally, it’s always recalled to me mind the sexually charged, antagonistic meetings you find in screwball comedies, such as Bringing Up Baby where Cary Grant encounters Katharine Hepburn for the first time on a golf course and they proceed to talk at crossed-purposes about balls. [Incidentally, Bringing Up Baby is crammed with innuendo and even uses a knowingly-coded use of the word ‘gay’]

I would argue that the National Gallery scene in Skyfall, with its coded exchange about the Turner painting, also carries connotations of gay cruising, something Bond has considerable form with (explored in my queer re-views of The Living Daylights and From Russia, With Love).

From start to end, the scene is sexually charged: will they/won’t they?

And it’s not just Whishaw who is responsible for the sexual tension. It’s right there in the screenplay. Let’s not forget that Skyfall was co-written by a gay man, John Logan.

After the exchange about the painting, the stage directions point out that “Q rivets Bond”, not the other way around. Bond is impressed by Q’s “intensity”. Q then presents Bond with an image of himself in his pyjamas before moving on to talking about pulling triggers. Bond takes the bait, flirtatiously linking the pulling of triggers back to Q in his pyjamas.

Is this subtle?

Well, perhaps it is, for those not in the know.

Ben Williams, again:

“There is still some ambiguity - can’t have the red-blooded homophobes getting the idea there’s a homoerotic subtext.”

Williams identifies Whishaw’s Q as gay here, but there are other possibilites. Other fans identify him as bi, or pan, or somewhere on the asexual spectrum. Perhaps then, it’s best that we will almost certainly never find out for sure. Although in a recent interview Whishaw himself has hinted that we will have “more insight into his private life” in No Time To Die, I wouldn’t hold out much hope of Q being identified explicitly as queer. At best, we might get a glimpse of something in his flat which leads us to join dots with the fragmentary intelligence we’ve already been given in Skyfall and Spectre. We could, of course, accuse the filmmakers of intentionally queer-baiting, the still common phenomenon of presenting a character that is coded as queer but never explicitly identified as such, for fear of losing the ‘phobes in the audience and sacrificing box office.

It’s hard to be cynical though, when a fellow Bond fan tells you that a single scene changed their whole life. Oliver himself says, “I owe this franchise quite a lot”.

Williams ends on a hopeful note, succinctly summing up how I feel about the character opening up possibilities for queer audiences:

“Perhaps “Q” doesn’t have to stand for “quartermaster” anymore.”

However, Q is presented in No Time To Die, I’m sure I will be as riveted by him as Bond is. And I know I won’t be the only one.

A very big thank you to everyone who has contributed their views to this piece, either by sending me their own views or by directing me to the writings of others. You can read the original Twitter discussion here: https://twitter.com/LicenceToQueer/status/1326978971142139904

If I have misrepresented anyone’s views or used incorrect pronouns please get in touch.

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