Why queer people love James Bond
When Cameron Scheetz from The A.V. Club emailed me out of the blue to invite me to contribute to a new documentary series he was putting together for Pride Month I jumped at the chance to get involved.
Although I’d only been writing Licence To Queer for a few weeks at the time, the whole project had been in my head for years.
One of the things that had been holding me back all that time was: will anyone be interested in what I have to say?
After all, on the surface of it, James Bond is not the most obvious candidate to be a queer icon. He’s assertively (sometimes aggressively) heterosexual. It might appear to many that the Bond fanbase is exclusively, even intimidatingly, ‘straight’.
But within days of me launching Licence To Queer, I was happily (ecstatically) proven wrong. So many people across the LGBTQ+ spectrum got in touch, either publicly or privately, to tell me what I was writing connected with them on a personal level. I’ve met so many lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans and non-binary Bond fans, not to mention many of our allies. It’s just a shame I’ve not (yet) met most of you in public, lockdown restrictions still determining our daily existences.
Cameron made it clear early on that he was a huge Bond fan himself. In fact, it was his own obsession with Bond that have driven him to develop the whole ‘Why We Love’ project. Each of the four episodes will feature queer people talking about a different genre of pop culture.
When Cameron asked me to be a part of the inaugural ‘action’ episode, I saw it as an opportunity to spread the word even further:
QUEER BOND FANS EXIST.
As I write this, I have only just seen the finished video for the first time. It features queer icons Cameron Esposito, Ira Madison III, Jonica T Gibbs and Karen Tongson. I’m honoured to be in their (virtual) presence.
The Bond community is more diverse than many people realise.
I’ll say it again: QUEER BOND FANS EXIST.
We’re here.
We’re queer.
Some of us prefer a Martini, some of us prefer a beer (but we’re a broad church so don’t form any value judgements please).
