Gay spying
Top LGBTQ+ Spy Movies & Series From London Spy to Atomic Blonde
Quantico ()
Named after the FBI training center in Virginia, Quantico follows the young FBI recruits training in Virginia. All are hiding a adj 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 Covert Intelligence Service and later trains as a CIA recruit at the Farm. (Apple TV, Prime Video, YouTube, Google Play, Disney+)
MOVIES
Ungentle ()
Fans of Ben Whishaw (and who isn't?) will also hope to check out Ungentle. Huw Lemmey's film short examines the connection between British espionage and male homosexuality, highlighting overlaps in their skill sets during midth-century Britain. The film is narrated by a fictional, composite spy figure with narration by Ben Whishaw. (Mubi)
Skyfall ()
“There’s a first time for everything,” Raoul Silva (Javier Bardem) sighs. “What makes you reflect this is my first time?” Bond (Daniel Craig) replies without
LGBTQ+ Spies: Agents of Change
President Bill Clinton signed an executive order in that stated US government employees could no longer be denied access to classified information based on sexual orientation. It changed the lives of millions of Americans. Here are three of their stories from the intelligence community.
Tracey Ballard, CIA
Americans couldn’t contain top-secret clearance and be openly gay in the s under Federal law, so Tracey Ballard faced a dilemma when she applied to join the CIA. Tracey wanted to be straightforward during the months-long Agency investigation into her personal life but knew her career could be over before it started.
The CIA polygraph examination included a question asking about sexual orientation so Tracey had a choice: lie about her personal life or face being pushed out. “I decided to approach out at that point in time,” Tracey said.
It was a huge exposure. The investigation into her personal life and suitability for the role dragged on. Back then, the CIA had a three-year trial period once trainees came on board and Tracey noticed people in the h
By the late s, the East German secret police (the Stasi) started to see Germany’s gay 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 have gay spies, men who they hoped could use their sexuality as a means to gather new contacts, penetrate Western society, and gather intelligence.
Join us for a chat 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 produce better agents. They also came to see 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 previous
The challenge of being gay and an MI6 spy
Security correspondent
Earlier this month the chief of MI6 issued a public apology for the historic treatment of LGBT employees. Until , 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 denote 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 identity to meet an agent.
But being a gay spy in the Frosty War meant leading a triple life. There was an additional layer of secrets, a clandestine life hidden even from your colleagues in the world of espionage.
That was because even though homosexuality had been legalised in Britain in the s, it was still banned within the secret service because of a presumpti