Featured Posts
Licence To Queer covers queer aspects of Bond books, video games and more. Search here for your favourite titles and characters or find content related to particular queer identities (lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, etc).
“Sexuality, gender and James Bond are all very complex subjects…” Breaking binaries with Ben Williams
Bisexual Bond expert Ben Williams and I have been speaking for years behind the scenes, emboldening each other to be more openly queer. After they came out as non-binary, we thought it was about time we tackled The Big Stuff more publicly: gender binaries, putting who we’re attracted to into boxes and, perhaps most profoundly of all, what needs to be going down in our personal lives to make sense of Quantum of Solace.
Look what the cat dragged in: is the world ready for a more feline James Bond?
More than shifting his gender or sexual orientation, surely the boldest way to reinvent Bond would be to make him care for something other than himself. A cat, perhaps? After looking back over 70 years of books and films, I’m convinced the idea has legs (four of them).
Queer re-view: Dr. No
You would think that a film which opens with three men pretending to be blind would alert us to the need to look at things differently. But six decades of straight-washing has obscured quite how queer Bond’s beginnings were - and still are to this day. It’s high time we took the blinkers off: Bond was born this way.
David was featured on German’s biggest TV channel, ZDF, talking about how James Bond provided him with an alternative role model when he was growing up, especially compared with the supposedly hypermasculine action heroes of 70s and 80s cinema.