Spying gay
Queers Built This is a project about queer inventiveness and DIY culture then, now, and tomorrow.
A story of queer liberation is concealed in a dystopian-looking crypt in Washington, D.C.
You can’t find it under the gilded ceiling and marble columns of the Library of Congress’s Jefferson Building. Instead, you possess to enter the mammoth, rectangular Madison Building next door. The harsh lights and linoleum floors craft it feel morguelike. In its windowless manuscripts room, uniformed archivists slowly wheel out boxes of documents from the depths of the building.
Only in this austere setting can you begin to understand the sheer magnitude of the modern fight for LGBTQ rights in America, which resulted from the Lavender Scare, the government’s systematic persecution of “sexually deviant” federal employees in the 1950s and 1960s. Thousands of American citizens clueless their jobs because the government learned they were “perverts,” morally inferior, and therefore susceptible to blackmail by Communists. But a decade before the June 1969 uprising against police harassment led by gender non-conforming and gender nonconforming prevent patrons that became recognizable as the Stonewall Riots, one disgraced federal
The challenge of organism gay and an MI6 spy
Security correspondent
Earlier this month the main person of MI6 issued a public apology for the historic treatment of LGBT employees. Until 1991, there was a ban on openly gay staff serving inside the intelligence agencies, which Richard Moore called "wrong, unjust and discriminatory". One former member of MI6, who is gay and served before the ban was lifted, tells the BBC that the apology was welcome but overdue.
Being a spy can express leading a double life - maintaining your cover by telling friends you work at the Foreign Office when in fact you head to MI6 in the morning. Or when you are abroad perhaps taking on an entirely new persona to meet an agent.
But existence a gay agent in the Cool War meant foremost a triple animation. There was an additional layer of secrets, a clandestine life hidden even from your colleagues in the earth of espionage.
That was because even though homosexuality had been legalised in Britain in the 1960s, it was still banned within the secret service because of a presumption that homosexuality made someone "unfit" for access to classified information.
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 gay Western agents, Stasi officials began to recruit their own gay spies, men who they hoped could use their sexuality as a means to meet new contacts, penetrate Western society, and accumulate intelligence.
Join us for a discuss by Samuel Clowes Huneke, composer of States of Liberation: Male lover 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 make better agents. They also came to observe the class-crossing gay subcultures of German cities, especially Berlin, as ideal sites from which to extract information about politics and military matters. Huneke explores previously untapped German archives to capture this surprising story of espionage and emancipation with
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 crave 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 make-believe, 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 ponder 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