Pussy Galore is the queer icon that made me love James Bond – Honor Blackman brought her to life
“They are written for warm-blooded heterosexuals,” wrote Ian Fleming of his James Bond novels in his essay How To Write A Thriller.
Fleming’s disdain for homosexuals was apparent not only in his essays, but in the Bond novels themselves. In Goldfinger (1959), he refers to homosexuals as “a herd of unhappy sexual misfits – barren and full of frustrations”. Bond, he wrote, was “sorry for them, but he had no time for them.”
Fast-forward to the present day and I’m one of a great number of LGBT Bond obsessives wondering why I adore Fleming’s stories so much.
On the face of it, I shouldn’t identify with the stories at all. Bond is the pinnacle of toxic masculinity, an endless womaniser prone to violence.
Yet one narrative in Fleming’s novels that resonated with me deeply from a young age: the outrageously-named Pussy Galore, played by Honor Blackman in the film version of Goldfinger (1964). Blackman, who gained a wide fanbase playing crimefighter Cathy Gale in the TV series The Avengers, passed away aged 94 on Monday.
Resplendent in fine tailoring, Pussy Galore was different to other Bond girls. She was tough and assertive and responded to Bond’s frivolity with calm authority. The leader of an all-female aviator team called Pussy Galore’s Flying Circus, she was adored by her obedient crew. Intelligent and strong, Galore led the way for a gamut of other Bond girls who refused passive femininity: Grace Jones’s May Day in A View To A Kill (1985), Famke Janssen’s Xenia Onatopp in Goldeneye (1995).
Most importantly, Galore’s sexual autonomy frustrated Bond. While other Bond girls – still, to this day – mostly act like damsels in distress, Galore spends the majority of Goldfinger warding off Bond’s advances. She alludes to sex but doesn’t offer it, provoking Bond with her flirtatiousness but never relinquishing control.
Blackman brought her own addictive playfulness to the role. With razor-sharp cheekbones and a deep voice, she had a formidable presence. Delivering her lines with an aristocratic accent and the potency of poison darts, she commanded attention in a room.
Yet for me, perhaps the most significant aspect of Galore was a line that instigated a global debate about queerness. In her establishing scene where she greets Bond as he comes around after being tranquilised aboard Auric Goldfinger’s private jet, Galore warns the spy against making sexual approaches towards her. She tells him: “You can turn off the charm. I’m immune.”
The line would go on to be poured over by academics and critics, its implicit suggestion that Galore isn’t sexually attracted to men. Galore became an emblem of queerness in a period when homosexuality was still illegal in Britain (the Sexual Offences Act would decriminalise homosexual acts between people in private in 1967).
Given how Goldfinger established a queer subtext in an era that broadly condemned homosexuality, the comparative lack of LGBT representation in the more recent Bond films seems shocking.
Fleming hadn’t intended to be so progressive; in fact, he said in a private letter that Galore’s lesbianism was temporary, that she “only needed the right man to come along”. This man, of course, was Bond, whose mouth came “ruthlessly down on hers” by the end of the book.
Yet this ending is interesting. It suggests that Fleming was terrified by his own queer creation, felt the need to rein in her sexuality by brute force. Ultimately, however, he couldn’t. Fleming unintentionally wrote an intensely powerful queer character, one whose LGBT iconicity transcends the contrived ending he gave her.
Honor Blackman will be remembered as the actor brought Fleming’s uncontainable character to life for people like me, and ensured that,over half a century later, Pussy Galore remains the queer icon of the Bond canon.
