The Gay Man With The Golden Gun

Image copyright © 2020 BBC, for the 2020 radio adaptation produced by Rosalind Ayres and directed by Martin Jarvis

Returning to the Bond novels as an adult, I am struck by how much of an influence these, perhaps even more than the films, had on my teenage self. If anything, they invite queer readings as readily as Scaramanga inviting 007 to join him for a long weekend.

It was while listening to the 2020 dramatised-for-BBC Radio 4 adaptation of Fleming’s The Man With The Golden Gun that its unapologetic queerness sent me rushing back to the novel to double-check it was faithful to the original text.

The Man With The Golden Gun is not most people’s favourite 007 novel. Fleming himself passed away before he could redraft it. Kingsley Amis bravely grasped the baton and, a few years later, would write his own impressive Bond novel, albeit under the pen-name of ‘Robert Markham’. Locations and plot elements from earlier books are recycled. Most irksome to some critics is the apparent stupidity of arch-villain Francisco Scaramanga. Not only does he take two CIA agents onto his payroll but he admits Bond into his closest circle and keeps him there even when it’s screamingly obvious to everyone but Scaramanga that his new employee is not who he claims he is.

But can Scaramanga’s blindness towards Bond be explained in some other way besides him not being the world’s brightest button?

Well, they do say that love is blind.

The novel opens shockingly, with Bond, brainwashed by the KGB, attempting to assassinate M. With 007’s future uncertain, M coldly decides to send him off on a likely suicide mission: to kill Francisco ‘Pistols’ Scaramanga. As M reads Scaramanga’s dossier he learns (as do we) all about his childhood trauma which includes taking revenge on behalf of a cruelly-treated elephant, a detail that made it into the 1974 film. The “Freudian thesis” about Scaramanga’s gun being “either a substitute of compensation” for the “male organ” also translated to the screen, with Christopher Lee tracing the tip of his ‘gun’ all over Maud Adams’s cleavage and lips. What is omitted in the movie, either intentionally or not, is the idea that Scaramanga has “possible homosexual tendencies.” Bizarrely, we are told in the novel that there is a “popular theory that a man who cannot whistle has homosexual tendencies” and Scaramanga cannot whistle. As if to prove the theory correct, M “unconsciously” whistles to himself, although when he realises what he’s done “he uttered an impatient “tchah!””, which can either be interpreted as M chastising himself for testing a distinctly unscientific theory or him feeling reassured that, according to popular theory, he’s very much a ‘red-blooded male’.

In the book, the dossier’s author, is identified as ‘C.C.’, who we are told is a “former Professor of History of Oxford” against whom M holds “prejudices” because of the way he dresses, his haircut and his “way of life”. Even so, M trusts the accuracy of the information he is reading, which he does “with relish”. It ‘takes one to know one’ perhaps. Are we therefore invited to conclude that ‘C.C.’ is correct and Scaramanga is homosexual?

The producers of the 2020 radio drama omitted much of Scaramanga’s back story, including the dubious whistling. Were they worried it would be taken as homophobic or was it just cut for time? Or maybe it was a wise artistic choice: Scaramanga was already queer enough without the scene. They didn’t want to hit the audience over the head with it. Intriguingly, they did cast an actor to play Scaramanga who identifies as a gay man - Cuban-American star Guillermo Diaz. Of course, gay men can play straight men, but as the producers sensitively and sensibly cast someone with similar ethnic origins (Scaramanga has lived most of his life in America and Cuba, like Diaz), perhaps they did the same with regards to sexual orientation. Diaz is superb in the role and he has, to my ears at least, a warmer-than-usual rapport with Toby Stephens’ Bond than villains who have come before. 

Even without his full back story, the Scaramanga of the novel (and radio drama) behaves in illogical ways, employing Bond as his arranger/bodyguard/personal secretary at their first meeting. He still trusts Bond even when he learns from his KGB associate that 007 is in the area. All he would need to do is ask the KGB for a photo or a physical description of Bond and he would realise his right-hand-man is working against him. But he doesn’t. He doesn’t even get that suspicious when he catches Bond and Mary Goodnight, who he knows works in local government, having a conspicuously clandestine tete-a-tete in the middle of the night, right on his property.

Some have said this crucial character ‘flaw’ would have been resolved with further redrafting of the novel. But what if it’s not a flaw and Scaramanga is besotted with Bond? Finally, he has found someone who is his equal and, when the little voice inside his head tells him this other expert marksman shouldn’t be trusted, another - louder - voice tells it to pipe down.

Although the film of Licence To Kill draws on many of the hitherto unused elements from Fleming (Leiter’s maiming from the novel of Live And Let Die, the sadistic whipping and character of Milton Krest from short story The Hildebrandt Rarity), the film’s villain, Sanchez, is most comparable with Fleming’s Scaramanga. Sanchez possesses the same ‘flaw’, being very clearly drawn to Bond in more than a professional capacity.

For his part, Bond agonises over killing Scaramanga in cold-blood, psyching himself up by bringing up all the murderous indignities Scaramanga has committed on his fellow agents. In the end, Scaramanga helps him out by reaching for a hidden weapon, shooting Bond in the stomach, absolving Bond of any guilt at unloading his own pistol into the other man. What was that “Freudian thesis” again?

Even after The Man With The Golden Gun is gunned down, the ending of the novel rips any hope of heteronormativity reasserting itself to shreds. Mary Goodnight tries to tempt Bond into recuperating from his wounds at her house, promising to “cook and sew buttons on for you”. Fleming is uncompromising in his views, forgetting to even frame them as Bond’s. Instead, he tells the audience directly:

Of all the doom-fraught graffiti a woman can write on the wall, those are the most insidious, the most deadly.

And as if the writing on the wall wasn’t clear enough, in the final paragraph of his final novel, Fleming makes it unequivocal:

He knew, deep down, that love from Mary Goodnight, or from any other woman, was not enough for him. It would be like taking ‘a room with a view’. For James Bond, the same view would always pall.

If we are to take it literally, the analogy with ‘viewing’ is revealing. At least in the past Bond has taken pleasure in looking at women, even when they were disposable pleasures. Now he can’t even stand to look at them.

As a gay teenager reading these lines for the first time, I found them to be a revelation: like James Bond, no woman would ever be enough. Maybe I would fall in love with a man instead. Golden gun optional.