Daniel Craig in No Time to Die — Photo: Nicola Dove
James Bond actor Daniel Craig has revealed that he prefers gay bars to straight bars because they’re a “very safe place to be.”
The No Time to Die star recently appeared on Bruce Bozzi’s Lunch With Bruce podcast on SiriusXM, where the pair discussed their friendship and the infamous tabloid reporting after they were spotted in a California gay bar.
National Enquirer breathlessly reported on Craig’s “open-mouth passionate French kiss” with Bozzi — who is married to director Bryan Lourd — at Roosterfish in Venice Beach in 2010.
“We’re tactile, we love each other. We give each other hugs, it’s OK. We’re two fucking grown men,” Craig, who is married to actress Rachel Weisz, said to Bozzi.
“For me, it was one of those situations and the irony is, you know, we kind of got caught, I suppose, which was kind of weird because we were doing nothing fucking wrong.
“What happened is we were having a nice night and I kind of was talking to you about my life when my life was changing and we got drunk and I was like, ‘Oh, let’s just go to a bar, come on, let’s fucking go out.’ And I just was like, ‘I know I don’t give a fuck,’ and we’re in Venice.”
Craig, 53, said he prefers gay bars because he can avoid the “aggressive dick-swinging in hetero bars.”
“I’ve been going to gay bars for as long as I can remember,” he said. “One of the reasons: because I don’t get into fights in gay bars that often.”
He added: “As a kid, because it was like… ‘I don’t want to end up [being] in a punch-up.’ And I did. That would happen quite a lot. And it [a gay bar] would just be a good place to go.”
Craig said that his experience in gay bars was that “everybody” was “chill.”
“You didn’t really have to sort of state your sexuality. It was okay. And it was a very safe place to be,” he said. “And I could meet girls there, cause there are a lot of girls there for exactly the same reason I was there. It was kind of an ulterior motive.”
Craig currently stars in No Time to Die in his last outing as James Bond. It has since earned more than $330 million at the global box office, including more than $70 million in Craig’s native UK alone.
Russell T Davies, creator of the British TV series Queer as Folk and the current showrunner of the BBC phenom Doctor Who, says gay society is facing dire peril ever since the presidential election of Donald Trump in November, 2024.
"I'm not being alarmist," Davies told the British newspaper The Guardian. "I'm 61 years old. I know gay society very, very well, and I think we're in the greatest danger I have ever seen."
Davies said the rise in anti-LGBTQ hostility is not limited to the United States, where Trump has signed various anti-LGBTQ executive orders, many geared to diminish and seemingly eradicate the transgender community.
When I was 13, my father took me on a weekend trip to New York City. I remember sitting with him at the Howard Johnson's in Times Square, nibbling on fried clams, and somehow the question of homosexuals arose.
Now, I was an extremely closeted Cincinnati, Ohio, teen back then and had no inkling of the greater depths of my own sexual identity or of being gay in general. But I saw a few flamboyant men on the streets of New York in that summer of 1972 and asked dad about why they acted the way they did.
"They're homosexuals," he said. "They like men." He didn't offer further details.
A Manhattan jury convicted three men of murder for drugging two gay bar patrons as part of an elaborate robbery scheme, leading to their deaths.
The three men -- 37-year-old Jayqwan Hamilton, 32-year-old Jacob Barroso, and 36-year-old Robert DeMaio -- were also convicted of robbery and conspiracy for the drugging scheme.
Prosecutors alleged that the trio, along with other accomplices, would lurk outside Manhattan bars near closing time, hoping to encounter patrons -- primarily young men -- who were intoxicated after a night of drinking.
After chatting up their victims, the men would drug them with a fentanyl-laced cocktail and wait until they were incapacitated. The men would then steal victims' wallets and use facial recognition technology on their smartphones to gain access to bank accounts, which were then drained of money. They used those funds, as well as the victims' credit cards, to purchase various items, including liquor, sneakers, and designer clothes and accessories.
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