I don’t know about you, but even in my “love-them-and-leave-them” prime, it never crossed my mind to cruise gay bars to pick up girls. Truth be told, it would’ve struck me as arrogant and anti-social to go to one, only to reject natural overtures from gay men to pick me up.
And, with all due respect to Daniel Craig, I think I would have appeared a far more tantalizing catch. Yet here, as reported in yesterday’s edition of the HuffPost, is how he reminisced about his down-low days:
_________
No Time To Die star Daniel Craig said on a podcast posted this week that queer nightlife has played a large role in his life and has helped him avoid brawls. …
‘I’ve been going to gay bars for as long as I can remember,’ the 53-year-old actor told Bruce Bozzi on the ‘Lunch with Bruce’ podcast. ‘One of the reasons (is) because I don’t get into fights in gay bars that often. … The aggressive dick swinging in hetero bars, I just got very sick of it as a kid because it’s like I don’t want to end up being in a punch-up. And I did. That would happen quite a lot.’
A gay bar ‘would just be a good place to go,’ Craig continued. ‘Everybody was chill. You didn’t really have to sort of state your sexuality. It was OK. And it was a very safe place to be. And I could meet girls there, cause there are a lot of girls there for exactly the same reason I was there. It was an ulterior motive.’
_________
Your first impression might be to think this was an inspired idea for “a kid”. I mean, he’s effectively portraying himself as the fox who figured out a way to hangout in the hen house without anyone, well, being shaken or stirred.
Except that I always thought “girls” went to gay bars to avoid being boorishly and relentlessly hit on by straight men. In fact, I’m reliably informed that straight women go to gay bars to have a good time without having to deal with straight men trying to pick them up.
So how does Craig explain this without “outing himself”, er, as that one prick who was always harassing girls at gay bars? And remember, he wasn’t “Bond, James Bond” back then. But his fellow Brit traveler, Rupert Everett, was the gay it-boy at the time. So I wonder what he thinks of this story …
Not to mention the presumptuousness inherent in Craig projecting his “ulterior motive’ onto them. After all, I doubt any straight woman ever went to a gay bar to avoid fights at straight bars.
Besides, I’ve spoken with enough of them about going to gay bars to gather that the last thing they would want there is some guy giving them that same pick-up vibe they get at straight bars. Again, they might think differently if that guy just happened to be the famous actor who plays James Bond.
That said, am I the only one who thinks the whole point of this story was for Craig to humble brag about being a former badass, bar brawler in real life? Apparently, playing Bond in movies is not enough for him …
Still, he clearly wants to appear evolved; hence the bit about cruising gay bars to pick up chicks, but not those with dicks, mind you. No, he wants you to know he was there to pick up girls without having to beat up boys to do so.
But kudos to Craig for pooh-poohing the woke madness about a woman succeeding him as Bond. For, according to a report in The Guardian on September 21, he echoed my view that it makes far more sense to create an equally compelling character for women to play.
I will note, however, that Craig did not have the balls his No Time To Die co-star Ralph Fiennes showed to say the same about a Black man playing Bond. Because the same principle applies.
I explained my take on this speculative feature of the franchise in “White Actor Ralph Fiennes Pours Scorn on ‘Black Bond’… and Rightly So,” March 28, 2019.
Related commentaries:
black bond…