This graphic came across my Facebook feed just this morning. It’s about the rerelease of Goldeneye…a James Bond movie starring Pierce Brosnan, who I always thought made an excellent Bond, though I didn’t watch the movie. I haven’t watched any James Bond movies after the series jumped the shark with the addition of the Sheriff Claude Pepper and Jaws characters. Roger Moore was another excellent Bond though. I’ve always thought his Bond movies could have done with a little (a Lot) less camp. Anyway…friends and readers of this life blog can probably see which part of it caught my attention right away.

No stream rises higher than its source…as Frank Lloyd Wright once said. If you’re wondering why Fleming just had to specify hetrosexuals in that passage, you have not taken a good look at the man or his most famous character.

“Fleming himself had a deeply unpleasant attitude to women,” writes David Sexton in this 2015 article in The Standard, titled It’s no surprise James Bond is a misogynist when you meet his creator. And as usual, scratch a misogynist, find a homophobe…

[Pussy] lay in the crook of Bond’s arm and looked up at him. She said, not in a gangster’s voice, or a lesbian’s, but in a girl’s voice, “Will you write to me in Sing Sing?” Bond looked down into her deep violet eyes that were no longer hard, imperious. He bent and kissed them lightly. He said, “They told me you only liked women.” She said, “I never met a man before.” His mouth came down ruthlessly on hers.

-Vito Russo, The Celluloid Closet.

This also works for gay men, as I discovered when some straight classmates dragged me to see The Opening Of Misty Beethoven, which claimed to be a porn/comedy. In it, a call girl is selected by a pornographer to become his magazine’s New Girl of The Season. But to cinch that title she has to go through a series of sexual challenges. And I’m sitting in this theater watching one sex scene after another after another after another, including the obligatory lesbian sex scene, and I’m trying to figure out if pornography really is that boring after all or was it just I’m a gay guy with zero interest in sex with women, when her final most challenging challenge is to cure a gay man of his homosexuality. Which of course she does because this is straight male fantasy and there is no such thing as bisexuality.

Back when Goldfinger came to the theaters I decided to pick up a copy of the paperback. The paperbacks of Fleming’s James Bond novels were everywhere then, even in the grocery store checkout lane racks along with the gossip magazines and tabloids. Back then the secret agent phase of kid culture was in full swing, and I had the James Bond Secret Agent Briefcase and a Man From U.N.C.L.E. pistol-rifle-combination-submachine-gun (it took your usual cap rolls) and several secret agent toys that would probably give adults kittens today if they were sold to kids, like the transistor radio that converted at the touch of a spring loaded button into a rifle, and a pocket knife that likewise became a pistol. By then I was already a voracious reader, escaping into the world of books whenever the world outside my bedroom became too much, and scanned the paperback bookshelves constantly for new material.  I read westerns by Louis L’amour, science-fiction by Arthur C. Clarke, Ray Bradbury and Hal Clement, the Lensmen series by E.E. Smith. I read the Arthur Conan Doyle Sherlock Holmes stories, mysteries by Earl Derr Biggers and Robert L. Fish. I read the novels of Arthur Healy. But the only cold war secret agent stories I could get into were the ones by Alistair Maclean. His stories really drew you in and kept you hooked. I tried to read Goldfinger and could not get past the first few pages. I scanned a few more, gave up and put it back. It was probably just as well.

Some years later I picked up a Raymond Chandler book whilst browsing the racks at a small local bookstore/newsstand (are there still any of these left?), because I’d heard he was the gold standard in hard boiled detective novels. It was The Big Sleep. Randomly I opened it up and began reading…

“Don’t kid me, son. The fag gave you one. You’ve got a nice clean manly little room in there. He shooed you out and locked it up when he had lady visitors. He was like Caesar, a husband to women and a wife to men. Think I can’t figure people like him and you out?”

I still held his automatic more or less pointed at him, but he swung on me just the same. It caught me flush on the chin. I backstepped fast enough to keep from falling, but I took plenty of the punch. It was meant to be a hard one, but a pansy has no iron in his bones, whatever he looks like.

…and then I put it back.

Yes, that really happened. I just flipped open the book and the first thing I read is this crap. 

It’s a better world for the gay and lesbian readers now, though sometimes it makes me ache for the world I could have had growing up, instead of the one I got tossed into where a pansy has no iron in his bones. There is so much more for us to read now…adventures, mysteries, stories where we are real people in them and not cheapshit bar stool stereotypes.

Here are some young adult books on my To Be Read stack, for the young adult I was once, who had to grow up in a world where young hearts like mine had to build walls around around ourselves to survive. It did its job on me…I never found a boyfriend to have and hold…but I have seen it destroy so many others, so runts like Fleming and Chandler could feel good about themselves.