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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).
007 decades of LGBTQ+ history
The Bond books, films and games are more than just cultural artefacts: they comprise a time capsule of seven volatile decades of social and political history - especially LGBTQ+ history. Although the lives of queer people over this period have generally improved, it’s a mistake to see this improvement as universal - or linear. Sometimes putting one foot forward has been swiftly followed by having to take two back. For seventy years, Bond has been there, reflecting and representing this ever-changing world in which we’re living.
Queer re-view: Skyfall
If Dorothy in the The Wizard of Oz is to be believed, there's no place like home. But what if that home is Skyfall? In his 50th anniversary queer odyssey, 00-Dorothy doesn’t just kick back against traditional notions of home and family; along the way he creates a unconventional family to replace the one he lost and blows up his childhood abode with dynamite. Talk about cathartic!
Exemplars of British fortitude
Despite me being British, sport has always bored me to tears. So imagine my surprise when I found myself bawling my eyes out with pride in our sportspeople twice in one day! Perhaps their Bond-like approach to overcoming adversity had something to do with it?
That or the priesthood: Bond’s queer calling
In the world of Bond, religion is often portrayed as being as hollow as a diamond smuggler’s Bible. But questioning an institution does not necessarily preclude believing in it. Queer Christian Kathleen Jowitt uncovers deep connections between religion and 007, revealing that a monk and a hitman might have more in common that we might think.
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.
Things were about to turn nasty?
For many of us, Timothy Dalton’s third Bond film is the most tantalising ‘what if?’ of the franchise. Targeted for a 1992 release, we all know it wasn’t to be. But what isn’t so well known is a TV drama that Dalton made at this time which gives us a glimpse of how a darker, queerer Bond 17 might have turned out had he stayed in the frame.
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.