Spy gay
As a kid, I had only the vaguest notion that my dad was a spy. When I was ten, he told me he worked for the Pentagon, which seemed fine. But then his story changed and he said he worked for the State Department, which later became the Department of Defense. His revolving door of job titles left me with a permanent fog about his occupation and whether or not I could believe him. It was a shadowy thing, this undisclosed secret. It was a family pact, too. According to the “spy family code,” we weren’t supposed to talk about it, ever–whatever ‘it’ was. It’s only now that I realized this fog about my dad’s job was similar to the fog I felt about my sexuality.
I knew intuitively not to talk about the fact that I preferred girls to boys. But when I was called a “lezzie” by a boy on the academy bus, it was really clear: it was awful to be the way I was. My queerness only went further underground. I doubled down on hiding, and stayed that way until college.
In the middle of a women’s studies lecture about female homosexual poets, a student with short spiky hair who wore black Doc Marten boots announced to the class that she was gay. Just like that. It was 1984, and the room went completely silen
Top LGBTQ+ Spy Movies & Series From London Spy to Atomic Blonde
Quantico (2015-2018)
Named after the FBI training center in Virginia, Quantico follows the young FBI recruits training in Virginia. All are hiding a classified and one of them is suspected of being a sleeper terrorist. MI6 officer Harry Doyle (Russell Tovey) joins as part of an exchange program between the Private Intelligence Service and later trains as a CIA recruit at the Farm. (Apple TV, Prime Video, YouTube, Google Play, Disney+)
MOVIES
Ungentle (2022)
Fans of Ben Whishaw (and who isn't?) will also long to check out Ungentle. Huw Lemmey's film short examines the connection between British espionage and male homosexuality, displaying overlaps in their skill sets during mid-20th-century Britain. The film is narrated by a unreal, composite spy figure with narration by Ben Whishaw. (Mubi)
Skyfall (2012)
“There’s a first time for everything,” Raoul Silva (Javier Bardem) sighs. “What makes you deliberate this is my first time?” Bond (Daniel Craig) replies without missing a beat. Bond movies are often racy but Skyfall adds a twist. In the d
By the late 1960s, the East German secret police (the Stasi) started to see Germany’s same-sex attracted subculture as both a threat and an opportunity for intelligence work. Western espionage services had long sought to exploit this subculture, recruiting agents and informants from Berlin's gay bars and cruising locales. After 20 years of run-ins with queer Western agents, Stasi officials began to recruit their hold gay spies, men who they hoped could use their sexuality as a means to assemble new contacts, penetrate Western society, and gather intelligence.
Join us for a speak by Samuel Clowes Huneke, author of States of Liberation: Gay Men between Dictatorship and Democracy in Cold War Germany. He will focus on how both Eastern and Western intelligence agencies sought to recruit gay men because they believed that they were naturally more conspiratorial and would thus create better agents. They also came to see the class-crossing gay subcultures of German cities, especially Berlin, as perfect sites from which to extract data about politics and military matters. Huneke explores previously untapped German archives to capture this surprising story of espionage and emancipation with
The era when gay spies were feared
MI5 has been named the UK's most gay-friendly employer - but it isn't long since same-sex relationships were considered a threat to national security. How did attitudes change?
In 1963 the Sunday Mirror offered its assistance to the Security Service.
"How to spot a possible homo," ran a headline in the paper. Below this, for MI5's benefit, was a list of supposed signifiers of male homosexuality ("a gay little wiggle", "his tie has the latest knot", "an unnaturally strong affection for his mother").
The pretext for this unsolicited advice - which now seems clearly offensive - was the case of John Vassall, a gay civil servant who spied for the Soviets under threat of blackmail. A male lover man, the paper's reporter said, was a de facto security risk: "I wouldn't trust him with my secrets."
Fast forward 53 years and the service tops Stonewall's 2016 list of the 400 best places to labor for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) people. According to the Times, external, more than 80 of its employees involve to an LGBT staff network.