MARK SIMPSON.com

The new blond Bond has a surprising amount in common with the brunette original – precisely for the reasons he’s been bashed, says Mark Simpson

(Out magazine, November, 2006)

BOND IS BLOND! He’s smooth! He works out! He doesn’t have any eyebrows! He kissed a guy!

Ever since English actor Daniel Craig was cast last year as the U.K.’s most famous spy—and the face of the world’s most successful, longest-running blockbuster brand—the British popular press and Bond fanboys have been up in arms, shrieking about his unsuitability for the role.

They complain about all sorts of supposed failings, including that he required coaching to handle a gun and play poker, and that he snogged another male on film (as Francis Bacon’s lover in Love Is the Devil and also in Infamous). Apparently, you see, he’s “not manly enough� to play cinema’s most famous action hero. Essentially, they’ve got their off-white tighty whities in a twist because Bond has gone metrosexual.

However, there is something that needs to be pointed out here, like the pleasing bulge of a Walther PKK semiautomatic in a Savile Row trouser pocket: The early Bond movies were thrillingly perverse, shockingly sexy, and not a little queer. This will traumatize millions, but the original James Bond, by the dingy, stringy-vested, “no sex please it’s bath night� standards of early 1960s Britain was something of a metrosexual, albeit a latent one (he’s a secret agent, after all).

Watching again the very first Bond film, Dr. No—released 44 years ago and played a zillion times on TV and cable but nevertheless something of a revelation—I’m struck by a number of things about the original Mr. Bond, supposedly the gold standard of authentic masculinity and virility in an increasingly sissified world:

(1) His fake tan
(2) His full, glossy, pink lips, much more luscious than Ursula Andress’s (or even Tom’s in the Missy Impossible franchise)
(3) His worked-out body (Connery represented Scotland in the Mr. Universe contest in 1953.)
(4) His fine tailoring, careful grooming, and manicured hands
(5) His fetish for gadgets and gizmos
(6) His taste for fussy cocktails (shaken, not stirred)
(7) His wigs (Connery went bald in his early 20s.)
(8) His overacting in the famous big-hairy-spider-in-bed scene….

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